President Clinton leaves his lawyer's office after his deposition on Jan. 17. (Tracy A. Woodward/The Washington Post) Related Links Linda Tripp Briefed Jones Team on Tapes (Feb. 14) Lewinsky Met Privately With Clinton After Subpoena (Jan. 29) Vernon Jordan Stands by His Man (Jan. 23) The President Faces His Accuser (Jan. 18) Key Players: Bill Clinton, Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky

By Peter Baker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 5, 1998; Page A1

President Clinton has acknowledged under oath that he talked with Vernon E. Jordan Jr. about his friend's efforts to find a new job for Monica S. Lewinsky, but the president testified that it was his personal secretary, Betty Currie, who initiated the career help for Lewinsky, according to a detailed account of his sealed deposition in the Paula Jones sexual harassment case.

During Clinton's five-hour deposition Jan. 17 – the first by a sitting president as a defendant in a court case – the president testified that he saw her at the White House on perhaps five occasions and that they may have been alone together.

But the president flatly denied ever having had sexual relations with Lewinsky, according to the account. For the purposes of the deposition, Jones's lawyers produced a written definition of sexual relations that encompassed acts such as fondling and oral sex but not kissing on the mouth – a definition that leaves Clinton little room to offer a revised explanation of his relationship with Lewinsky.

In recent weeks, some advisers have suggested possible scenarios in which the president might admit to intimate contact short of the oral sex Lewinsky reportedly has claimed engaging in, but any contradiction with his testimony risks a perjury charge.

For Clinton, the deposition was an excruciatingly long and intimate look into his past, as lawyers questioned him not just about Jones and Lewinsky but about five other women who were named by the Jones team as well. The president's mood seemed generally sober, but as the hours wore on there were moments of pique as well.

His voice was so low at times that he was asked repeatedly to speak up. At a couple of points, Clinton seemed agitated, once complaining about conservative attacks on him and later seeming to dare the lawyers to throw any question at him they could come up with.

While Jones was the plaintiff, much of the interrogation by her team actually centered on Lewinsky. Clinton acknowledged exchanging gifts with the young woman – she gave him a tie and at least one book, he recalled, while he gave her souvenirs from Martha's Vineyard and did not dispute that he may also have given her a hat pin, a gold brooch and a book of Walt Whitman poetry. Lewinsky and other interns once brought him pizza in the Oval Office during the federal government shutdown in 1995, he testified, and after her April 1996 transfer to the Pentagon, Lewinsky sent him personal messages through Currie.

In addition to denying a sexual relationship with Lewinsky, Clinton repeated his denial that he propositioned Jones for oral sex in a Little Rock hotel suite in 1991. He denied sexual contact with three of the other women he was asked about. U.S. District Judge Susan Webber Wright, who was present for the deposition, ruled he did not have to answer regarding a fourth woman, because she had no state or federal employment.

But Clinton acknowledged for the first time in any known forum that he did have sexual relations with Gennifer Flowers, saying it occurred just one time in 1977.

Selected aspects of Clinton's testimony in the Jones case have been reported by The Washington Post and other news outlets in recent weeks. But this account represents the president's most detailed description about the frequency and nature of his contacts with Lewinsky that has been made public.

It was secret tape recordings of the young White House aide's allegations of a sexual relationship with him – and her assertion in those ostensibly private conversations with a friend that Clinton had urged her to lie about it – that launched independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr's investigation of whether the president suborned perjury or attempted to obstruct justice. Starr has now obtained a copy of Clinton's deposition through Wright's Little Rock court.

As Starr's investigation enters its eighth week, the president has offered no public explanation for his dealings with Lewinsky beyond several emphatic denials that they engaged in sex.

Even in the sealed deposition, Clinton offered no explanation for his frequent contacts with Lewinsky or why he was kept informed about a former low-level aide's job search – nor was he asked by Jones's lawyers to do so. Clinton also testified that he spoke with Lewinsky at some point about the likelihood that she would be called to testify about the nature of their relationship in the Jones case. However, he described the conversation as a quick and casual exchange in the presence of his personal secretary Currie.

Clinton's legal team in the Jones matter was informed on Dec. 5 that Lewinsky was a potential witness. Thus, the president's interactions with her and Jordan after that point are key to Starr's obstruction of justice investigation. Clinton has said publicly that he never urged Lewinsky to lie about any sexual liaison. But in the deposition, he makes clear that he was aware that his secretary and close friend were looking for work for her at a time when her testimony could be critical to the Jones case.

Jordan, who returns for a second day of testimony before a Washington grand jury today, has said that he embarked on a job search for Lewinsky after being asked by Currie and has told associates he inferred that the request had come from the president. According to the associates, Jordan has said he was not aware when he first intervened to help Lewinsky that she was involved in the Jones case, even though Currie's call asking for his help in finding Lewinsky a job came three days after Clinton's lawyers were told she might testify.

