NIGHTMARE ON PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE
by
Carl LimbacherOYSTER BAY -- In this space last week the Washington Weekly asked, "Could Paula's Civil Suit Spell Criminal Trouble for Bill Clinton?" This week we have the answer: You betcha - in spades. News that Linda Tripp, in anticipation of her own Paula Jones deposition, taped young Monica Lewinsky's tale of Oval Office sex with the President has Washington - along with the rest of the world, reeling. Reports that Tripp's tapes have been turned over to Kenneth Starr, who is now investigating Lewinsky's recorded allegation that Clinton pressured her to lie, has the "I-word" on everyone's lips. Remarkably, it was one time White House waterboy George Stephanopoulos who first let the cat out of the bag, telling Wednesday's "Good Morning America" audience that impeachment is inevitable if the allegations are true.
The Clinton White House is now enmeshed in a full blown, televised political nightmare - all thanks to the president's notorious libido. Clinton's inability to keep himself in check, even around tender morsels just this side of jailbait like Monica Lewinsky, has provoked an eruption of outrage from coast to coast, riveting every newsroom from Bangor to Beijing.
Looking back to last Saturday, the president's much feared deposition in the Paula Jones case now seems like a relative cakewalk: the calm before an horrific storm. Call it Hurricane Monica. Her gale force winds have left Clinton press spokesman Mike McCurry's credibility in tatters. The first lady's surreal obliviousness in midweek interviews conjured up delusions of equilibrium in the eye of the maelstrom. Vernon Jordan's assurance that the Revlon job he secured for Ms. Lewinsky was not atypical of the kind of help he gave to many of the White House's needy cases played out like a scene from a rejected Twilight Zone script (too bizarre to be believable). The only other example of such Jordan generosity on record was the job he obtained for Webster Hubbell under remarkably similar circumstances. If nothing else, the potential to testify against this president appears to be quite a resume enhancement.
The press' coverage of Zipper-gate, Water-Lew, Billatio (call it what you will) has dwarfed its attention to all the other Clinton scandals combined. "After everything else the media has ignored, why have they jumped on this scandal?", wondered Rush Limbaugh, during a call placed to his Wednesday radio show by yours truly. I had no good answer. But perhaps The New York Post's Deborah Orin explained it best the next day: "This is Paula Jones meets Whitewater meets Watergate."
Clinton's problems here are two-fold. Did he have a sexual relationship with a girl entrusted to White House care, which allegedly began when she was a tender 21 - barely out of her teens? And did he and pal Jordan suborn perjury by pressuring her to lie about it? According to the experts, the latter will be tough to prove. Still, the "talking points" memo pressed on Linda Tripp by Lewinsky in hopes of changing Tripp's Paula Jones testimony needs some explanation. No one believes that the naive 24 year old Lewinsky came up with that stunt on her own. Irrespective of whether Clinton tried to shape Lewinsky's testimony, Tripp's memo means somebody high up in the White House food chain is guilty of witness tampering.
It was Tripp who first corroborated the Kathleen Willey story, telling Newsweek that she had bumped into Willey outside the Oval Office after Willey's sexual encounter with Clinton. Any kind of sexual relationship between Willey and Clinton would strengthen Paula Jones' case, but Tripp here was actually somewhat helpful to the White House. She described Willey as looking "disheveled" but also "happy and joyful" over the president's attention. In fact, Tripp told Newsweek that she came forward to make it clear that the episode was definitely not sexual harassment. Still, this wasn't good enough for Clinton bimbo barrister Bob Bennett, who trashed Tripp as someone who was not to be believed. Reportedly Bennett's complaint sent Tripp to the nearest Radio Shack, where she purchased the tape recorder that would capture for posterity Lewinsky's raunchy tale of Clinton sex.
After both Tripp and Lewinsky were subpoenaed by Jones' lawyers, Monica gave Linda the talking points, which instructed Tripp to alter her story. "You never saw her (Willey) go into the Oval Office or come out of the Oval Office." Reads the memo in part. "Talk about when you became out of touch with her and why."
Thus far, the press hasn't focused on the Tripp memo, perhaps reasoning that the point of its origin will be impossible to determine. Think again. If Ken Starr could turn up Hillary Clinton's fingerprints on her long missing Rose Law billing records, then any prints on this much more recent document should be easy to retrieve. Simply take prints of the likely suspects and cross check them with what's on memo - then book'em, Kenno.
