CONTENTS

"You have to be alert to it (President Clinton's philandering), vigilant in helping. I thought this was resolved ten years ago. I thought that he had conquered it; I thought he understood it, but he didn't go deep enough or work hard enough." - Hillary Clinton, August 1, 1999

Gennifer Flowers was the first to claim that she had a long lasting relationship with Clinton. While working as a news reporter for KARK-TV, she interviewed Clinton at the Little Rock airport. She claimed that soon blossomed into a relationship which lasted most of the years that Clinton was governor. In 1992, Flowers named Clinton in a lawsuit. Flowers claimed that she was a mistress of Clinton for 12 years, a charge which he repeatedly denied until 1998. Flowers was given a lucrative job over a more qualified minority in the Arkansas state government by the Clinton administration in the 1980s. She recorded some of Clinton's "love calls" to her and made the tapes public. They contained highly damaging information about Clinton but for the most part were ignored by the media. While in the White House, Clinton repeatedly danced around questions which dealt with his relationship with Gennifer Flowers. His responses were frequently vague and ambiguous. During the 1992 presidential campaign, Clinton denied Flowers' statements that he was romantically involved with her but admitted having caused pain in his marriage. The White House responded to Flowers' allegations by saying that "she made half a million dollars from accusations against Bill Clinton." Eventually, in January 1998, Clinton acknowledged for the first time that he had an affair with her during the 1970s. His statement came during his six-hour deposition in the Paula Jones sexual harassment lawsuit.

DOLLY KYLE BROWNING. He called her "Pretty girl." She called him "Billy." That’s how Browning characterized her relationship with Clinton dating back to the mid-1970s and continued through 1992. Browning first knew Clinton when they were teenagers and ended at their thirtieth high school reunion in Hot Springs, Arkansas in July 1994. She said that they first had sexual relations when she attended the University of Arkansas. Since that time, Browning moved to Texas where she has been a real estate lawyer.

In January 1992, Clinton was bombarded with accusations that he had a sexual affair with Flowers. At that time Browning was interviewed by The Star tabloid and was asked about her sexual relations with Clinton. According to Browning’s testimony in the Paula Jones lawsuit, Clinton called her about the nature of the interview, and for the first time he intimidated her. Browning claimed that the Clinton campaign threatened to destroy her if she did not cooperate with The Star. She said that Clinton’s secretary subsequently called her and warned, "We think you should deny the story. ... If you cooperate with the media, we will destroy you."

Then the two met once again two years later in July 1994 at their thirtieth high school reunion. In her novel Purposes of the Heart, Browning wrote that when she and Clinton met at their reunion, he pursued her across the dance floor and pulled her away from other men. Browning said that "I reminded him that he had threatened to destroy me, and he said he was sorry." She also claimed that "he asked me to come to Washington" and he said "you can live on the Hill. I can find you a job."

Clinton rebuked all parts of her story and claimed that Browning was jealous of Flowers. According to Browning, Clinton returned to the White House and asked his secretary, Marsha Scott, to write a note at the bottom of the page confirming that his version was correct. Later, in 1998, Clinton produced this old document for Jones’ attorneys.

In 1998, Browning brought a defamation lawsuit against Clinton. She named as defendants the New Yorker Magazine and reporter Jane Mayer. Browning contended that the magazine and reporter acted with malice, saying that a 1997 article by Mayer defamed her and contributed to her inability to get her book published. She contended in her lawsuit that Clinton "acting personally and through various agents, sought to prevent Mrs. Browning’s book from being published in ways which included ... defaming and disparaging Mrs. Browning and her book" and "threatening Mrs. Browning and potential publishers of the book."

JUANITA BROADDRICK (AKA "JANE DOE No. 5). Only two months after Clinton’s acquittal by the Senate, Jane Doe No. 5 revealed herself as Juanita Broaddrick. Raised in the small Arkansas town of Van Buren, Broaddrick contended that she met Clinton in April 1978 when she was 35 years old and while he was Arkansas’ attorney general, campaigning for the first time for governor.

Broaddrick maintained that during a campaign stop at her Van Buren nursing home facility, Clinton talked with her and invited her to visit his campaign office in Little Rock. She said that she agreed to do so a week later on April 25 while in the capital with a friend for a conference sponsored by the American College of Nursing Home Administrators. Broaddrick said in an interview, "We were very excited. We were going to pick up all that neat stuff, T-shirts, buttons." She then called the campaign headquarters and eventually talked with Clinton on the telephone. She later recalled he said he was not going to his headquarters that day and suggested they meet in the Camelot Inn coffee shop where she was staying. When Clinton arrived, he asked if they could have coffee in her room instead because there were too many reporters in the lobby. Broaddrick said that she was naive in believing that they were going to talk about the campaign.

Broaddrick’s story continued. She claimed that they spent only a few minutes chatting by the window before he began kissing her. She resisted his advances but soon he pulled her back onto the bed and forcibly had sex with her. She said she did not scream because everything happened so quickly. Her upper lip was bruised and swollen after the encounter because, she said, he had grabbed onto it with his mouth. Clinton allegedly told her to get some ice for it, and he put on his sunglasses and walked out the door.

Since there were no witnesses, Broaddrick's story could not be verified, although she told her husband and a friend a month later. Norma Rogers, an employee and friend who traveled with her to the conference, said that she returned to the hotel room that day to find Broaddrick badly shaken and her lip swollen. They quickly packed and left, stopping to get ice for Broaddrick's lip on the way back to Van Buren, both later said. Records indicated that a nursing home administrators conference was held at the Camelot Inn on that date and that Clinton had only one publicly announced event that day, an evening appearance in nearby Conway. White House officials and the state attorney general's office said they do not have records of his schedule from then and the Camelot has since closed.

Broaddrick said Clinton called her at the nursing home several times afterward but she would never take the call. The next time she recalled seeing him was in 1991, when she said she was summoned out of another nursing home meeting in Little Rock to meet with him. Broaddrick said, "It was unreal. ... He kept trying to hold my hand. I can still remember his words. He said, ‘Can you ever forgive me? I'm not the same man I used to be.’ ...I told him, ‘You just go to hell.’ And I walked away. I was shaking."

Broaddrick never reported the alleged incident to authorities and said it never occurred to her to do so because Clinton was a rising politician while she was "young and vulnerable" and in the middle of an extramarital affair. She said, "I had blamed myself all these years. I am a businesswoman, I made money. But I was insecure about men."

Paula Jones's lawyers heard about Broaddrick from another Republican activist in Arkansas. After their private investigators visited Broaddrick on November 13, 1997, her lawyer, Bill Walters, contacted a Clinton lawyer and asked for a draft affidavit for her to sign denying the "rumors and stories" about her and Clinton. In her January 2, 1998 affidavit, Broaddrick said, "These allegations are untrue, and I had hoped that they would no longer haunt me or cause further disruption to my family."

FBI agents working for Starr then approached Broaddrick and after being promised that she would not be prosecuted for perjury she disavowed her previous sworn testimony without getting into details. Eight months later, Starr made note of her change of heart in a passing reference in an appendix sent to the House along with his Lewinsky impeachment referral.

On March 22, 2000, the Eighth United States Court of Appeals dismissed Browning's request that a judge in Arkansas consider whether Clinton lied about his relationship with her. The court ruled that Browning lacked standing to pursue her claim. Browning's lawyer argued that the judge in the Jones case should consider finding the president in criminal contempt for denying the alleged relationship.

BETH COULSON. Coulson was a long time friend of Clinton whom he appointed to the Arkansas Court of Appeals in 1987. In the Jones deposition Clinton said that he chose her because she was intelligent and a supporter. He denied any sexual relationship. He said he visited her at her house about five times while her husband was not there, calling them personal visits with a friend.

Reports circulated that the Jones team attempted on several occasions to serve her with a subpoena. They tried to reach her as she was getting into her car in Little Rock, but she jumped into her car and locked the doors. Then Jones' attorneys placed the subpoena papers under the windshield wipers as she tried to drive away.

ELIZABETH WARD. Ward was Miss America in 1982. It was alleged that she had an affair with Clinton when she was 21 while she was a Reagan supporter. Ward was an accounting major at the University of Arkansas when she won the Miss America crown. She showed off her classic 36-24-36 figure in her one-piece and won the swimsuit competition which she said proved that she was "well- rounded." Later Ward received an estimated $100,000 for posing nude in Playboy.

ROBIN DICKEY. Dickey was alleged to be a lover of President Clinton in the Paula Jones case. She handled finances for Clinton's presidential campaign in 1992, and she accompanied him to Washington D.C. after his inauguration. Then Clinton appointed her the White House Director of Special Projects and Special Needs. Her daughter, Helen Dickey, was Chelsea Clinton's nanny and lived on the third floor of the residence at the White House. Dickey earned the nickname "Thumbs" for the presidential backrubs she gave during staff meetings.

Prior to the Jones' deposition in January 1998, the plaintiff attempted to subpoena her when she worked for the Pentagon, but they did not have the security clearance to enter her office. They tried to find a home address but there was no listing for Ms. Dickey in the Washington D.C. area. She was sent to London and Brussels on Pentagon business. Then the Jones' legal team dropped their pursuit of her since the cost became to expensive. Thus, Dickey was never served with a subpoena. She said that published reports of an affair with Mr Clinton were "recklessly false and malicious."

MARSHA SCOTT. Scott worked as an aide in the White House. An American Spectator article by Rebecca Borders in January 1997 quoted former White House aide David Watkins as saying that Scott was Clinton's "hippie girlfriend" and that she had had an affair with Clinton.

DEBRA SCHIFF. She was a flight attendant on Clinton's plane while campaigning in 1992. Even though she had no training for her position, Clinton said that she was hired for her "airborne people skills." There was film footage of Clinton onboard the plane with his hand on her knee. Later Clinton appointed her the West Wing receptionist, and her office was only yards away from the Oval Office. The White House chief steward said she locked him in his pantry in 1994 so she could have 20 minutes alone with the president. She denied the allegations.

CONNIE HAMZY. Some considered Hamzy a rock and roll groupie who was known as "Sweet sweet Connie." She claimed that she had sex with Clinton in her Little Rock apartment in 1984. Hamzy said that she was sunbathing at a Little Rock hotel when Clinton's aides escorted her to a hotel. But the aides could not find an empty room for the couple, so they never had sexual relations. According to a February 2, 1998 Newsweek article, Clinton's aides claimed that she attempted to seduce him. Hamzy told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette that she passed three polygraph tests regarding the alleged encounters.

SALLY PERDUE. Perdue was a former Miss Arkansas and local radio talk show host. She claimed that she had a four month affair with Clinton after they met in 1983. Perdue said that they had sex in her Little Rock apartment where he called her "Long Tall Sally" while she sang, "He's Just My Bill." Perdue said that Arkansas state troopers regularly brought Clinton to her condominium at Andover Square. She said, "They'd pull up in a wooded area about thirty feet from the house and wait there. He'd drink a few Budweiser beers, and then Clinton would begin to loosen up." She described him as a "showman" and a "brilliant actor" who needed the constant approval of women. Purdue said, "He had this little boy quality that I found very attractive. Clinton would flick a patio light to summon the police car when he was leaving."

In 1992, Perdue tried to publicize her alleged affair. On August 19, 1992, she met with Ron Tucker, who claimed that he represented the DNC, in Clayton, Missouri. According to Perdue, Tucker said that there were people in high places who wanted her to keep her mouth shut. Perdue quoted Tucker: "If I was a good little girl, and didn't kill the messenger, I'd be set for life: a federal job, nothing fancy but a regular paycheck, Level 11 or 12 ($60,000 a year). I'd never h ave to worry again. But if I didn't take the offer, then they knew that I went jogging by myself and he couldn't guarantee what would happen to my pretty little legs. Things just wouldn't be so much fun for me anymore. Life would get hard." Perdue ignored Tucker's warnings. Eventually, she lost her job and started receiving threatening mail and calls. One letter read: "I'll pray you have a head-on collision and end up in a coma. .. . Marilyn Monroe got snuffed." She also found a shotgun cartridge on the driver's seat of her Jeep, and the back window of her car was shattered.

Perdue never received much media attention. She said, "I've had it with the American press . .... The powers here are strong. You know, they've protected Bill Clinton in a way they'd never protected anybody in the history of America. When I see him now, President of the United States, meeting world leaders, I can't believe it. ... I still have this picture of him wearing my black nightgown, playing the sax badly; this guy, tiptoeing across the park and getting caught on the fence. How do you expect me to take him seriously?"

CHRISTY ZERCHER. Zercher was a flight attendant on Clinton's 1992 campaign plane. In March 1998 she charged that Bill Clinton grabbed her breast as Hillary slept just a few feet away. Zercher reported a mysterious break-in at her apartment where only her personal diary and photos of Clinton were taken. Later she posed in Penthouse for an estimated $50,000, and she also appeared on the Sally Jesse Raphael show.

When Zercher moved to Washington D.C., she said that she received a call from Clinton confidant, Bruce Lindsey. She said that she responded to him, "What did they want to know? Did they want to know if Clinton was flirting on the plane? Did you say anything to anybody?" Then she said that Lindsey urged her to say "all positive things."

