There are many witnesses to the trail of Hurricane Monica. There are blameless ones like Bill Clinton’s valets and stewards and Secret Service agents. There are not-so-blameless ones like his political handlers and sundry enablers. And all of them have lawyers. Most of the lawyers have been selected by recommendation of the White House counsel’s office. And most of these lawyers are now unashamedly working to coordinate their clients’ memories and testimonies — and to share the resulting “evidence” with the president’s own legal and political defense team. Pretty soon, if whispered suggestions out of the White House are to be believed, the whole, thick stew of legal advice and PR spin will have been suitably assembled and massaged. And we will be offered a more or less coherent “explanation.”
It will have to be a doozy. The scandal is a vast, still growing mountain of detail. The Clinton camp has denied only a very small number of the credibly reported facts in the Lewinsky matter. And they have expressed doubt about — or conveniently interpreted as innocent — only a very small number of others. Which unmistakably suggests that they cannot or will not dispute the rest. So the rest must be true.
As a service to our readers, we summarize all the facts below. Information that has been disclosed or firmly dated since we last outlined the Monica matter on these pages, two weeks ago, appears in italics.
November 29, 1993. Former White House aide Kathleen Willey meets with Clinton in the Oval Office to ask for a promotion. According to her subsequent sworn and videotaped deposition, Clinton molests her — kissing her, grabbing her breasts, and placing her hand on his crotch. Then-White House aide Linda Tripp meets the woman in the hallway immediately after.
June 1995. Monica Lewinsky begins an unpaid White House internship.
November 15, 1995. Clinton and Lewinsky begin a sexual relationship later described in extensive, tape-recorded conversations between Lewinsky and Tripp.
One Weekend in the Fall of 1995. Former Secret Service agent Lewis Fox, he later tells a Pittsburgh television station and the Washington Post, escorts Lewinsky through the hallway door to the Oval Office for a meeting with Clinton. She does not emerge for the 40-minute remainder of his duty. Fox’s lawyer now says Fox cannot be sure she did not leave through one of the Oval Office’s other doors.
December 1995. Lewinsky gets a paying job in the White House Office of Legislative Affairs. There she becomes concerned about the suspicions of her coworkers. She tells a friend that Clinton is looking into having the display on her telephone console, which flashes his in-house acronym, “POTUS,” whenever he calls her, turned off.
April 17, 1996. Lewinsky is moved to the Defense Department. Clinton aides subsequently confirm that Evelyn Lieberman, former White House deputy chief of staff, was concerned that Lewinsky had been in too-close and too-frequent contact with the president. Lewinsky returns to the White House for visits 37 times over the next 20 months, usually “cleared in” by Clinton’s secretary, Betty Currie.
Early July 1997. Linda Tripp, who is also working at the Pentagon by now, learns that Newsweek has caught wind of the Kathleen Willey incident and tries to phone Clinton crony Bruce Lindsey at the White House. Unsuccessfull, she mentions the matter to Lewinsky, whom she has befriended. Lewinsky apparently reports the issue to Clinton. Lindsey then calls Tripp back.
July 12, 1997. Clinton summons Lewinsky to the White House to discuss Newsweek’s Willey inquiry and, after consulting by phone with his lawyer Robert Bennett, reportedly tells her, “We’re not going to be able to see each other for a while.”
August 11, 1997. Newsweek publishes its account of the Clinton-Willey encounter, sourced to Linda Tripp. Robert Bennett is quoted in the press calling Tripp a liar.
Early October 1997. Plaintiff’s attorneys in the Paula Jones case hear rumors about Lewinsky and subpoena Linda Tripp. White House deputy chief of staff John Podesta then arranges an interview for Lewinsky with U.N. ambassador Bill Richardson. Richardson offers her a job in New York. She turns it down.
October 7, 1997. Lewinsky sends the first in a three-month series of courier packages and letters to the White House, where Betty Currie signs for them, and to the offices of Clinton friend Vernon Jordan, who is intensively helping Lewinsky find a job in New York.
December 5, 1997. Paula Jones’s lawyers notify their Clinton counterparts that they intend to call Lewinsky as a witness.
December 10, 1997. Vernon Jordan calls senior officers at American Express on behalf of Lewinsky.
December 17, 1997. Lewinsky gets her Paula Jones subpoena — and a job interview appointment from American Express.
December 18, 1997. Lewinsky has a Jordan-arranged job interview at Burson- Marsteller in New York.
December 22, 1997. Vernon Jordan arranges for Lewinsky initially to be represented by Washington lawyer Frank Carter and discusses her response to the Paula Jones subpoena while driving her to Carter’s office. Clinton is in Bosnia. Lewinsky reportedly phones him there later in the day.
December 23, 1997. Lewinsky has her interview with American Express.
Just Before Christmas 1997. In a tape-recorded conversation with Linda Tripp, Lewinsky expresses anxiety about getting rid of incriminating gifts that Clinton has given her, including an inscribed photograph. Lewinsky proposes that Tripp duck her own Paula Jones subpoena by claiming a “foot accident.”