Even absent the witness tampering charge, Clinton's reported denial of a Lewinsky affair, offered while under oath during his Jones deposition, could be just as ominous. Bob Bennett is certain to argue that Tripp's Lewinsky tapes are hearsay. But the President's messages on Lewinsky's home phone, which Monica reportedly re-played for Ms. Tripp as her tape recorder ran, leaves Bennett - and Clinton, with a lot of explaining to do. Likewise, reports of personal gifts Clinton gave to Monica, including a dress, a broach, and a book of erotic poetry will be problematic.
And there's another tidbit which could prove evidentiary - and supremely embarrassing. On Thursday reports surfaced that, according to Lewinsky's taped account, Clinton would call her in the wee hours of the night, sometimes as late as 2 a.m., and the two would engage in long sessions of phone sex. Believe it or not, that's not the embarrassing part. The real problem here could be one of the gifts that Lewinsky gave to Clinton, which, according to Newsweek, was a "sexually provocative audiotape". Retail availability of erotic audio recordings would seem to be somewhat limited, since the market is generally more interested in video sex. Was Monica's sexually provocative tape a homemade production? Was it perhaps a recording of her and the President of the United States engaging in their own phone sex? All gifts from Lewinsky to Clinton and vice versa are now under federal subpoena, since they constitute evidence of the President's possible perjury.
Another bombshell that was first reported by Matt Drudge on Thursday and confirmed by the "reliable" media two days later, is the existence of a garment that Monica Lewinsky wore during an encounter with Clinton and never had cleaned. Why not? Because she was saving the garment, reportedly a blue dress, as a souvenir of the event. The dress is said to have the President's semen stain on it.
It doesn't get any more gamy than that. Then again, the Clinton-Lewinsky saga is still young. There was no way to be euphemistic about this development, so the press was faced with a choice: either downplay the "smoking stain" as a supplemental piece of evidence - or give this bombshell news the treatment it deserved. Saturday's New York Daily News took the latter approach, with Pearl Harbor sized front-page headlines blaring: "SHE KEPT SEX DRESS" If the story is accurate, Kenneth Starr now has "O.J. - like" DNA evidence that Bill Clinton gave Monica Lewinsky lessons in oral sex, which may mean that Barry Scheck will be getting a very important new client in the near future. Any under oath presidential denial of sex with Monica Lewinsky should make for an airtight perjury case.
All week long pundits and legal experts have explained that the witness tampering charge is far more serious than the simple perjury charge. That's not true, at least if measured by the criminal penalty attached to each crime. Both perjury and its procurement are felony violations under federal law and are subject to the exact same punishment - up to five years of incarceration.
Unlike the myriad of other scandals Bill Clinton has subjected Americans to, the sordidness of this sorry tale began to take its toll on the public almost instantly. Only 48 hours into the story, Clinton's approval rating had plunged a full 10 points in both CNN and Fox News polls. A day later ABC News reported that just over half of Americans surveyed believe that the President should step down or be impeached if either the witness tampering or perjury allegations are true. That's clear evidence that Americans do indeed care about corruption in public life, once the broadcast press gives that corruption the attention it deserves.
Now that the mainstreamers have finally picked up the scent, it's important to note where the story broke first. Once again it was the Internet's Matt Drudge who forced this story out into the open when editors in the prestige press were intent on spiking it. Now we hear that a few mainstreamers had been aware for almost a year that Clinton had been preying upon Monica Lewinsky. One can only imagine what else this bunch isn't telling us.
When they're not too busy hiding government corruption, our Keystone Cops press corps can be downright amusing. After Clinton's fuzzy Wednesday denial of sex with Lewinsky, a few of them recalled his equally delicate disavowal of any affair with Gennifer Flowers (the gist of which was recounted in this space last week). New York talk radio host Sean Hannity reports that he got a call from ABC's vaunted news program, "Nightline". They wanted to share some of the more precious moments from Gennifer Flowers' audiotapes with their national audience, since those tapes show Clinton cajoling Flowers to lie about their affair ala Lewinsky-gate. But there was one problem. "Nightline" didn't have a copy. Hannity had been playing excerpts from his own copy of what he calls, "The Gennifer Flowers - Bill Clinton Love Tapes" for days and now Ted Koppel and the gang wondered if Hannity could oblige with a duplicate.
Evidently the Monica Lewinsky affair has transformed "Hate Radio" into a valuable resource for network newspeople.
Published in the Jan. 26, 1998 issue of The Washington Weekly
Copyright 1998 The Washington Weekly (http://www.federal.com)
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