SHEILA LAWRENCE. She was the widow of Larry Lawrence, a major donor to the DNC. In turn, Clinton rewarded him with an ambassadorship to Switzerland where he served until his death in 1996. In Clinton's deposition in the Jones' case, he admitted to staying overnight with her on two occasions in her house. One was with his family and the other was with Bruce Lindsey, his White House confidant. However, Clinton denied having sexual relations with her.

MARILYN JO JENKINS. Jenkins was a long-time official for the Arkansas Power and Light Company. Stories circulated that she had met with Clinton on several occasions and that she had a sexual encounter with Clinton in Little Rock in 1989. State telephone records revealed that Clinton placed 59 calls to Jenkins home or office. One call was for 94 minutes and was placed at 1:23 a.m.

In sworn statements in the Jones' deposition, Jenkins and Clinton characterized their encounters as innocent. Clinton did admit he had two visits when he gave Jenkins presents for herself and her children before leaving Little Rock for the White House. He also said he met with her several times at her apartment while governor.. Clinton did not have to answer in his deposition whether they ever had sex because it was ruled irrelevant by the judge. When Jenkins was asked why she was seen with Clinton on one occasion in the early morning hours, she said that had to catch a plane and wanted to say good-bye to him.

Clinton told Bob Bennett, his counsel, that he never had sexual relations with Jenkins. Bennett noticed that when he asked Clinton about Jenkins, he reacted much differently than when he responded to questions about other women. Eventually, Bennett said to the president, "I find your explanation about one of the women frankly unbelieveable."

Arkansas state trooper Danny Ferguson swore in a deposition that on four occasions he took Jenkins to meet with Clinton in the basement of the governor's mansion on four occasions between his November 1992 election and January 1993. Bennett had learned from another attorney that Clinton had asked Ferguson to cover for him and to take responsibility for the phone calls. Ferguson refused to do so. According to Ferguson's deposition, the state trooper also said that Clinton once told him that he loved both his wife and Jenkins. Ferguson said that on one occasion the president said to him, "It's tough to be in love with two different women."

BOBBIE ANN WILLIAMS. Williams claimed that Clinton paid her for sex in Little Rock in 1984 when she was a 24 year old prostitute. She also claimed that they had sex sixteen additional times -- once with another female -- and that she had a son by Clinton. However, DNA testing proved that Clinton was not the boy's father. According to London Daily Mail columnist James Dalrymple in a January 14, 1997 article, Williams and her sister Lucille Bolton passed two lie detector tests claiming that Clinton was the father of her illegitimate son, Danny. Clinton maintained that he had never met Bobby Ann, and he refused to take a blood test to confirm or deny the allegation.

REGINA BLAKELY. She was another Miss Arkansas back in the mid-1980s. Blakely's father had a high position on the state highway commission. Reports circulated that she had an affair with Clinton. On November 10, 1997 Arkansas state trooper L.D. Brown was deposed by Jones' lawyers in Little Rock. Brown responded accordingly:

Q. Let's be specific for the record. Would the governor make comments to you that he was having a sexual relationship with Regina Hopper?

Mr. Bennett: I object to the form. I mean, that's about as leading a question --

Q. I'm just asking you to be as specific as you can about the governor's comments.

A. When he would talk to me about her after she had been there or after she had come to the mansion, in so many words that's what we would talk about would be that he had had sexual relationships with her.

Q. Did she ever say anything to you along the same lines that confirmed that she had had a sexual relationship with Bill Clinton.

A. Yes.

Q. Do you know Regina Hopper's father's name?

A. Bobby Hopper.

Q. Did he had a job with the State of Arkansas?

A. Well, he was appointed to a state highway commission job.

Q. Who appointed him to that position?

A. Governor Clinton.

LEOCOLA SULLIVAN. Sullivan was yet another Miss Arkansas who finished fifth in the Miss America Pageant in 1980. She was a former girlfriend of Stevie Wonder and allegedly had an affair with Clinton when she was 29.

DEBORAH MATHIS. Mathis was a former TV and newspaper reporter in Arkansas, and she was an alleged lover of Clinton. She was mentioned in the deposition of Arkansas state trooper L.D. Brown in the Jones trial. He stated that he had heard from others of the affair. Mathis began her career in Little Rock as a general assignment reporter for the Arkansas Gazette. She worked as an on-air reporter and anchor for both KTHV-TV and KATV-TV in Little Rock. She later moved back to the Arkansas Gazette where she was an editorial columnist and staff writer. Mathis eventually was promoted associate editor in 1990.

PAULA JONES. The daughter of an Arkansas fundamentalist minister, Jones grew up in the small Arkansas town of Lonoke with a population of 4,000. After attending a conservative Nazarene school, she attended a junior college for eight months and studied basic business classes. She dropped out of school and took an entry-level clerk's job for the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission. Jones was hired at $4.93 an hour and earned standard promotions, but not all went well for her. Her superior admonished her about tardiness, excessive socializing, and personal phone calls. Jones also was cited for wearing inappropriate office attire such as tight leggings and sweaters. However, she stated in her deposition that other supervisors commented on "how really nice I always tried to dress."

In May 1991, Jones was at Little Rock's Excelsior Hotel on the banks of the Arkansas River, attending the Governor's Quality Conference at the hotel. State trooper Danny Ferguson approached her and said that the governor would like to see her. In her deposition Jones said that she wondered what he wanted and decided to accompany Ferguson upstairs. When she came down the elevator, there emerged sharply differing accounts of what had transpired. Ferguson himself was responsible for two of them. In addition Arkansas state trooper L.D. Brown was assigned to the security detail when Clinton was governor. After he was demoted in 1994, Brown came forward and said that he and Clinton had engaged in some carousing. He corroborated the story of other state troopers who claimed that they had arranged for and then covered up various affairs for Clinton while in Arkansas.

In a sworn deposition Ferguson claimed that she had asked to meet the governor, that she had spotted him in the hotel and thought he was a "good-looking" man with "sexy hair." Ferguson said he told her, "That won't be any problem. ... We do that all the time." He said that he escorted her to the eighth floor where Clinton had taken a room in expectation of a phone call from President Bush.

In some earlier interviews with reporters, Ferguson said that it was Clinton who notice Jones, commenting on her "come-hither look" and dispatching the trooper to arrange a meeting. In both versions, the trooper remembered that, when she came back down 15 or 20 minutes later, she was smiling. Ferguson testified, "She asked me if the governor had any girlfriend. I said, ‘No.’ She said that she would be his girlfriend."

But Jones offered a totally different version. She said that Ferguson approached her, saying the governor wanted to meet her. Then she claimed that when she stepped into the hotel room, Clinton groped at her and suddenly dropped his pants and asked for oral sex. She said that she refused and headed for the door. In her deposition Jones said, "You could tell he was embarrassed and everything. And he was pulling up his pants. And he said, ‘Well, if you have any trouble, you have Dave Harrington call me immediately.’ " Jones said that she opened the door, and then Clinton held his hand on the door. She said that Clinton told her, "You're a smart girl. Let's keep this between ourselves." Jones took that as a threat: "He didn't want me to tell anybody." She said that since that time, she felt intimidated by Clinton. She recalled once running into him near the rotunda in the state Capitol. He squeezed her and laughed and told his entourage that they made "a good couple" and didn't they look like "The Beauty and the Beast"?

The fourth version of what transpired that day came from Clinton. In his January 1998 deposition, Clinton was asked if he recalled meeting a woman in an Excelsior Hotel room almost seven years before. He answered, "No .. I .. You know. ... Over the years I met a lot of people at a lot of these meetings. I don't ... let me just say ... if the Excelsior, if they let me use a room ..."

Then Clinton was asked by Jones’ lawyers, "Do you recall ever having met her before today?" He replied, "No. I've said that many times. I don't." Then he was asked, "Do you recall ever having seen her before early 1994 when she first made public her accusations against you?," to which he replied, "No ... I ... I actually saw her on television then, just by accident. I just happened to be walking by a television in the office, and I remember I asked (deputy White House counsel) Bruce Lindsey to come here. I said, ‘Bruce, do we know this lady, who is this person?’ That was my first surprised reaction."

After her encounter with Clinton, Jones said she could sense the atmosphere at work suddenly chill. Once friendly co-workers and supervisors seemed distant. Her desk was moved to an isolated spot in the office. She believed management wanted to watch her closely. She got no flowers on Secretaries Day. She said she was ordered to reimburse the office for personal phone calls. When she took a six-week maternity leave, she said, no one from work called to wish her well. There was no job demotion or cut in pay, and Jones filed no job grievance. She said she nevertheless connected the abrupt unpleasantness at work with her unwillingness to give in to the governor. Her supervisors and some of her colleagues said the problem was Jones. They noticed that her performance had slipped, that she was late to work more often, that she was more cranky, more difficult. They said that she developed a fascination with the governor, that she was the first to volunteer to make deliveries to the governor's reception area. Some saw her as a stalker. When she was told he was inside working, she would smile and wave at the security cameras.

Jones resigned in February 1993, and her colleagues cut a cake and toasted her at her office goodbye party. And she cried. Jones maintained that she had been forced out. "I had applied for different other jobs within the agency, and my supervisor would always try to discourage me, try to keep me over in that corner, saying that I could grow and make something of myself if I stay over there. And I never went anywhere."

In 1993, the Jones case began to receive more public attention when Cliff Jackson made allegations that Jones was sexually harassed by Clinton. Jackson, one of Clinton's fiercest foes, persuaded journalists Bill Rempel of the Los Angeles Times and David Brock of the American Spectator to probe into allegations that Clinton used state troopers to procure women. In December 1993, a Los Angeles Times story reported that Clinton used state troopers to help him score with young women. A small article in the the American Spectator mentioned her only as "Paula" and said that she "had spent an intimate hour with Clinton at the Excelsior." The article concluded by stating that Paula "was available to be Clinton's regular girlfriend if he so desired." Jackson turned to conservative banker Peter W. Smith who was a major contributor to Gingrich's GOPAC. Smith gave turned him on to Richard Porter of Kirkland & Ellis, Starr's law firm who was unable to take on the case. But he recommended an old friend, Jerome Marcus, who accepted and eventually filed the civil complaint against Clinton.

Later, James Fisher of Radar, Campbell, Fisher & Pyke to represent her. The law firm had been asked by the conservative Rutherford Institute of Charlottesville, Virginia. The Rutherford Institute agreed to fund it partially.

In February 1994, Jones held a press conference organized by a conservative organization. She received little attention from the mainstream media. During that spring, she reportedly prepared to settle out of court if the president acknowledged that she did nothing wrong. Clinton hired Robert Bennett to be his lead counsel. Jones became furious with the leaks alleging that she did not have a solid case and filed a suit. She asked for $700,000 and an apology from Clinton. On May 6, 1994, they filed her sexual harassment lawsuit in federal court in Little Rock.

Meanwhile, Bennett encouraged Clinton to settle out of court for between $400,000 and $500,000. But Clinton theorized that other women would come forward and demand money from him -- and so he declined the offer. So Clinton's attorneys worked to discredit Jones, probing into her past. They were convinced that she was not as innocent as her attorneys made her out to be. Clinton's lawyers first break was when they got an affidavit from a man who swore that he received oral sex from Jones in a car after meeting her in a bar. This allegedly took place about six months before she met Clinton in 1991.

Clinton's attorneys were concerned about a statement which Jones made -- that the president had "distinguishing characteristics" in his genital area. Bennett wanted to make sure that this was not sure. First he asked some of Clinton's old male friends who may have seen him in a shower. When Bennett reached a dead end, he contacted one of Clinton's doctors who wrote out a sworn statement stating that the president had no distinguishing marks or abnormalities in his genital area.

On June 27, 1994, Bennett filed a motion in the Little Rock federal court to dismiss the Jones lawsuit while Clinton was still in office. Bennett was careful by not asking for total immunity, leaving it open for Clinton to be sued after he left office.

Meanwhile, Jones contacted a Little Rock attorney, Daniel Traylor, whose specialty was real estate law. So small was his practice that he shared support staff with other tenants in the First Commercial Bank Building. Traylor's political pedigree was solidly Democratic. His father, a former two-term state representative, was a prominent member of the Democratic Party in North Little Rock. Traylor's first move was to send word to Clinton through a local Democratic Party leader that Jones wanted Clinton to help refute the story.

Traylor envisioned a simple settlement: a private apology from Clinton, $5,000 to cover his legal costs and a joint public statement from Jones and the president condemning those who leaked and published accounts of their hotel meeting. The real estate lawyer thought Jones and Clinton could actually appear in public as allies, blasting Ferguson for "shooting his mouth and spreading lies." Instead, Traylor got a call from the Democratic operative rejecting his private bid. Traylor then contacted another attorney, Cliff Jackson, who had represented two of the state troopers in Arkansas. Speaking lawyer to lawyer, Traylor, who mistakenly thought Jackson also represented Ferguson, said he was prepared to file a claim against Ferguson for giving the name "Paula" to the American Spectator.