December 26, 1997. Lewinsky resigns her Pentagon post.
December 28, 1997. Lewinsky and Clinton meet in the White House, with Betty Currie present. They discuss how Lewinsky will describe her past visits; Clinton suggests that she say she had been meeting Currie. Clinton also urges her to move to New York. Lewinsky attorney William Ginsburg says that Clinton told his client that she would not have to produce his gifts to her if she did not retain possession of them — and that Lewinsky then gave the gifts to Currie.
December 30, 1997. Lewinsky has a Jordan-arranged job interview in New York at the Revlon corporation and a second interview with Burson-Marsteller. She fails the Burson-Marsteller writing test and sends an ungrammatical thank-you note.
January 7, 1998. Lewinsky signs a sworn affidavit declaring that she never had sexual contact with Clinton.
January 8, 1998. Lewinsky, according to her later-taped conversations with Tripp, refuses to file the affidavit until Vernon Jordan gets her a job. Jordan personally calls Revlon’s parent-company chairman, Ron Perelman, on Lewinsky’s behalf.
January 12,1998. Linda Tripp takes her Lewinsky audiotapes to Starr’s investigators.
January 13, 1998. Revlon offers Lewinsky a $ 40,000 job. Lewinsky meets with Tripp, who is wearing a Starr-provided wire, urges her to lie about her knowledge of the affair with Clinton, and makes Tripp vague promises of ” job security.”
January 14, 1998. Lewinsky gives Tripp a set of “talking points” covering Tripp’s account of the Kathleen Willey incident — and suggesting that Tripp alter her recollections so as not to contradict the president.
January 15, 1998. Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff telephones Betty Currie to ask about Lewinsky’s courier packages. Currie tells him she doesn’t remember them. Within minutes, Lewinsky calls Tripp about the packages. Lewinsky visits the White House later that night.
January 16, 1998. The Lewinsky “denial” affidavit is filed with the court. Agents of the independent counsel’s office confront Lewinsky.
January 17, 1998. Clinton denies a sexual relationship with Lewinsky during a sworn deposition to attorneys for Paula Jones and states that he has never met alone with her in the White House. That night, the president calls Betty Currie and asks her to meet him in the Oval Office the next morning, a Sunday.
January 18, 1998. Clinton reportedly tells Currie that he resisted sexual advances from Lewinsky — and, as his aides would later confirm, reviews his previous day’s testimony. “We were never alone, right?” he asks Currie.
January 21, 1998. The Lewinsky story breaks in public. Revlon revokes its job offer to her. Betty Currie begins talking to investigators and turns over to them Clinton’s gifts to Lewinsky: a dress, a hatpin, and a brooch among them. Linda Tripp signs a sworn statement recounting Lewinsky’s conversations about sex with Clinton.
January 27, 1998. Betty Currie gives three hours of grand-jury testimony, during which she admits that Clinton and Lewinsky sometimes met alone and that Lewinsky’s high-level job help was out of the ordinary.
January 28, 1998. A former lover of Lewinsky’s, Andy Bleiler, says she told him she was having sex with a “high-ranking White House official” whom she called “the creep.”
Late January, 1998. Ashley Raines, an employee of the White House Office of Administration, tells the grand jury that Lewinsky had confided in her about a sexual relationship with the president — and had played her Clinton’s messages, left on Lewinsky’s home answering machine.
January 30, 1998. Attorney William Ginsburg confirms that Clinton and Lewinsky spoke by telephone, in the evenings, while Lewinsky was home.
February 1, 1998. Ginsburg says it is “entirely possible” that Lewinsky offered Tripp a half-share in an Australian condominium while the two women were discussing Tripp’s prospective Paula Jones testimony.
February 2, 1998. Pentagon officials announce that Lewinsky’s 37 trips to the White House were unrelated to her official duties. Ginsburg gives Starr a written “offer” of evidence in which Lewinsky confirms a sexual relationship with Clinton.
February 3, 1998. The Los Angeles Times, citing and confirming a story in the UCLA student newspaper the Daily Bruin, reports that in the summer of 1997 Lewinsky told then-Pentagon intern Dennis Lytton she was having sex with Clinton.
February 4, 1998. Former White House press secretary Dee Dee Myers says Lewinsky’s visits to the White House were “extraordinary” and inexplicable. ” I haven’t visited the White House 37 times since I left.”
February 6, 1998. President Clinton says, “I’ve told the American people what is essential for them to know about this.”
That last item is particularly delicious. The president’s poll numbers may temporarily survive his amazing silence about so much devastating evidence that, yes, he did have sex with Monica Lewinsky and, yes, he and his friends did scurry around a lot in an effort to hush it up. But the survival of his legal position is another thing altogether. Before long, he will be subpoenaed by the independent counsel’s office. And he will have to face a long set of impossible questions about two-and-a-half years of obviously unseemly activity. We look forward to reading the president’s answers. And we hereby make public our request, in advance, that someone leak us a copy.
David Tell, for the Editors