Later, Jordan told associates, both Lewinsky and Clinton assured him they had had no sexual relationship.

Even for a roller-coaster presidency, Jan. 17 had to be one of the lowest moments of Clinton's tenure. Despite all his attempts to avoid it, he was being forced to submit to a day-long interrogation not about his politics or his business dealings but about his sex life.

Never before had any commander-in-chief been compelled to testify in a court case brought against him, though several, including Clinton, had been witnesses. Outside the law offices where he was questioned, less than two blocks from the White House, was an unruly mob of journalists beaming the embarrassing story around the world.

To those inside the room where the questioning took place, Clinton appeared to keep his composure and answered in measured terms. In response to many of the particular questions, his language was imprecise. He said he did not recall certain events or know for sure if he had done some things he was asked about, although he often allowed that it was possible. But when the allegations regarding sex were raised, Clinton answered in firm, declarative sentences or unequivocal one-word answers like "no."

He expressed aggravation at being accused of so many illicit acts by his conservative opponents, echoing what Hillary Rodham Clinton would say later about a "vast right-wing conspiracy" after the Lewinsky story first became public on Jan. 21. By lunchtime, Clinton had been asked about a number of women with no mention of Jones – the supposed focus of the deposition. While they were supposed to be taking a break, Clinton was asked whether he ever gave money to Lewinsky – his answer was no – and challenged a Jones lawyer to ask directly whatever he was getting at.

Jones came personally to look Clinton in the eye as he discussed her allegations, and brought six lawyers. Gathered on the other side of the long conference table in the 11th-floor offices of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom were four of the firm's lawyers representing Clinton, as well as White House counsel Charles F.C. Ruff. Attorney Bill W. Bristow attended for co-defendant Danny Ferguson, the former Arkansas state trooper assigned to then-Gov. Clinton's security detail on the day when Jones has alleged he propositioned her. In addition, Judge Wright, a pair of video camera technicians and a Secret Service agent were present.

The indignity of the event was impossible to avoid. Rather than asking the president direct, perhaps uncomfortable, questions about specific sex acts, Jones's lawyers produced at the outset a written description of what they meant whenever they asked about sexual relations. The document also provided to all a clear, indisputable definition so that no one could later argue about what was intended.

Under that definition, sexual relations meant any contact with someone's groin, buttocks, breast or inner thigh if intended to stimulate sexual arousal. No specific mention was made of kissing lips.

Unbeknownst to Clinton or his lawyers at that point, Jones's legal team had arrived with a secret weapon – full briefings from Linda R. Tripp about her tape-recorded conversations with her friend Lewinsky detailing a sexual relationship the young woman said she had with the president. Four days before the deposition, after Tripp had told her story to Starr and turned over to his office the tapes she secretly made of the telephone conversations, Tripp had made another tape. This one was recorded in person, via a wire worn on Tripp's body at Starr's behest.

On Jan. 16, the day before the deposition, Tripp lured Lewinsky to an Arlington hotel so that Starr's investigators could confront her. As the prosecutors questioned Lewinsky, Tripp left the hotel and went to her Maryland home, where she met that evening with a Jones lawyer.

When the Jones team questioned Clinton the next morning, they were armed with extensive details of Lewinsky's story – including not only her detailed account of sex with the president, but her description of Jordan's efforts to help her find a job.

That information was invaluable to the Jones lawyers, who were trying to prove that Clinton used his governmental power to reward women who succumbed to his sexual advances, in contrast to Jones, who maintained her own career as a state worker had been circumscribed after she rebuffed the then-governor. The lawyers considered Lewinsky's story prime evidence of a pattern of Clinton behavior.

In some ways, Clinton's sworn answers to questions about his ties with Lewinsky conflict with information that has been reported since the deposition. Most notably, he gave Jones's lawyers a significantly different account of his last meeting with Lewinsky.

During the deposition, he said he saw her briefly just before Christmas when she stopped by to visit Currie and he stuck his head out of the Oval Office to say hello. But White House entry logs turned over to Starr's office showed that Lewinsky visited the White House the Sunday after Christmas, Dec. 28. Sources familiar with the session have said she met with Clinton, and the sources said they were not aware of anyone present other than the two of them.

Thanks to Tripp, the Jones lawyers were able to ask especially detailed questions that apparently surprised Clinton, including whether he had ever received a videotape from Lewinsky and whether she had ever been at the White House after midnight.

Clinton testified that he met her sometime in 1995, after she arrived as a summer intern in Chief of Staff Leon E. Panetta's office. He said he saw her a few times during the federal government shutdown later that year, when regular workers were forced to stay home and the White House was populated by interns filling in.

According to a sworn statement filed by Tripp in the Jones case, Lewinsky said her sexual relationship with Clinton began on Nov. 15, 1995, the same day he canceled a trip to Japan to stay home and deal with the budget battle with Congress that had closed the government.