Traylor and Jackson set up a meeting with Jones. At the session, Jackson recounted that Jones "broke down crying when she described what happened in the room. She described Clinton's face. It was so red she said she would never forget it. They said they had tried making the demand through private channels without success. They thought they had nothing to lose going public." Jackson said he told Traylor and Jones that they would never get an apology out of the White House and tried to dissuade them. But when they said they wanted to go ahead with the news conference anyway, Jackson noted that he already had scheduled one for the troopers during the Conservative Political Action Committee's annual retreat in Washington the next month. He was going to announce creation of a whistle-blower fund to aid two troopers who feared financial hardship for their public roles in the stories published in American Spectator and the Los Angeles Times.

However, Jackson warned that there would be repercussions from the White House. He said that the Clinton administration would likely spin it as a "right-wing political plot." Jackson said he bought plane tickets to Washington for Jones and Traylor, using money for the whistle-blower fund already provided by a conservative Chicago financier. But they paid their own way.

Against Jackson's advice, the Jones team had decided not to let Jones stand up and tell her own story, for fear that the press would "eat her alive." The next day at the news conference, Jackson announced the whistle-blower fund, and then he introduced Traylor had allowed Jones take a few questions. The reporters were merciless. She was nervous, and her voice was cracking.

Jones did not want to give up. Resentful at the treatment she had received, and perhaps naive about what lay ahead, she decided it was time to sue Clinton for sexual harassment. Traylor tried to find help in liberal quarters, pitching his client's case to the National Organization for Women and the American Civil Liberties Union. He consulted with an associate of prominent Wyoming defense attorney, Gerry Spence. He sent a packet of affidavits and a letter to Anita Hill, who had accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment amidst the Senate's confirmation hearings. Convinced only Clinton's foes would take up Jones' cause, Traylor settled on Washington-area lawyers Gilbert Davis and Joseph Cammarata who had handled conservative causes before.Traylor said that he was convinced they came into the case with no political agenda.

However, Jones' attorneys ran into a huge roadblock. No sitting president had ever been the recipient of a lawsuit while he was still in the White House. They did not know if it was constitutional to sue the president, and only the Supreme Court could tell. While preparing their arguments for the high court, Jones' lawyers were befriended by Starr who was still in private practice at Kirkland & Ellis. Starr urged them to press on with the lawsuit. Starr and Davis spoke about six times for a total of four and one-half hours in June 1994. They discussed ways that Jones' legal team could undercut the president if he claimed immunity. Starr's involvement ended two months later when he was named independent counsel.

Davis and Marcus brought aboard powerhouse attorney George Conway who had been raking in over a million dollars annually at a New York law firm. When Conway attacked Clinton's immunity argument in a Los Angeles Times article, Cammarata and Davis knew they had landed a hot shot lawyer. Conway went to the right wing Federalist Society and enlisted the help of Robert Bork and Theodore, friends of Starr and former Reagan administration attorneys.

Clinton asked for the delay of any possible trial until after he left the White House. However, Clinton lost in a Little Rock federal court, and in January 1996, he also lost in a circuit court of appeals. In June 1996, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case once Clinton finished his term. After Clinton was reelected in November 1996, Jones' attorneys presented their case to the Supreme Court for a second time. They hoped that her lawsuit would go to court while the president was still in the White House.

It was a rare unanimous ruling by the high court. In a 9-0 verdict handed down in May 1977, the Supreme Court ruled that Clinton could be sued while still in office. The ruling of the Supreme Court was unprecedented. The justices allowed a civil trial to proceed on the grounds that it would not interfere with the workings of the presidency. Never before had the highest court acted in such contempt and with a lack of respect for the office of the president. In August 1997, a district court judge set the trial date for May 27, 1998.

In September 1997, two lawyers for Jones stopped saying that she had turned down a settlement of $700,000. Rumors emerged that Jones was only asking for an apology from Clinton, something that the president always had refused to do. Depositions for the trial began the next month. Among those deposed were Dolly Kyle Browning, Gennifer Flowers, and Kathleen Willey. Then it was reported that Jones offered to settle for $2 million. Again, the White House refused to accept this new offer.

MONICA LEWINSKY. Years later, after Clinton arrived at the White House, he met Monica Lewinsky. With the assistance of Walter Kaye, a family friend, Lewinsky obtained an internship at the age of 21. She was assigned to work on correspondence in the office of Chief of Staff Leon Panetta in the Old Executive Building. Towards the end of her internship, she applied for a position on the White House staff. On November 15, 1995, Lewinsky was offered and accepted a job dealing with correspondence in the Office of Legislative Affairs and started the new assignment on November 26. She remained in that capacity for five months before being transferred to the Pentagon.

Lewinsky stated in her August 1998 grand jury testimony that in December 1995 she and Clinton first began "intense flirting" one month after she started her internship. She frequented White House functions where she talked with the president and said that she was infatuated with him. Then backstage, in rooms just off the Oval Office, his relationship with Lewinsky unfolded. On 10 separate occasions between November 15, 1995 and March 29, 1997, Clinton wove into his schedule a series of sexual rendezvous with Lewinsky whose life appeared to have been dominated by her obsession with the president. The cast of Secret Service agents, secretaries, and assistants -- who protect and serve the president in his official role -- were clearly aware of the backstage activities, but in many cases chose to avert their eyes.

On November 15, the second day of the government shutdown, the White House staff of 430 people operated at a minimum of 90 employees. When their paths crossed in a White House hallway, the president invited her into the Chief of Staff's office. Later that evening, Clinton invited her into the office of George Stephanopolous where she performed oral sex on him. White House records corroborate Lewinsky's account. Records showed that she was in the White House during those hours and that Clinton visited the Chief of Staff's office at the time she testified. In addition, Lewinsky also related that Clinton received a phone call from a member of Congress during their sexual encounter. Records indicated that Clinton spoke with Congressmen Jim Chapman and John Tanner at the time Lewinsky claimed their sexual encounter occurred.

Two days later, on November 17, their second sexual affair occurred. Lewinsky testified that she told Clinton's secretary, Betty Currie, that the president ordered pizza. Currie then ushered her into the Oval Office. The two eventually proceeded into the back study area where she performed oral sex on him for a second time. Several witnesses confirmed that they saw Lewinsky with the pizza in the White House. Additionally, Lewinsky recalled that Clinton received a phone call from someone with a nickname. White House records showed that the president received a phone call from Congressman Sonny Callahan during the time that Lewinsky and Clinton were alone. In Clinton's grand jury testimony he stated that he did recall seeing Lewinsky with a box of people but that he did not recall being with her alone.

On December 3, their third sexual encounter took place. Lewinsky testified that the two of them were in the president's private dining room where she performed oral sex on him once again. Lewinsky testified that she was in the vicinity of the Oval Office and saw a Secret Service agent named Sandy. Records showed that Sandy Verna was on duty outside the Oval Office during the time that Lewinsky said she was with the president.

According to Lewinsky, her next sexual encounter with Clinton was on January 7. After Clinton telephoned her earlier in the day, the two agreed to meet once again in the president's private bathroom where they kissed. White House records did not show that she was there but other evidence indicated her presence. Before Lewinsky entered the Oval Office, she said that she spoke briefly with Secret Service agent Lew Fox. White House records corroborated the fact that Fox was stationed outside the Oval Office on that afternoon. Fox testified that before Lewinsky arrived, the president asked him if he had seen "any young congressional staff members." Fox replied, "No sir." Clinton said, "Well, I'm expecting one. Would you please let me know when they show up?"

Once again, Clinton and Lewinsky had a sexual encounter on January 21. First, she saw the president in a hallway, and he invited her into the Oval Office and moved on to the hallway by the president's study where she performed oral sex on him. Lewinsky testified that someone entered the Oval Office and that Clinton was visibly shaken. Shortly thereafter, Clinton was told that a friend from Arkansas was waiting too see him. Lewinsky exited through the office of Susan Hernreich. On February 4 Lewinsky testified that she and Clinton had their sixth sexual encounter. Two weeks later, the president attempted to break off their relationship. On February 19 Clinton telephoned Lewinsky and asked that she come to the White House. She said that a tall Latino Secret Service agent ushered her into the Oval Office. The president told her that he did not feel right about their relationship and that it should be terminated. During their conversation, Clinton received a telephone call from a sugar planter in Florida. Lewinsky testified that his name sounded like "Fanuli." White House records indicated that during that time period, Clinton spoke with Alfonso Fanjul. Additionally, the Secret Service agent on duty outside the Oval Office was Nelson Garabito.

CLINTON'S ATTEMPT TO TERMINATE THE RELATIONSHIP. After four months of sexual relations, Clinton tried to break it off. Lewinsky wanted to continue, and she began to pressure the president. Lewinsky was a mixed-up, fragile, insecure woman who, despite her aggressive behavior, was deeply wounded by the experience of their affair. She was worldly, smart, and cunning. She was later accused of manipulating the president when he tried to terminate the affair, threatening to expose it unless he helped her get a job.

Prosecutors later accused his closest friend and confidant, Vernon Jordan, of trying to silence by landing her a high paying job which required little or no work. Jordan later told the president that Lewinsky apparently became "fixated" on him, and he was also convinced that the president was in love with her. Clinton seemed to set her up by suggesting that she hang around outside his office so they could run into each other as if by accident.

More than a month since Clinton tried to break off the relationship, they resumed "sexual relations." This became a term which the president later refuted. While in the Oval Office, she presented the president with a Hugo Boss necktie. They proceeded down the hallway towards his private study where he inserted a cigar into her vagina and then put it into his mouth. He said, "It tastes good." This was the last physical contact between Clinton and Lewinsky for several months.

Because Lewinsky was so persistent and ostentatious in her behavior around the White House, Lieberman decided to transfer her. Patsy Thomasson in the Office of Presidential Personnel sent the Lewinsky’s resume to the Special Assistant to the Secretary of Defense and asked him to find a Pentagon opening for her. On April 5, 1996, the former intern was formally transferred. When she was informed of the move to the Pentagon, she was devastated. Two witnesses testified that Clinton knew why Lewinsky was transferred to the Pentagon. Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles thought that "she hung around the Oval Office too much." Jordan testified that Clinton said to him later in December 1997 that "he knew about Lewinsky's situation, which was that she was pushed out of the White House."

Two days later, Lewinsky met with Clinton and told him of her dismissal from the White House -- and the two had a sexual encounter while the president spoke on the telephone with Dick Morris., another close adviser. Another call came in for the president. Secret Service agent Muskett knocked on the door of the Oval Office and getting no response, he opened the door. He saw the door to the hallway ajar and called out twice to the president. Finally, Clinton said, "Huh?" Then Lewinsky heard Harold Ickes' voice outside the Oval Office, and she quickly exited through the dinner room door. Lewinsky's testimony was corroborated by White House logs which confirmed that Morris was on the phone with Clinton during that time frame. In addition, records indicated that Muskett was posted in the hallway and recalled seeing Lewinsky being very upset as she rushed out. The following day, Lewinsky phoned and talked to Clinton for 20 minutes.

During the summer of 1996, Starr asked for a sample of Clinton's blood so that the FBI laboratory could determine if the DNA matched any on the infamous blue dress contained DNA evidence of a sexual encounter. Clinton's attorneys complied, and the special prosecutor received a sample from Bethesda Naval Hospital and from there it was turned over to the FBI. The results showed that it was Clinton's semen which was on Lewinsky's dress.

Between April and December 1996, Clinton and Lewinsky never met together privately. However, in those eight months they were engaged in phone sex on a number of occasions. Lewinsky also boasted in the taped conversations of purchasing Vox, a "phone sex" book from Kramer Books. The bookstore refused to cooperate, stating that their records were confidential. Consequently the OIC swiftly subpoenaed them and were able to prove that Lewinsky did purchase such a book.

Lewinsky repeated several times that she disliked her Pentagon job and that she wanted to return to the White House. The intern frequented several White House functions as her frustrations intensified. She saw the president in public -- at a reception for the Saxophone Club, at a taping of a Saturday radio address, and at a fund-raiser for Senate Democrats.

THE CLINTON-LEWINSKY RELATIONSHIP SOURS. On February 14, 1997, Lewinsky published a "love note" in the Washington Post. It read: "Handsome. With love's light wings did I o'er perch these walls for stony limits cannot hold love out. And what love can do that dares love attempt. -- Romeo and Juliet 2:2. Happy Valentine's Day. M."

Lewinsky testified that she and the president resumed their sexual relationship on February 28. She entered the Oval Office and presented him with a copy of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. While in his private study wearing a navy blue dress, she performed oral sex, and he ejaculated for the first time, leaving stains on her dress. FBI laboratory tests proved that the stains were Clinton's semen.

At some moment in the affair between the president and Lewinsky, Clinton began to fear her and the emotional mess he had helped create. A few months before their affair made news, he told her in a late-night phone fight, "If I had known what kind of person you really were, I wouldn't have gotten involved with you." Clinton explained that they had to terminate their sexual relationship. Three days later, the Supreme Court unanimously rejected Clinton's claim that the Constitution immunized him from civil lawsuits. The court ordered Jones v. Clinton to proceed. Currie testified that Clinton urged her and Marsha Scott to help Lewinsky find a White House job. Currie stated that by this time, her opinion of Lewinsky had changed and that she resisted the president's request.

Over the following months, Lewinsky stepped up the pace and repeatedly asked Clinton to get her a White House job. Perhaps she knew that her relationship with Clinton was over, so this was her way of "blackmailing" the president to keep silent up their sexual encounters. On several occasions, Clinton replied that White House members were working on finding her a position.

KATHLEEN WILEY. In 1991, Wiley and her husband, Edwin, were living extravagantly. The Wileys purchased expensive clothes, a high priced vacation condominium, and a new home for themselves. Then Edwin became financially overextended. In November 1993, he was accused of stealing $274,000 from a client. She decided to separate from him. The next day, she was allowed to meet with Clinton in the Oval Office.

Legal documents also raised questions about Wiley's account. First, her husband committed suicide on the same day of her alleged encounter with Clinton. Second, in her deposition in the Jones case, she said that she told Clinton during their meeting that "we were having a family crisis and my husband had asked me to sign a note for a large amount of money." However, in a civil lawsuit filed in Virginia, she gave a sworn deposition in 1995 saying that she had not had any conversations "with any people in Washington" about her husband's financial troubles.

Michael Viner, president of New Millennium Press, said he was approached by Wiley's lawyer about two months before she agreed to appear on 60 Minutes. Viner was asked if he would consider paying Wiley $100,000 to publish a book. He said that they had been talking weekly since that time about a deal that would include a $100,000 advance. Viner said that Wiley was interested in striking a deal with him because he published a popular book about O.J. Simpson by Faye Resnick while he was the president of Dove Entertainment. Wiley's lawyer, Daniel Gecker, stated that he had approached Viner five months before about a possible book deal, but that none was made. He disputed Viner's account of the conversation before the 60 Minutes interview, saying the publisher called him just two days before to suggest Wiley's appearance on television might reignite interest in a book.

The issue of a book deal -- whether Wiley had tried to negotiate one and whether the television appearance was connected to it -- was first raised by Clinton's lawyer, Robert Bennett. He suggested that Wiley attempted to profit from her sensational accusations against the president.

In the spring of 1998, Wiley was interviewed on 60 Minutes and said that Clinton made an unwanted sexual advance next to the Oval Office in 1993. Distraught over financial problems, Wiley went to the Oval Office seeking a paying job in the federal government. In her three hour and twenty minute deposition, Wiley claimed that Clinton reached for her breasts and "placed my (Wiley's) hands on his genitals." She continued: "I recall him saying that he had wanted to do that for a long time."

At the time of the alleged incident, Wiley's husband was embroiled in a growing scandal over his financial dealings. He finally committed suicide on the day that she first met with Clinton. Wiley maintained that she had coffee with the president in the same room on two other occasions and that the president made passes at her both times. Wiley soon got a paid position, and the next year she represented the United States at international conclaves in Copenhagen and Jakarta. She testified that she was deeply troubled by the episode and that the trauma was worsened when she found out the next day that her husband had killed himself. She checked herself into a hospital a short time later. She said that "it was a terrible time, and I was in very bad shape."

The White House tried to undercut Wiley's interview by releasing some of her letters the morning after her 60 Minutes appearance. They were written in an extremely friendly tone and thus indicated that she had an excellent rapport with Clinton, suggesting that she may have fabricated her story.

Starr's office gave complete immunity to Wiley and subpoenaed her as a witness against Clinton. This immunity agreement contained an unusual provision. It said that Wiley has done nothing illegal to warrant immunity. In March 1998 Wiley testified before Starr's grand jury. The OIC's goal was to determine from Wiley if Clinton had sexual relations with Lewinsky and if the president encouraged her to lie about it.

Five months later, Clinton testified before a grand jury and "emphatically" denied Wiley's version of the story. He said that he "embraced her. I may have kissed her on the forehead. There was nothing sexual about it." He referred to the release of the letters, telling prosecutors: "You know what evidence was released after the 60 Minutes broadcast that I think pretty well shattered Kathleen Wiley's credibility." Clinton told the grand jury that he considered releasing the letters earlier, but "frankly, her husband had committed suicide. She apparently was out of money. And I thought, ‘Who knows how anybody would react under that?' So I didn't. But, now when 60 Minutes came with the story and everybody blew it up, I thought we would release it." Clinton also said, "I didn't remember that she'd written us as much as she had and called as much as she had, and asked to see me as often as she had. ... I didn't know the volume of contact that she had which undermined the story she has told. But I knew there was some of it."

Wiley later testified at the trial of Julie Hiatt Steele in May 1999 that Clinton first offered her a cup of coffee in the president's private dining room and that he led her to a galley kitchen. As she was preparing to leave, she said that Clinton "hugged me and told me he was very sorry this was happening to me." Wiley said that it was a long hug, "much longer than I thought a hug should last." According to her testimony, Clinton then "backed into a corner" and struggled to kiss her, succeeding despite her resistance. She said that "he had his hand on my breast. He had his hands up my dress. He also put my hand on his genitals." Wiley further testified that she was able to leave by saying, "(I) just told him that I needed to get out of there. ... I was shocked at his behavior. I just really couldn't believe what he was doing."

The conservative legal group Judicial Watch, which filed numerous litigation cases against the Clinton administration, brought a lawsuit against the Clinton administration. Wiley was not a plaintiff in the suit. In March 2000 conservative Republican District Judge Royce Lamberth ordered White House lawyers to answer questions in the litigation. His ruling simply cleared the way for Judicial Watch to press the White House to answer additional questions about the Wiley letters.

Lamberth ruled that Clinton committed a misdemeanor by criminally violating the Privacy Act. According to the Washington Post (March 28, 2000), Lamberth contended that Clinton's motive was to release damaging information that cast doubt on her credibility. Lamberth said that the evidence "established that the president had the requisite intent for committing a criminal violation of the Privacy Act" when he authorized the release of the letters in the midst of the 1998 criminal investigation that led to his impeachment. Lamberth added, "When the president and EOP (executive office of the president) released the letters they were fully aware of this court's ruling that the Privacy Act was applicable and that the disclosure of the letters was therefore prohibited." In addition to the president, Lamberth said that three top presidential aides --- adviser Bruce Lindsey, White House Counsel Charles Ruff, and Deputy Counsel Cheryl Mills -- may have violated the Privacy Act.

Wiley filed bankruptcy in a Richmond, Virginia court in May 2000. She listed debts totaling over $700,000. She reported that her assets were worth just $19,011. They consisted primarily of her car, household furnishings, and her wedding ring.

LEWINSKY PRESSURES THE PRESIDENT FOR A JOB. Clinton began to give Lewinsky small presents. In one episode that she called a "hysterical escapade," when she had raged and waited outside the White House in the rain, she was finally allowed in, for two minutes and a quick kiss, before Clinton left for a state dinner.

Lewinsky pushed unsuccessfully to resume sexual relations with Clinton. She brought him more gifts for his birthday on August 19. She also continued to press Clinton for a White House slot. But it appeared to her that her requests were falling on deaf ears. On September 3, Clinton called Lewinsky and said that Erskine Bowles was not searching for a job for her. On October 6, she was told that she would not be allowed to return to the White house. In a recorded telephone conversation, Lewinsky told the president that he need to be contrite and that he had to find her a job. "She said, "I don't want to do work for this position. I just want it to be given to me." She wanted to move to New York City, and again Clinton promised to find her a position perhaps at the United Nations.

At an October 11 meeting in the Oval Office, Lewinsky asked Clinton if Jordan, could aid in the job search. She testified that the president was receptive to that idea. Five days later, the intern gave

Clinton an envelope which included a card, some jokes, and her "wish list." She wrote that she had no interest to work at the United Nations but said that she was interested in five public relations firms in New York City. Clinton asked Currie to contact Deputy Chief of Staff John Podesta who in turn approached United Nations ambassador William Richardson. A few days later, Lewinsky was interviewed by Richardson and two of his aides. On November 24, the former intern was offered a job, and over a month later, she turned down the offer.

On November 5, Clinton and Jordan spoke on the telephone for five minutes. Later that morning Jordan and Lewinsky met for the first time where she continued the pressure to be given a job by presenting him with her "wish list." The next day Lewinsky e-mailed a friend and wrote that she was hopeful that Jordan would find her a job. Jordan testified that he did not recall meeting with Lewinsky in early November but that it was "entirely possible." For the next week, Lewinsky attempted to speak with Clinton. On November 12 Clinton invited her to his office and they spoke for an hour. The next day, Lewinsky returned with gifts for the president and was escorted by Currie up the back stairs and into the Oval Office. Currie gave him an antique paperweight. She suggested that they have oral sex, but Clinton replied that he did not have the time. Lewinsky was not to see the president for another month.

According to his grand jury testimony, Jordan insisted that he made intensive efforts to find a job for Lewinsky because she "bordered on being a nuisance," not because she was a potential witness who could damage the president. Both Jordan and Currie testified that the job search for Lewinsky was not part of a conspiracy to obstruct justice -- an effort to keep Lewinsky from testifying about her sexual relationship with Clinton. Currie testified that, acting on her own, she enlisted Jordan's assistance in finding a private sector job for Lewinsky.

Jordan testified that he began his job search for Lewinsky in the latter part of 1997 before she was listed as a potential witness by lawyers for Jones. In fact Lewinsky wrote Jordan a warm thank-you letter dated November 6, 1997, soon after he began helping her find work. The letter read, "I know how very busy and demanding your schedule is. I particularly appreciated your taking the time to speak with me. I feel compelled to mention how overcome I was by your genuineness. While some people wear their heart on their sleeve, you appear to wear your soul. It made me happy to know that our friend (Clinton) has such a wonderful confidant in you."

Jordan first recommended Lewinsky to a New York company after they met on December 11 at Currie's request. Jordan said that he increased efforts to land a job for Lewinsky after hearing on December 19 that she received a subpoena from Jones' lawyers. Jordan said that on January 8 he called Ronald O. Perelman, chairman of the holding company that owns Revlon. This resulted in a job offer to Lewinsky soon after she had signed an affidavit denying any sexual relationship with the president. He said he promptly informed Clinton, through a message left with Currie, that Lewinsky had received the New York job offer, terming it "mission accomplished." While denying that his efforts were tied to any desire to influence Lewinsky's testimony, Jordan maintained that he kept the president constantly informed of his job search. Clinton testified in his deposition in the Jones case: "I thought he (Jordan) had given her (Lewinsky) some advice about her move to New York. Seems like that's what Betty said." This contradicted Jordan's testimony when he said that he kept the president continuously and personally apprised of his efforts to land a new position for Lewinsky.

Jordan also testified that Clinton as well as Lewinsky assured him that they never had a sexual relationship. Jordan said both Clinton and Lewinsky had assured him they had not had a sexual relationship and that he believed that was true. Jordan said, "The concept of oral sex never entered my mind."

Despite the contention by Jordan and Currie that there was no quid pro quo involved in the job search, Starr nevertheless charged Jordan with helping land Lewinsky an interview at Revlon. The special prosecutor maintained that this was a measure to buy Lewinsky's silence in matters pertaining to her sexual relationship with the president. The timing and nature of this gave Starr circumstantial evidence to build an overall case of perjury and obstruction of justice.

THE IMPACT OF THE JONES LAWSUIT. On November 12, 1997, Clinton invited Lewinsky to his office, and they spoke for an hour. The next day the former intern returned with gifts for the president and was escorted by Currie up the back stairs and into the Oval Office. Currie gave him an antique paperweight. She suggested that they have oral sex, but Clinton replied that he did not have the time. Lewinsky was not to see the president for another month.

On December 19, Lewinsky was served with a subpoena, compelling her to turn over to the court "each and every gift including but not limited to, any and all dresses, accessories, and jewelry, and/or hat pins given to you by, or on behalf of, defendant Clinton." Tipped off by Tripp, the Jones lawyers knew the president had given her a T-shirt or dress and a book of poetry. Clinton and Lewinsky met the same day of the subpoena.

In his January deposition, Clinton was asked, "Have you ever given any gifts to Monica Lewinsky?" He answered, "I don't recall. Do you know what they were?" Clinton later conceded that he "could have given her a gift, but I don't remember a specific gift." Under questioning, he said he bought souvenir items from the Black Dog store in Martha's Vineyard that were given to Lewinsky by Currie.

However, Clinton's testimony in the Jones' deposition differed from the answers he gave to the grand jury in August. The president told prosecutors that he told Lewinsky in December 1997 that she had no choice but to turn over gifts he had given her to Jones' lawyers. Clinton denied during his testimony that he ordered Currie to retrieve the gifts and said during his televised speech to the nation that he never asked anyone "to hide or destroy evidence." It remained unclear, though, how Currie came to approach Lewinsky to collect the gifts if she was not told to by the president. Prosecutors also attempted to determine whether Clinton kept some of the gifts given to him by Lewinsky after they had been subpoenaed by lawyers in the Jones case. The president did acknowledge that he gave Lewinsky a throw rug, a pin, and an Alaskan stone carving as farewell presents. If the president did instruct Currie to ask Lewinsky to return the gifts to her, that would constitute obstruction of justice.