In the deposition, Clinton said it was possible he had been alone with Lewinsky. But he said he did not remember any specific instances, describing instead a possible occasion or two when he was working on a weekend and she delivered documents, exchanged a few words and left.

Lewis C. Fox, a retired Secret Service uniformed officer, has testified before the grand jury about his recollection that he admitted Lewinsky to see Clinton one weekend in the fall of 1995 when he was guarding the Oval Office.

Fox has said he believes they were alone for at least the remaining 40 minutes of his shift, although he could not swear definitively that no one else was there.

During the deposition, Clinton said Lewinsky was once in his private pantry when she and other interns brought him pizza during the shutdown. He testified that Currie, who he said had befriended the young intern, was around on other occasions. In any case, he said, he keeps no curtains in the Oval Office or adjoining private study or dining room.

The president said he had nothing to do with Lewinsky being given a paid clerk's position in the White House Office of Legislative Affairs on Nov. 26, 1995. After she left for a Pentagon job in April 1996 – reportedly after a senior White House official decided she was hanging around the West Wing too much – Lewinsky sent more than a half-dozen packages by courier to Currie at the White House. At least some of the messages were intended for Clinton, the president acknowledged, although he characterized them as holiday cards or notes about how to recruit young people to work on White House activities.

Many people send things to him through Currie, Clinton said, because there is a better chance they will actually reach him and not be lost in the piles of unsolicited mail that swamp the White House.

Clinton said he did not recall receiving any videotape from Lewinsky or seeing her at the White House late at night.

Under questioning, he acknowledged he once mentioned the Jones case to Lewinsky, telling her that many women who knew him were being summoned to testify and that she might be among them, but he testified that was the extent of the conversation. Clinton said he was not sure whether he knew at that time that Lewinsky had been subpoenaed. The president said his top aide and close confidant, Bruce R. Lindsey, told him Lewinsky was on the Jones witness list, but it was unclear when.

Clinton said he was aware that Currie had arranged for Lewinsky to be interviewed for a job by United Nations Ambassador Bill Richardson, a meeting that took place in October, and that Currie later contacted Jordan for help with private-sector job prospects. While that was not done at his suggestion, he said, he believed it was proper.

Although the president offered few specifics, he said that Jordan told him that he had been talking with Lewinsky about jobs and Clinton said he indicated his support.

Jones's lawyers did not get to the particulars about their client until after lunch and elicited little new from Clinton about the events of May 8, 1991, when, Jones has said, trooper Ferguson escorted her to meet with the then-governor in a private suite at the Excelsior Hotel.

As he has stated in the past, Clinton said he did not remember meeting Jones or much else about the state conference that brought him to the Excelsior that day, although he did not rule out that they may have met. He said he often used a suite to make telephone calls or conduct other business while attending conferences at the hotel. Clinton said he did not remember ever asking a trooper to arrange for any women to meet him in a room at the Excelsior during any visit there.

But he did not dispute telling Ferguson that he thought Jones had a "come-hither look," saying he may have said it because he has used the term to describe sexually provocative women.

Jones has testified that Ferguson invited her to come up to the governor's suite and that once there Clinton tried to kiss and fondle her before dropping his pants and asking her for oral sex. While not disputing that he may have met her, Clinton said he could categorically deny any such actions because he would never do that.

In his own deposition, Ferguson has testified that Jones seemed happy, not upset, after the encounter, and sought Ferguson out with an offer to be "the governor's girlfriend." While not directly asked about this version, Clinton testified that he had no reason to challenge Ferguson's truthfulness.

As Jones looked on from across the table, Clinton testified that his first memory of his accuser was seeing her on television in 1994 when she publicly aired her allegations for the first time, and he asked Lindsey whether they knew her.

Jones's lawyers did not ask Clinton whether he ever ordered anyone working for him to retaliate against her in the workplace, as she maintained in her lawsuit. Much of their questioning concerning Jones actually focused on Clinton's later conversations with Ferguson about the trooper's dealings with reporters and lawyers who were trying to persuade Clinton's former bodyguards to go public with stories of womanizing. Clinton took handwritten notes of his two telephone conversations with Ferguson, recording allegations that the troopers were offered hundreds of thousands of dollars even if the stories they told were not true.

Under the rules of discovery, Jones's lawyers were granted latitude to ask about other women and they walked Clinton through a list of rumored paramours from throughout the years.

Clinton said he remembered meeting with White House volunteer Kathleen E. Willey on Nov. 29, 1993, when she came to him seeking a full-time job because of family financial problems. Willey was so emotional that the encounter stood out, Clinton said, but he denied her account of an unsolicited sexual advance.