Lewinsky's August 1998 grand jury testimony differed from that of Clinton just three days before. She told prosecutors that Clinton told her that she could not turn over the gifts if they were not in her possession. She testified that on the day after her discussion with Clinton, Lewinsky received a phone call from Currie who told her, "I hear you have something for me." Lewinsky said that she just assumed that Currie was referring to the gifts. Lewinsky continued by saying that on the same day Currie went to her apartment to retrieve the gifts. Currie allegedly contacted Lewinsky, saying she understood that Lewinsky had something to give her.

Starr's attorneys also questioned Clinton about the gifts which he had given Lewinsky. The president acknowledged that he had given her some items but did not recall any specifics. Clinton also said that he and Lewinsky had talked about the fact that she should return the gifts but that he had no knowledge that Currie had collected them. This was one area where Clinton and Lewinsky gave conflicting accounts to the grand jury, and it was a major reason why Starr later recalled Lewinsky to appear before the grand jury.

Lewinsky testified that she and Clinton discussed the lawsuit and how the attorneys might have learned of her. Afterwards, Lewinsky said that she met with Jordan and told him of her concern for the gifts. She asked Jordan to inform the president that she had been subpoenaed.

On December 28, Lewinsky called and spoke with Currie who arranged a meeting with Clinton. Lewinsky told the president of her concern for the subpoenaed gifts. She testified that Clinton discussed the possibility of moving them out of her possession. In order to silence Lewinsky, Clinton presumably gave her several gifts. Both Currie and Lewinsky testified that the president's secretary drove to Lewinsky's home later that day and that returned with a box which contained several gifts.

Clinton testified that he had spoken with Lewinsky about the gifts but that the conversation may have occurred before she received the December 19 subpoena. Lewinsky testified that on the same day, she met with the president in the Oval Office and further discussed the Jones case.

Clinton testified in August 1998 that he "did not recall" if he and Lewinsky were ever alone in the Oval Office. However, he did concede that she may have come to drop off papers for him while she still worked there. In the Jones deposition, Clinton testified that Lewinsky dropped by the White House "to see Betty Currie."

On January 5, Lewinsky testified that he called again and that for the third time they discussed her role in the Jones lawsuit. In Clinton's grand jury testimony, he stated, "I don't know if she had ever been" subpoenaed when describing his last contact with Lewinsky.

LINDA TRIPP. Tripp was known as the source of never-proven allegations about former President George Bush's private life. Tripp came to the White House during the Bush administration but was retained as an administrative secretary working in the counsel's office when Clinton took office in 1993. Tripp was transferred from the White House in 1994 after falling out of favor in the Foster suicide controversy. After arriving at the Pentagon, she started receiving large pay raises and outstanding performance evaluations in her job, even though her government supervisors considered her a problem employee. She brought in an annual salary of $90,767. When it was announced that she had taped conversations with Lewinsky, Tripp was given a special assignment and was allowed to do her work at home.

However, before long Tripp realized that she was in disfavor. She complained to presidential aide Bruce Lindsey. She said that she had accumulated 900 hours of compensatory time and was angry to discover that she could not take it with her. In addition, Tripp wasted no time telling her new bosses that she was special. She told Clifford Bernath, then a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, "You know, I'm, I'm involved in ... Vince Foster and I'm involved in a lot of things and I know a lot of things and this is why I need privacy and this is why I should be treated differently.’ " Within two months he put a memo in her personnel file. It read: "She (Tripp) has been a disruptive force since her arrival and nothing we do seems to assuage her." He complained that she fought daily with co-workers, sending nasty e-mail messages to anyone who disagreed with her. He said that she found silly reasons to leave work early, including that her cat was sick. He complained to the Pentagon's White House liaison office and was told that "basically, this was my problem and we had to deal with it." Tripp received four pay increases in 1995 and 1996.

When Tripp was assigned to work out of her home, she found herself in immediate trouble once again. She asked the Pentagon to ship some documents to her home but then complained that the material was useless. She blasted her bosses in an e-mail message, saying that she felt "a veiled hostility toward me as a cooperating witness." She threatened legal action.

It was at the Pentagon that Lewinsky met Tripp who had been there since August 1994. Before moving over to the Defense Department, Tripp was an assistant to Bernard Nussbaum, Chief White House Counsel and the boss of Vince Foster. Tripp was the last person to see Foster alive, and she had first-hand knowledge of the internal investigation.

Tripp was a holdover from the Bush administration and had come to dislike the Clintons intensely feeling that she had been shoved out of her position in the White House. When Clinton took office in 1993, she was appalled by how the new administration dismissed many senior civil servants to fulfill a campaign promise to cut the White House staff by 25 percent, and then Clinton replaced them with political appointees. Tripp looked up to Gary Aldrich, a former Secret Service agent who wrote a critical book about the Clintons, as a "professional, decent, honorable" man who was "slimed" by the White House. Tripp made it clear to Lewinsky that Clinton has abused her.

On July 14, 1997, Clinton summoned Lewinsky to the Oval Office to discuss Tripp and the Newsweek story on White House volunteer Willey. Lewinsky testified that "he was concerned about Linda, and I reassured him. He asked me if I trusted her, and I said ‘yes.’ " Clinton made a spectacular blunder in his bid to have a damage control operation to knock down rumors about his private life. The president used Lewinsky as an intermediary between him and Tripp. If Willey's story became public, Jones' attorneys would have new ammunition to show a pattern of Clinton's sexual behavior. He hoped that Tripp would not reveal his affairs. The president told Lewinsky to talk with Tripp and terminate her interviews with the Newsweek reporter. Lewinsky was to report back and say "mission accomplished." She never did. The Newsweek story was published. Willey charged Clinton of fondling and kissing her in the Oval Office.

Clinton said in a statement that day, "I have apologized for my conduct, and I have done my best to atone for it with my family, my administration, and the American people. I have paid a high price for it, which I accept because it caused so much pain to so many people. I hope my actions today will bring hope and closure and finality to these matters." (New York Times, January 19, 2001.

In January 2001, Tripp was fired from her Pentagon job after she refused to submit her resignation on the last day of the Clinton administration. White House officials said they were compelled to dismiss her after she failed to resign along with other political appointees who served Clinton. Her attorneys threatened to take legal action to get her job back. Tripp was a "Schedule C" political appointee who was not protected by Civil Service status.

According to the New York Times (January 20, 2001), Jake Siewert, the White House spokesman, denied that Tripp was being treated unfairly. "She was treated as any other Schedule C employee was. Most Schedule C employees were -- virtually all-- asked to submit their resignations. And if they didn't do so, they were terminated."

LUCIANNE GOLDBERG. Tripp was a good friend of 62-year old Lucianne Goldberg, a conservative Republican activist. She was a literary agent who infiltrated the McGovern campaign in 1972. Goldberg used a phoney media pass and acted as a journalist who was merely reporting on the Democratic presidential nominee. However, she picked up sexual gossip on key Democrats, serreptiously looking for dirt to help Nixon's chances in the November election. It was Goldberg who advised Tripp to tape conversations with Lewinsky about her reported sexual encounters with Clinton. Earlier, Goldberg tried to sell books by a woman who claimed to have a relationship with Clinton and by Arkansas state troopers who told Clinton womanizing stories.

Goldberg assembled a back channel of conservative-leaning advisors and conduits. One contact was with Richard Porter, a former aide for President Bush and Vice President Quayle, who was a partner in a Chicago law firm that also employed Starr. This network extended to Jerome Marcus, a Philadelphia attorney and Porter's University of Chicago law school classmate, and George Conway, a New York lawyer. At a later time, Porter had helped line up Jones with her original attorneys in the case against Clinton and talked to them on occasion about the lawsuit. Marcus and Conway had assisted the Jones team with a successful appeal to the Supreme Court that allowed the case to proceed against the president while he remained in office.

By November 1997, Goldberg said that she had told these lawyers about "a very young woman in the White House having a relationship with the president." The Goldberg pipeline extended to David Pyke, a Dallas lawyer working on the Jones case. Goldberg continued, "I asked one of these guys to give (Pyke) Linda's number. She wanted to talk. She was going to see what she could do about her situation."

A November 21 Tripp tape contained a call to her home from Pyke who said that Goldberg told him about "a woman that's having a relationship with Clinton." Tripp told Pyke that she would not lie but insisted that she appear to be a hostile witness to avoid risking her job at the Pentagon. Tripp later testified before Starr's grand jury that she provided Pyke limited information about Lewinsky, even refusing to disclose Lewinsky's name. She asked Pyke not to subpoena the Lewinsky tapes because she was afraid that Clinton's lawyers would learn that she had made them. On November 24 Tripp received a subpoena from the Jones lawyers to testify about Willey.

Presumably, Goldberg saw the potential for a great deal of money in a future book. At first she hoped to bring in a ghost writer. When the scandal broke, Tripp downplayed the idea of writing a book despite the fact that she had approached a publisher with a proposal for as much as $500,000. Goldberg had even titled one chapter, "All the President's Women." However, Goldberg's dream of a book was stalled when Tripp called and said that she had decided to abandon the project because she feared losing her job.

After 14 months, Tripp and Goldberg talked again. In the fall of 1997, they had three phone conversations. According to Goldberg, Tripp told her that a Newsweek magazine reporter was asking her what she knew about the incident between Willey and Clinton.

It did not appear as if Tripp and Lewinsky even liked each other. Tripp, who was nearly twice Lewinsky's age, showed her superiority and once even said to the former intern, "The problem I have with you, frankly, is I feel entirely too maternal towards you. And it's almost like when I'm yelling at my kids, not that that ever has any effect. When I yell at you, it's out of love." Tripp frequently corrected Lewinsky's grammar, edited her love notes, sneered at her girlish handwriting, and castigated her with lines such as "He's never been attracted to you because you use big words."

For the most part, however, the tapes were a depressing record of a betrayal. At one point, Tripp said, "I know you're going to hate me, Monica. I want you the (deleted) out of there. I want you with a life." Also, there were times when Tripp gave false hope to Lewinsky, telling her that Clinton really cared for her but could not always be with her because of the possible consequences. Tripp said, "I don't think he has it in him to say, ‘I meant it. I wanted you back. I want you in my life, but I can't do it.’ "

In an e-mail to Tripp, Lewinsky said, "I will also be checking my messages in the hopes that the creep will call and say, ‘Thank you for my love note. I love you. Will you run away with me?’ What do you think the likelihood of that happening is?" Then Tripp cold-heartedly encouraged her: "Ah, but that has already transpired, says my omnipotent crystal ball," and "You will come home to an opportunity to get together with the creep, I am positive." Lewinsky also told Tripp that she was also falling in love with Jordan who was helping her find a job. Tripp responded by saying that Jordan was "very crushable."

Tripp constantly pushed Lewinsky to be harder on Clinton, persuading her to demand a low paying and low stress job from the president. Tripp helped her write the letter demanding that the president help her get a big job in New York City. Additionally, Tripp put herself in the middle of the Clinton-Lewinsky sexual relationship and at times appeared to have managed the former intern's affairs. After Lewinsky made a recording of a phone sex conversation, Tripp said, "No wonder he likes to have phone sex with you. You're just like a little Marilyn Monroe vixen." Tripp then encouraged Lewinsky to re-record it in order to make it more effective.

Tripp defended her decision to make the tapes of their conversations. She said, "My idea was never to manufacture evidence. In fact I had never even thought about the independent counsel in my wildest dreams. My idea was, I'm going to arm myself with records so when I'm in a position to speak under oath I can do so truthfully, not to be set up in a perjury trap, and say, ‘Fine, you think I'm committing perjury, here. Have a look.’ "

THE TRIPP TAPES. Goldberg influenced Tripp to secretly tape her telephone conversations with Lewinsky. This began on October 3, 1997. According to a Starr office summary, "Goldberg told Tripp to tape the telephone conversations with the young woman (Lewinsky) from the Pentagon." However, Goldberg said that "Tripp did not want to tape the calls as she thought it was’'sleazy.’ " Nevertheless, because of her disdain towards the Clinton administration, Tripp agreed to begin taping Lewinsky when Goldberg warned her about one other thing: that the Clinton "machine would destroy Tripp unless Tripp had irrevocable proof."

Lewinsky and Tripp freely talked about many issues -- including sex. Tripp set the scandal in motion by taping conversations with Lewinsky on her home telephone. She compiled 17 tapes which contained 20 hours of conversations with Lewinsky. They talked primarily about hair, diets, shopping, and sex. The conversations did not indicate that there was a real friendship between Lewinsky and Tripp, but rather there was a temporary alliance between two women obsessed with Clinton.

The Tripp tapes confirmed that Lewinsky told at least one friend on repeated occasions that she was having an affair with the president, and that she had discussed with Clinton and Jordan the fact that she had been subpoenaed in the Jones case. On the tapes, Lewinsky sounded distraught but not unbalanced. She talked spontaneously about a sexual relationship with the president. She expressed her anguish about being brought into the Jones case; and declared her desire that Clinton would settle the case. She said that the president was "in denial. He'll never settle." Lewinsky affirmed to Tripp that Lewinsky would deny any sexual relationship in a deposition by Jones's lawyers. She said, "Look, I will deny it so he will not get screwed in the case, but I'm going to get screwed personally. Tripp then asked why and Lewinsky answered, "Because it will be obvious ... it will be obvious to him... that I told you." However, there was no clear evidence on the tape that confirmed or denied Tripp's allegation that Clinton or Jordan had coached Lewinsky to lie.

Starr was stalled. He had hit one roadblock after another. He failed to find evidence linking Clinton with any illegalities in regard to Whitewater, Filegate, and Travelgate. In early January, Goldberg began exploring the best way for Tripp to approach Starr's office about Lewinsky's relationship with Clinton. Goldberg said she contacted Starr's law partner Porter, who got in touch with Marcus, a former federal prosecutor, as a way to conceal Porter's involvement. In turn, on January 8, 1998 Marcus phoned Paul Rosenzweig, another law school classmate in Starr's office. On the following day, Rosenzweig informed Starr's Washington deputy, Jackie Bennett, about Clinton having an affair with Lewinsky.

When Lewinsky learned of the tapes, she found herself in a quandary when she learned that Starr was investigating her for perjury and obstruction of justice in the Jones case. The former intern had signed an affidavit swearing that she had never had a sexual relationship with the president. However, Starr had the tapes which indicated that her denial was a lie. They suspected that she had been advised to lie by the president and by Jordan. Starr offered her a tough choice: cooperate with prosecutors and turn against the president, or face the possibility of criminal charges herself.

Starr himself was placed in a tenuous situation regarding the legality of the tapes. Since Tripp had secretly taped the conversations with Lewinsky in Maryland, she was subjected to the criminal code of that state. Tripp recorded 20 hours

Tripp claimed that she did was unaware of Maryland law which prohibits taping a conversation without consent of the other party. However, it does not constitute a felony if that person is ignorant of the law. Tripp went to Goldberg for advice. In November 1998, Goldberg was subpoenaed by a Maryland grand jury. She was questioned about the advice which she had given to Lewinsky about taping the conversations with the president. Goldberg said that she encouraged Tripp to secretly record the phone conversations. At her November 1998 testimony before a Maryland grand jury, Goldberg testified that she asked an associate to research the legality of wiretapping on the Internet and that she incorrectly told Tripp that it would be legal to proceed with taping conversations with the president. Goldberg said, "I take all the blame," and ignorance of the law is a valid defense. However, had it been proven that Tripp did know Maryland's wiretapping law, she could have been sentenced to a maximum of five years and fined up to $10,000.

Goldberg even appeared to have pressured Tripp into doing so when she said, "She'd (Tripp would) better tape her phone calls or she'd be destroyed." Tripp began taping her conversations with Lewinsky in September and continued for four months. Tripp said that she learned in December that recording her calls with Lewinsky was illegal. However, her testimony was made under a grant of immunity from Starr, so that evidence was inadmissable in the Maryland investigation.

Tripp had a colossal opportunity to crack open a case since his previous three year investigation of Clinton had run into deadends. On January 12 Tripp called deputy Jackie Bennett at the OIC. She told Bennett about her taped conversations with Lewinsky. During this conversation, Tripp told Bennett that Jordan was "an active participant in what I think I deemed a cover-up." She said she felt the president was involved. She added that Jordan and Clinton were getting the former intern a job. Tripp also said the woman was being encouraged to lie in the Jones case. Tripp also told Bennett that she had information that Lewinsky was about to lie about her affair with Clinton in her deposition.

Starr had a tremendous opportunity to penetrate the president's inner circle, and this all hinged on whether or not Tripp was telling the truth about the tapes. The independent counsel knew that he had to verify as much information as possible in regard to the Tripp tapes so that a grand jury would believe that Lewinsky's comments of sexual affairs with Clinton were valid. Starr decided to proceed.

Less than an hour later, six of Starr's lawyers and an FBI agent knocked on Tripp's front door in Columbia, Maryland. They heard Tripp tell an extraordinary story. Tripp told Starr's deputies that she had been angered and offended by what she considered the president's "callous" behavior toward Lewinsky. Tripp also talked to Starr's deputies about Willey. She said that in 1993, she had seen Wiley leaving the Oval Office with her make-up smeared and her clothing askew. The six deputies listened to some of the tapes in which Lewinsky described her sexual relations with Clinton. Starr's four year investigation having been stalled was now revitalized. The 17 audio tapes consisted of about 20 hours of surreptitiously-taped phone conversations. Most of the tapes were made from Tripp's home in Maryland.

Starr quickly moved to subpoena the tapes and made plans to bug Tripp the next day. Starr knew that Tripp would cooperate with the OIC since she was an ardent Clinton-hater. Tripp had had a number of run-ins with the Clinton White House. In 1993, Tripp was an executive assistant to Bernard Nussbaum, then the White House counsel. Early in the Whitewater probe, Tripp had testified before a federal grand jury and the Senate Whitewater investigating committee about the so-called Travelgate affair, the firing of staffers in the White House travel office by the Clinton administration in 1993. She told Starr's assistants that she had been urged by her lawyers -- whom the White House arranged to represent her -- not to volunteer information she had about Hillary Clinton's role in Travelgate.

On January 13 -- approximately 12 hours after Starr's deputies left Tripp's home -- Starr swung into action. FBI agents fitted Tripp with a secret microphone, and she set out to have drinks with Lewinsky at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Pentagon City, Virginia. When Tripp met with Lewinsky, there was a team of FBI agents and prosecutors listening as a hidden tape recorded the conversation. Lewinsky again discussed conversations with Jordan about keeping quiet in the Jones case. She also talked about Jordan's efforts to get her a job in New York. This gave Starr hope that he could make Lewinsky a witness for the prosecution. They hoped to "sting" Jordan or Currie by getting Lewinsky to place phone calls to them that Starr's staff would monitor.

On January 14, Lewinsky picked up Tripp at the Pentagon and offered to drive her home. Lewinsky gave Tripp "talking points" about how she should respond to questions from Jones's lawyers in the Wiley matter.

On January 15, Starr's team met with Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder and player portions of the tape where Lewinsky said that Jordan had asked her to perjure herself. Then Starr asked Holder to ask Justice Sentelle and the other members of the three judge panel for approval to broaden his jurisdiction. But Holder was opposed to the OIC expanding its probe, especially to investigate the personal life of the president. Holder did explain that he would recommend to Reno that she should seek another independent counsel. Starr objected. He said that this would delay the investigation and that time was of the utter most importance.

The next day, January 16, Reno did proceed with Starr's request to expand his inquiry. The attorney general asked the three judge panel for approval for the OIC to probe into the life of Lewinsky. Several hours later, the panel responded in a sealed and secret order which gave Starr power to investigate "whether Monica Lewinsky or others suborned perjury, obstructed justice, intimidated witnesses, or otherwise violated federal law." No other names were mentioned.

On the very day that Starr received authority to expand the probe, he had Lewinsky wired by the FBI. Once again the two met at the Ritz Carlton. But this time two FBI agents quickly appeared, and she was taken to a room on the tenth floor. It was 1:05 p.m. She asked to call her attorney, Frank Carter. Starr's deputies rejected her request because presumably they feared that he would advise her to remain silent. Instead, they gave her the phone number of another attorney, but Lewinsky refused to make the call. For the next two hours, the deputies laid out the evidence to Lewinsky. They said that they had the tape where she said that she committed perjury. They threatened her with 27 years in prison unless she would cooperate with them and wear a listening device when she met with others who were also under investigation. Starr's attorneys wanted her to "place calls or wear a wire" to secretly record conversations with Jordan, Currie, and "possibly the president" before their relationship was publicly disclosed. Starr denied any intent. The FBI report indicated that one of Starr's deputies spoke to Lewinsky's father about the sexual relationship and that he spoke of "an interview, telephone calls, body wires, and testimony."

Lewinsky was told that if she would cooperate with the OIC, the deputies said, she would be given immunity. She said that she wanted to talk with her mother in New York City, but deputy Jackie Bennett told her that she was 24 years old and did not need her mother. They had to wait for her to arrive until Marcia Lewis arrived. At 10:15 p.m., more than nine hours since she had been sequestered, Lewis met with Michael Emmick who was the chief prosecutor in the Lewinsky task force. Lewis then called her ex-husband, Bernard Lewinsky, a physician 3,000 miles away in Los Angeles. He recommend that she contact William Ginsburg as legal counsel for their daughter.

Emmick explained to Bernard Lewinsky that they offered immunity to his daughter. Meanwhile, Ginsburg contacted Emmick, and the two tried to work out the immunity offer. Ginsburg suggested that Emmick write out the proposal on letterhead stationery and fax it to him; that he would sign it; and that he would fax it back. Emmick rejected the proposal. He said that the deal had to be made immediately. The deal was off.

On January 17, the Jones attorneys offered Tripp a deal. They would forego a formal deposition, if Tripp would inform them of her conversations with Lewinsky just prior to Clinton's deposition. Tripp agreed to the hastily arranged briefing. Tripp's role in the days just prior to the Jones case raised serious questions about Starr's function. The special prosecutor essentially provided information that helped the Jones lawyers question Clinton more extensively about his relationship with Lewinsky.

William Ginsberg flew to Washington the same day, but on January 19, his negotiations with Starr broke down. Also that day, Lewinsky's name surfaced in the Drudge Report, a gossip column on the Internet. According to Starr's deputies, the fear that Lewinsky's name would become widely known was enough to torpedo the negotiations between Starr and her Lewinsky's lawyers. Tripp also acknowledged through her attorney that she had given Starr a notebook which chronicled dozens of conversations with Lewinsky. They detailed Lewinsky's alleged relationship with Clinton. For example, the notes mentioned Lewinsky's calls to Tripp where she complained about Clinton's requests of ending their alleged affair. She also chronicled the times when Lewinsky said to her that she would "recount her times with the president."

CLINTON'S DEPOSITION IN THE JONES LAWSUIT. On January 17, 1998, Clinton gave a sworn deposition in the Jones sexual misconduct case. In October of the same year, 724 classified pages were made public.

District Court Judge ordered Clinton answer the question about his sexual relations, but she narrowed it to the period from May 1986 to the time of his January deposition. Her ruling also limited the question to those women "who were state or federal employees, and those whose liaisons with Governor Clinton were procured, protected, concealed, and-or facilitated by state troopers assigned to the governor." The crux of Clinton's testimony revolved around his testimony that he never had sexual relations with Lewinsky. Clinton answered "no" when asked generally if he had "an extramarital sexual affair with Monica Lewinsky." If Lewinsky told someone that she had a sexual affair with him beginning in November 1995, he testified, "it would not be the truth." Later Clinton maintained that he was legally correct because he believed that oral sex constituted having sexual relations.

Part of Clinton's deposition included the following questions and answers:

Q: Is it true when she (Lewinsky) worked at the White House she met with you several times?

a: I don't know about several times. There was a period when the, when the Republican Congress shut the government down, that the whole White House was being run by interns, and she was assigned to work back in the chief of staff's office, and we were all working there, and so I saw her on two or three occasions then, and then when she worked at the White House, I think there was one or two other times when she brought some documents to me.

Q: Did you have an extramarital sexual affair with Monica Lewinsky?

a: No.

Q: I think I used the term ‘sexual affair.’ And so the record is completely clear, have you ever had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky, as that term is defined in Deposition Exhibit 1, as modified by the Court?

a: I have never had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky. I've never had an affair with her.

Q: I'm going to read you certain portions of Miss Lewinsky's affidavit, and ask you about them. In Paragraph 8 of her affidavit, she said this: ‘I have never had a sexual relationship with the president, he did not propose that we have a sexual relationship, he did not offer me employment or other benefits in exchange for a sexual relationship, he did not deny me employment or other benefits for rejecting a sexual relationship.’ Is that a true statement as far as you know it?

a: That is absolutely not true.

Clinton's attorneys struck back by claiming that they had testimony from a man who alleged he had sex with Jones in his car in a bar parking lot on their first encounter. a few weeks later, according to Clinton's attorneys, Jones initiated oral sex with the man. These two encounters allegedly occurred just months before the episode in which Jones claimed that she was emotionally distressed when Clinton propositioned her for a similar sex act. The filing identified the man only as Michael King who was deposed on December 29, 1997. Two Michael Kings listed in Arkansas telephone directories who were contacted said they had nothing to do with the case and two other listings in the Little Rock area were no longer in service.

The president was also asked if he and Lewinsky had ever been alone together in any room of the White House. Clinton replied, "I have no specific recollection, but it seems to me that she was on duty on a couple of occasions working for the legislative affairs office and brought me some things to sign, something on the weekend." The testimony in the deposition read:

Q: At any time were you and Monica Lewinsky together alone in the Oval Office?

a: I don't recall, but as I said, when she worked at the legislative affairs office, they always had somebody there on the weekends. ...She, it seems to me, she brought things to me one or twice on the weekends.