In her own deposition, according to sources, Willey testified that Clinton took her in the hallway between the Oval Office and his private pantry, kissed her, put his hand on her breast, put her hand on his own crotch and said, "I wanted to do that for a long time."

While disputing that account, Clinton suggested he embraced her and may have kissed her on the forehead in an attempt to comfort her because of her obvious anguish. Unknown to Clinton, Willey's husband, Edward Willey Jr., a prominent Richmond lawyer and son of a former powerful Virginia lawmaker, had been accused of misappropriating nearly $275,000. That evening, just two hours after his wife met Clinton in the Oval Office, Ed Willey committed suicide, unaware of the outcome of his wife's meeting with the president.

Kathleen Willey later was given a paying job in the White House counsel's office, was made a delegate to two international summits and was appointed by Clinton to the board of the United Service Organization (USO).

Clinton was also asked about a prominent friend, Shelia Davis Lawrence, the widow of M. Larry Lawrence, whom Clinton had made ambassador to Switzerland. Larry Lawrence, owner of the luxurious Hotel del Coronado near San Diego, was a major contributor to the Democratic Party and generated national controversy last December when it was discovered that he fabricated a hero's service record in World War II. Lawrence's body was exhumed from Arlington National Cemetery and moved to California.

Both publicly and in her own deposition in the Jones case, Shelia Lawrence denied any sexual involvement with Clinton, calling the claim in one statement an "outrageous, scurrilous accusation that is completely untrue." Clinton likewise denied it in his deposition, although he acknowledged staying overnight in her house on two occasions while president, once with his family and on another occasion with Lindsey.

Going further into the past, the Jones lawyers asked about Beth Coulson, a lawyer appointed by then-Gov. Clinton to serve on the Arkansas Court of Appeals in 1987. Coulson was a little-known municipal judge in Perryville when Clinton tapped her to fill out a term on the higher court, sparking complaints about her quick rise to such a coveted post.

In his deposition, Clinton said he chose her because she was intelligent and a supporter, but denied any sexual relationship. Clinton said he visited her at her house about five times while her husband was not there, calling them personal visits with a friend.

Coulson has left the bench and now works with her husband at a family-owned business in North Little Rock. She and her husband were overnight guests in the Lincoln Bedroom at the White House during Clinton's first term, and she served as a Clinton fund-raiser for the 1996 presidential election. More recently, in December, Clinton named her to a committee of Arkansas friends to come up with name recommendations for his new dog. The next month, Coulson denied any sexual relationship in a deposition with Jones's lawyers.

Clinton acknowledged a friendship with another Arkansas woman, Marilyn Jo Jenkins, but was not forced to answer whether they ever had sex because Judge Wright ruled it was not relevant since Jenkins did not work for the state.

Jenkins works at Entergy Corp., a power company in Little Rock, and was escorted by Ferguson past the Secret Service to meet with Clinton at the governor's mansion after he won the 1992 presidential election. In his deposition, according to a source, Ferguson said he escorted her to see Clinton at least four times during the transition, including once at 5:15 a.m. on the day the president-elect was leaving Little Rock to head to Washington.

Clinton, though, recalled just two visits, once before Christmas 1992 when he gave her presents for herself and her children and the second time just before departing Little Rock to say goodbye. During the latter meeting, they met in the basement of the mansion, which Clinton said had been set up as an office. Clinton also said he met with her several times at her apartment while governor. In her own deposition, sources said, Jenkins said their meetings were innocent.

Her firm, Entergy, has had ties to the Clinton administration, most notably its work in 1994 with then-Commerce Secretary Ronald H. Brown and the Lippo Group on a deal to build a power plant in Datong, China, that ultimately failed to come to fruition. Entergy was a major contributor of unregulated "soft money" donations during the 1996 election cycle.

The only woman Clinton acknowledged any sexual contact with was Flowers, whose allegations of a long-running affair nearly crippled his first presidential campaign. Clinton said they met in 1977 when he was attorney general of Arkansas and she was a television reporter.

While Flowers described a 12-year affair, Clinton testified they had just one sexual encounter, although he added that she later made an advance on him that did not lead to sex. In 1991, long after she had left Arkansas and then returned, Flowers asked for help finding state employment and Clinton said he asked an aide to try to find her a government job.

After Clinton's deposition statement about Flowers was first reported by The Post in January, the president and his spokesman insisted it did not contradict Clinton's denials of an affair during the 1992 campaign. They apparently base that on the notion that Clinton's denial six years ago applied strictly to Flowers's version, not to any sexual encounter whatsoever.

But in an interview with "60 Minutes" on Jan. 26, 1992, that helped salvage his campaign, correspondent Steve Kroft asked Clinton, "I'm assuming from your answer that you're categorically denying that you ever had an affair with Gennifer Flowers."

Clinton responded: "I said that before, and so has she. When these stories came out, she and the other people involved denied them and denied them repeatedly, and she changed her story when she was paid."