Q: So I understand, your testimony is that it was possible, then, that you were alone with her, but you have no specific recollection of that ever happening?

a: Yes, that's correct. It's possible that she, in, while she was working there, brought something to me and that at the time she brought it to me, she was the only person there. That's possible.

Q: At any time have you and Monica Lewinsky ever been alone together in any room in the White House?

a: I think I testified to that earlier. I think that there is a, it is, I have no specific recollection, but it seems to me that she was on duty on a couple of occasions working for the legislative affairs office and brought me some things to sign, something on the weekend. That's, I have a general memory of that.

It appeared preposterous that Clinton did not remember giving her specific gift. The president, testified: "I don't remember a specific gift." Yet, during his August grand jury testimony, he remembered that he had given her an Alaskan stone carving, a throw rug, and a pin. The testimony read:

Q: Well, have you ever given any gifts to Monica Lewinsky?

a: I don't recall. Do you know what they were?

Q: a hat pin?

a: I don't, I don't remember. But certainly, I could have.

To constitute perjury, Clinton would have had to make a statement which he knew was false, and it had to be "material" to the case at hand -- that is, capable of influencing the proceeding in which it was made. Evasive and misleading statements do not constitute perjury as long as they are technically true. Clinton's team maintained that any misstatements did not constitute perjury because they were not material to the Jones lawsuit. An attorney sympathetic to Clinton said, "It may not have been the most candid version, but it wasn't perjury."

Soon after Clinton's deposition, a federal judge said that any possible affair with Lewinsky could not be used against Clinton in the Jones case. In February Clinton's lawyers filed a motion asking for the Jones suit to be dismissed without going to trial. On April 1, 1998, it was announced by Judge Susan Wright that the case was dismissed. The strategy of the White House was to associate Jones with the far right. Clinton spokesmen claimed that Jones was sponsored from the beginning by Cliff Jackson, a right wing Clinton hater from Arkansas.

THE SCANDAL GOES PUBLIC. On January 21, accusations of Clinton's relationship with Lewinsky first appeared in the media. From January to August, the worried president used all the means at his disposal to keep his private life from exploding into public view.

Only two and one-half hours after his deposition, the president contacted Currie at her home and asked her to contact Lewinsky. Clinton told Currie that he was asked questions about Lewinsky. Currie testified that the president then said, "You were always there when I was there, right? We were never really alone. You could see and hear everything. Monica came on to me, and I never touched her, right? She wanted to have sex with me, and I can't do that." Currie indicated that Clinton's remarks were "more like statements than questions." The next day Currie attempted unsuccessfully to contact her by pager seven times and to reach her at home twice.

In the first days after the scandal became public, Clinton spoke to a few close allies about his relationship with Lewinsky, offering various explanations that were damaging to her credibility. The president was fearful of doing or saying something that would alienate her, since he knew that she could eventually testify about the affair. So the president stopped the verbal assault and also urged his aides to do the same. Clinton's new strategy was to keep Lewinsky happy and quiet, in hopes that she would not cooperate with Starr.

The strategy differed greatly from his previous tactics which he implemented when other women had accused him about sex. On January 22, Clinton turned to Morris who months before was caught with a prostitute in the nation's capital. He suggested to Clinton that he should tell the story and apologize. Morris testified that he had told the president, "The one thing you've got to avoid is getting trapped like (President) Nixon into a rigid posture of denial." Morris ordered an immediate poll and the next day told Clinton, "I'm wrong. You can't tell them about it. They'll kill you." Morris advised the president to call a press conference and use it to blast Lewinsky's story as "the fevered fantasy of a teenage mind." After thinking about it for a day, Clinton urged Morris to drop the idea saying, "My people don't think it would be a good idea for you to have that press conference because we're not all sure that Lewinsky is going to cooperate with Starr. We think there's some chance that she won't and we don't want to alienate her."

Morris also testified that presidential allies had mounted a "secret police operation to go around and intimidate women" who may have been involved with the president. When asked about his statement, Morris said that his testimony was based on no first-hand information and was a supposition based on his reading of affidavits and published accounts. Morris said, "I had no personal knowledge of the operation."

Clinton's decision came after he had explained his relationship with Lewinsky to his senior adviser, Sidney Blumenthal, just one day after the story broke. Blumenthal testified that he related the story to Hillary who backed her husband by saying that Lewinsky had been "troubled" and that he had "helped" her. Then Clinton told Blumenthal that Lewinsky had "made a sexual demand" on him and that he had rebuffed her. Clinton said that Lewinsky had threatened him that she would tell others that they had had an affair. Clinton’s adviser also said that he raised a question about Lewinsky with Hillary who told him not to worry, that the president was "ministering to a troubled young person."

White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles confirmed Podesta's account when the two of them met with Clinton on those two occasions. Deputy Chief of Staff Harold Ickes testified that Clinton had denied such a relationship with Lewinsky. White House Counsel Charles Ruff testified that he had talked to White House aides. He said that the president was denying allegations that he engaged in a sexual relationship and denying that he told subordinates to lie.

Other advisors heard other versions of the story from Clinton. In a meeting with Deputy Chief of Staffs John Podesta and Sylvia Matthews and Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles, the president denied reports of the affair in the broadest terms. According to their testimonies, the president said, "I want you to know that this story is not true." Podesta said that "he was forceful when he spoke to us." Podesta testified that the president told him on January 23 that he had never had sex with her and that he never asked anybody to lie. Podesta testified that he had heard Clinton state that he either denied having a sexual relationship with Lewinsky or he minimized his involvement with her. Podesta remembered a January 23, 1998 meeting when Clinton stated, "Erskine (Bowles), I want you to know that this story is not true." Podesta also recalled a conversation two days later when Clinton told him that he had not engaged in sex of "any kind, shape, or manner" with Lewinsky. Podesta also said, "He (the president) was extremely explicit in saying he had never had sex with her. There was some spate of, you know, what sex acts were counted, and he said that he had never had sex with her in any way whatsoever . . . that they had not had oral sex."

Clinton's story gradually began to change. In a conversation with Podesta, Clinton volunteered only that whenever Lewinsky had come by, "she came to see Betty, and that he -- when she was there, either Betty was with them--either that she was with Betty when he saw her in the Oval Office with the door open and Betty was around--and Betty was out at her desk."

On January 24, the White House issued "talking points" for its staff. They refuted Clinton's literal truth statement in his deposition. The points stated that the president had stated that oral sex is "of course a sexual relationship." Clinton's advisers Rahm Emanuel and Paul Begala testified that a White House adviser sought assurances from the lawyers that the president's denial of a sexual relationship with Lewinsky did not rely on an exclusion for oral sex. Presidential adviser Mickey Kantor insisted on a wall of silence. a few days later, Clinton reassured his Cabinet that he was innocent of accusations of having sex with Lewinsky and telling her to lie about it. After the Cabinet meeting, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and three other Cabinet secretaries met with reporters in a show of support for Clinton. By this time, several top political advisers had also been personally assured by the president that the accusations were untrue.

On Super Bowl Sunday, Clinton told 200 people gathered in the Roosevelt Room for a child-care policy meeting, "I want you to listen to me, I'm going to say this again. I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky." Clinton's denial also energized his defenders, including his wife, who appeared on the NBC program Today to defend him.

Two weeks later, Lewinsky placed a Valentine's ad in a Washington newspaper, hoping that the president would read her personal note.

For months, Clinton continued to make bold public statements of categorically denying having a sexual relations with Lewinsky. The polls indicated that the American public was willing to forgive Clinton if he would report having sexual infidelities with Lewinsky. However, he was told that the American people would not accept untruthful statements in his sworn deposition in the Jones case. For eight months, Clinton's denials continued, and his aides denounced Starr, driving up his public disapproval ratings.

THE TRAP THAT WAS NEVER SET. Starr had the opportunity to trap Clinton in a way that could have destroyed the president overnight, but the independent counsel declined to do so. On July 29 Lewinsky gave the IOC her navy blue dress which, she said, may have been soiled with the president’s semen. This presented Starr with some choices. He could have kept the results of the DNA testing secret until after Clinton testified before the grand jury. Or he could have given the president the results of the tests. Obviously, Clinton knew that Starr had the dress and easily knew what the results of the tests would indicate. But Starr was not under the legal obligation to divulge these results to the president. Starr also knew that when Clinton eventually would testify before the grand jury, he could have stuck to his original story that he had not had sexual relations with Lewinsky. If that would have occurred, then Starr would have had a relatively clear cut perjury case against the president.

However, Starr did not set the trap. He told his colleagues that his job was to encourage Clinton to tell the truth and not to catch him in a lie. When the DNA testing came back on July 31, Starr’s counsel contacted Kendall and requested a blood specimen. Kendall asked if the OIC had "a precise factual basis" for the request, and Starr’s office replied that it was "substantial." This obviously alerted Clinton to the test results.

GRAND JURY TESTIMONY: CORROBORATION BY THE SECRET SERVICE, WHITE HOUSE AIDES, AND LEWINSKY'S FRIENDS. Throughout his political career, Clinton never trusted his security whether it were Arkansas state troopers or the Secret Service. The agents' arrival in Arkansas during the 1992 presidential campaign was far from welcomed. Once Clinton fumed that they "were cramping his style with women" whom he sometimes met during his jogs alone. He had to sign a waiver if he wanted to be alone. Early in his administration, it was reported that Hillary threw a lamp at her husband, and the Clintons requested that the Secret Service detail be removed from their private living quarters.

Lewinsky's visits to the White House did not go unnoticed. Numerous Secret Service agents were aware of her numerous trips to the White House and more specifically to the West Wing on weekends. When subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury, the agents claimed objected, arguing that they should be immune from any testimony involving overheard conversations with Clinton. They shied away from publicity, believing that anonymity is important in performing their jobs.

Starr hoped to get crucial information from Larry Cockell, the head of Clinton's protective detail. Lewis Merletti, the director of the Secret Service, argued that the president would distance himself from his bodyguards -- putting his life in danger -- if Secret Service employees were compelled to testify about his private life.

The Justice Department immediately responded with an emergency petition forwarded to Chief Justice William Rehnquist. The sealed petition asked Rehnquist to delay any testimony by Secret Service officials until the full court considered the administration's appeal. The next day Rehnquist replied and stated that he would not block the subpoenas of the Secret Service agents, but he left open the possibility that the Supreme Court may hear the case in the future. Republicans were quick to praise Rehnquist's decision. Newt Gingrich stated, "We do not have an emperor. We do not have a Praetorian Guard." Orrin Hatch, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said that the Secret Service and the Justice Department had jeopardized their cause by seeking a broad privilege for the agents.

Nine agents testified by July 1998. Larry Cockell, the agent in charge of the presidential detail, along with other agents he supervised who guard Clinton, were subpoenaed to appear before the federal grand jury. Starr's office questioned more than 20 agents about 37 of Lewinsky's visits to the White House after she was reassigned to the Pentagon. Starr called agents John Kelleher, the chief counsel of the Secret Service, and Gary Byrne and Brian Henderson, both uniformed officers. The special prosecutor wanted to know whether the uniformed officers discussed anything about Lewinsky with Kelleher. In the spring of 1996 Byrne reportedly informed Evelyn Lieberman that he had seen Lewinsky in the West Wing when he did not believe she was authorized to be there. Lieberman said that Lewinsky was transferred to the Pentagon and removed from her White House job because of "immature and inappropriate behavior." Starr immediately summoned the six agents, including Cockell again, to appear on that same day. However, Starr had no guarantee that whether they would provide evidence damaging or helpful to Clinton. The Secret Service said that no agents had seen the president do anything improper. Despite the fact the agents were reluctant to testify, they intended to answer all questions truthfully, except for any that intruded on what they overheard of conversations between the president and his lawyers, or national security matters.

Part of the testimony of two other Secret Service agents contradicted each other. John Muskett was stationed outside the Oval Office. a phone call came in for Clinton, but he did not respond and Muskett could not locate him. Muskett, Byrne, and Ickes knocked on the Oval Office door and again there was no response. Then they went to Clinton's private study, knocked on the door, and entered the room. Muskett told DOJ investigators that he saw Lewinsky emerge from the room where Clinton was. However, Byrne told a different story -- that he saw Lewinsky's head in Clinton's lap. Finally, Ickes stated that he did not recall what he had seen.

Secret Service agent Fox testified that he frequently saw Lewinsky in the West Wing on weekends. Agent William Ludke said that he once saw Lewinsky exit from the pantry near the Oval Office. He testified that she appeared startled and embarrassed to be seen by him. Agent William Bordley said that he once escorted Lewinsky into the Oval Office and saw her leave half an hour later. Agent Robert Ferguson testified that on a Saturday, Lewinsky appeared outside the Oval Office and said "the president needs me." Once inside the office, Lewinsky and Clinton were seen by him going through the door leading to his private study.

Several Secret Service agents testified that they observed Clinton frequently entered the Oval Office soon after Lewinsky arrived in the West Wing. Then he left for his private residence soon after her departure. They noted that Lewinsky's visits were usually on weekends. Concerned about her numerous appearances in the West Wing, one agent suggested that Lewinsky be banned from entering the White House.

Clinton's personal secretary, Betty Currie, was frequently a few feet away from the president when he and Lewinsky were alone on several occasions. Office visitors had to pass in order to enter the Oval Office. Records indicated that she logged in Lewinsky for a majority of her 37 visits to the White House after she stopped working there in April 1996. Currie also helped Lewinsky in her job search in December 1997 and January 1998. After leaving the White House as an intern, Lewinsky logged in to the White House on 37 occasions. According to Tripp, Currie arranged for Lewinsky's visits at 7 p.m. on Tuesdays when aide Susan Hernreich, an outspoken critic of Lewinsky, was at her yoga class.

Currie testified that she believed something was probably improper occurring in the Oval Office, but she did not want to know the details. She said, "I didn't want to know anything or be able to say I knew anything."

Lewinsky testified that she frequently called Currie in order to arrange for meetings with Clinton. Currie would usually be the one to authorize Lewinsky's entry into the White House and would take her to the West Wing. Lewinsky sent "six or eight" packages to Currie between October 7 and December 8. Currie signed for them and feeling that they were personal, she would leave them in the president's box. Currie helped to keep the Clinton-Lewinsky relationship secret. When Clinton wanted to talk with the intern, the president’s secretary would dial the call herself rather than to go through the White House operator who would record the phone number. Currie also testified that she occasionally attempted to persuade Secret Service agents to admit Lewinsky into the White House without making a record of it. Many times when Lewinsky approached the West Wing, Currie chose a path which reduced the likelihood of being seen by White House employees.

Catherine Davis, a college friend of Lewinsky's, testified that she told her in the latter part of 1995 or early 1996 about her sexual relationship with Clinton. Neysa Erbland, a high school friend, testified that on November 23, 1995 Lewinsky told her a similar story. Ashley Raines worked with Lewinsky in the White House Office of Policy Development Operations, and she also testified that Lewinsky had spoken of her relationship with Clinton and that it included oral sex. Dr. Irene Kassorla, a counselor to Lewinsky from 1992 to 1997, spoke of Lewinsky's conversations with her where she boasted of having sexual encounters with the president. Debra Finerman, the aunt of Lewinsky, testified that Monica had told her of their sexual encounters. a family friend, Dale Young, testified that Lewinsky told her that she had engaged in oral sex with Clinton. Kathleen Estep, a counselor for Lewinsky, was told of her sexual relations with the president.

STARR'S THREE MAJOR VICTORIES INVOLVING PRIVILEGE CLAIMS. In the spring and summer of 1998, Starr won three major privilege claims. His first major victory in the courts dealt with attorney-client privilege. In February 1998 Starr subpoenaed White House counsel Bruce Lindsey, the president's closest aide, to testify about conversations which he had with Clinton about Lewinsky. Later White House senior communications aide Sidney Blumenthal and White House lawyer Lanny Breuer were subpoenaed to appear before the grand jury. The court rulings on the last-ditch effort to block Lindsey's testimony left open the possibility that Breuer could also refuse to answer questions on the grounds of attorney-client privilege, as Lindsey had claimed. The Clinton administration fought back and attempted to block Starr's efforts to question them regarding the president's relationship with Lewinsky. The Clinton team, claiming attorney-client privilege, appealed to the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals.

The court ruled against Clinton, saying that attorney-client privilege could not prevent a government lawyer from testifying in a criminal investigation. Clinton's attorneys immediately appealed to the Supreme Court. However, Rehnquist refused to postpone the appeals court ruling, thereby clearing the way for Starr to question Lindsey. Rehnquist handled emergency matters from the District of Columbia for the Supreme Court. The White House had the option of seeking help from any of the other eight justices, but officials dropped the effort for the emergency stay and instead focused on the appeal.

The special prosecutor's second victory in regard to privilege claims dealt with executive privilege. When several presidential aides claimed executive privilege, Starr appealed to District Court Judge Norma Holloway Johnson who oversaw the Washington D.C. grand jury. He convinced her that he had a sufficient showing of evidence to over-ride the White House's claim of executive privilege. Therefore, White House advisers, including Blumenthal, were compelled to testify before the grand jury.

In July 1998, Starr won a major court victory regarding privilege claims and the Secret Service. a three-judge panel from the appeals court unanimously rejected the administration's argument that Secret Service agents should be entitled to this privilege. In response, the administration filed a sealed motion for a protective order that would block the testimony of any agents while the Justice Department pursued a further appeal of its contention that the agents should not be compelled to testify. Reno filed a brief arguing that the full Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia should review the issue. The appeals court responded the next day. All nine judges on the unanimously rejected her last-minute request to block their testimony.

Despite several key victories in July and August for Starr's office, the special prosecutor was accused of possibly leaking testimony to journalists. Judge Johnson said that Starr may have broken the ethical code governing criminal investigations. Earlier in June Clinton's lawyers compiled a persuasive list of potential violations by Starr's office, and she ruled the next month that Starr's office carried the burden of proof. Johnson stated that Starr had to demonstrate his office's innocence in a hearing to avoid contempt citations and possible penalties. Starr appealed aspects of the ruling, delaying the hearing. Starr repeatedly denied that his office illegally slipped grand jury secrets to reporters. Dozens of members of his office submitted affidavits to the judge declaring that they had not disclosed any protected information cited in a laundry list of news articles and broadcasts compiled in February by David Kendall, the president's personal lawyer. Starr indicated that he would provide the court with evidence to assure it "that we are committed to an investigation that is conducted thoroughly, fairly, professionally, and in full compliance with the rule of law."

LEWSINSKY'S GRAND JURY TESTIMONY. On July 28, Starr chose to grant Lewinsky transactional immunity. This provided her with full protection from prosecution over any subject about which she testified. She could have been charged only if prosecutors believed that she was committing perjury by failing to testify fully and truthfully. This, in turn, gave more credibility to the appeal in the case of Jones whose attorneys said that Clinton's behavior with Lewinsky indicated a habit of making aggressive sexual advances to young, low ranking government employees.

In early Augus,t and just nine days after receiving immunity, Lewinsky appeared before the Washington D.C. grand jury. Her testimony contradicted Clinton's previous sworn statement in the Jones case and consequently tightened the legal and political vise around Clinton. In addition, on several occasions Clinton had denied having sexual relations with Lewinsky in televised addresses to the American people. Lewinsky testified to having had approximately 12 "special sexual encounters" with Clinton over a period of 18 months. She claimed that they took place in his small, private study near the Oval Office. Lewinsky also testified that she and the president had talked about ways to conceal their relationship, but she also said that said he never directly told her to lie under oath.

CLINTON'S GRAND JURY TESTIMONY. Events continued to unravel rapidly in the high stakes game between Starr and Clinton. Kendall was still clinging to the hope that the independent counsel would conclude that he lacked the authority to compel Clinton to testify. However, on July 17 and unknown to the public at the time, Starr quietly subpoenaed the president. This showed that the special prosecutor was ready to provoke a constitutional crisis if challenged by the president. In most cases, the client would invoke the Fifth Amendment. However, Clinton believed that his refusal to testify would be an admission of guilt. He knew that by claiming executive privilege, it would look Nixonian, and he would also likely lose in the courts.

Eight days later on July 25 Kendall told Starr that the president would voluntarily testify, if he would withdraw the subpoena. Clinton agreed to answer questions on closed circuit television in the White House where he had given sworn testimony several times in the past.

After seven months of bobbing and weaving around questions about his relationship with Lewinsky, Clinton finally answered questions from Starr's team for nearly five hours on August 17. The grand jury sat 13 blocks away and listened to the testimony on closed circuit television in the federal courtroom of Judge Johnson. Starr himself asked just two questions and left the bulk of interrogation to deputies Jackie Bennett, Solomon Wisenberg and Robert Bittman, and associate independent counsel Michael Emmick. Clinton sat near attorneys Kendall, Ruff, and Nicole Seligman.

Clinton first read a prepared statement to grand jurors describing his physical contacts with Lewinsky. He detailed some times and places where they met, but these times and dates cited may not have matched other evidence or testimony. However, he deflected questions posed by Starr and prosecutors about the details of such encounters. Clinton refused to give detailed answers to approximately a dozen questions which involved sexual relations with Lewinsky. He claimed that they were too graphic and intrusive. By answering these questions specifically, the president easily could have contradicted his testimony in the Jones deposition. Clinton's response to such questions about the specifics of his sexual relations was that they involved private matters which were highly intrusive. He did insist, that his sworn deposition in the Jones lawsuit, he was "legally correct" when he denied having sexual relations with Lewinsky. It was reported that Clinton's legal strategy was centered around using a loophole in the definition of "sexual relations" used during the Jones deposition, maintaining that it did not appear to include having oral sex performed on him. Thus, Clinton attempted to avoid a trap which would have caught him in a lie. Now Starr's role was to decide whether Clinton may have perjured himself before the grand jury.

Prosecutors also asked Clinton if he deliberately wore a necktie, given to him by Lewinsky, during a Rose Garden appearance on the day that Lewinsky first testified before the grand jury. Clinton said he did not believe the gold and royal blue tie was a gift from her. He was then informed she had testified she gave it to him, and the prosecutors asked if he had worn it that day as some kind of a "signal" to her, perhaps to influence her testimony. Once again Clinton said that he could not remember if the tie came from her. However, he insisted that he had no intention of sending Lewinsky any kind of message that day. Since Lewinsky was already seated before the grand jury before Clinton made his first public appearance of the day, it would have been impossible for her to have seen the president on television.

Friends of Lewinsky said that she was devastated by Clinton's characterization of their relationship and felt that she and the president had a deeper bond with emotional ties. One friend said that when Lewinsky filed a sworn affidavit in January denying a sexual relationship, it was in an effort to protect Clinton. In Clinton's televised message, he did not speak to the pain everyone else has experienced in this,'' according to one of Lewinsky's friends, and therefore she felt that she had been betrayed by the president when it was reported that Clinton did not feel emotionally attached to her. Several journalists reported that Lewinsky initially kept quiet because she believed her relationship with Clinton might last beyond his second term.

The morning after Clinton's testimony, Starr subpoenaed Lewinsky to appear for a second time before the grand jury. This indicated that there may have been a conflict between the testimonies of Clinton and Lewinsky. Starr was determined to pit her testimony against Clinton's to see whether there were inconsistencies -- to draw distinctions between her testimony and that of the president. This testimony surrounding Clinton's gifts to Lewinsky was central -- and perhaps the most serious -- in the prosecutors' efforts to build a case that the president attempted to obstruct justice. The independent counsel attempted to pin Lewinsky down as to how she came to return gifts which Clinton gave her. The prosecutors were seeking to determine whether he instructed Lewinsky to turn the gifts over to Currie and not to give them to lawyers for Jones.

Starr later subpoenaed Morris and then Lindsey for the fourth time and the first time since the court of appeals rejected his claim of attorney-client privilege. Previously, Lindsey had refused to answer questions about conversations which he had with Jordan in attempting to find a job for Lewinsky. Additionally, Lindsey refused to disclose what he knew about Currie on the issues of the Clinton gifts and job seeking for the former intern.

CLINTON'S APOLOGIES. Later that evening, the president went on television to give a four minute address to the nation. Clinton said he "misled people" and "gave a false impression." However, he did not admit that he had lied. He merely described his relationship with Lewinsky as "wrong," never using the words "affair" or "sex." He offered no contrition to the American people and never even used the words "sorry" or "apology" Clinton did lash out against Starr, calling for a halt to the prolonged and expensive investigation. The president said, "I intend to reclaim my family life for my family. It's nobody's business but ours. Even presidents have private lives. It is time to stop the pursuit of personal destruction and the prying into private lives and get on with our national life." Clinton showed no contrition in his speech which was not received well by the American public. He knew that he had to show some contrition.

In Clinton's August 28 speech marking Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, the president "acknowledged that I made a mistake, said that I regretted it, asked to be forgiven, spent a lot of very valuable time with my family in the last couple of weeks and said I was going back to work. ... I read it the other day again, and I thought it was clear that I was expressing my profound regret to all who were hurt and to all who were involved, and my desire not to see any more people hurt by this process and caught up in it." Still Clinton never showed any remorse for what he had done.

While in Ireland, on September 4, Clinton once again stayed away from a formal apology. He said, "I've already said that I made a bad mistake, it was indefensible and I'm sorry about it. So I have nothing else to say except that I can't disagree with anyone else who wants to be critical of what I have already acknowledged was indefensible. ... But there's nothing that he or anyone else could say in a personally critical way that I -- that I don't imagine that I would disagree with, since I have already said it myself, to myself. And I'm very sorry about it. There's nothing else I could say."

At a September 9 fund-raiser in Florida, the president again refused to show contrition. He said, "I've done my best to be your friend. But I also let you down, and I let my family down, and I let this country down. But I'm trying to make it right. And I'm determined never to let anything like that happen again. ... So I ask for your understanding, for your forgiveness on this journey we're on. I hope this will be a time of reconciliation and healing and I hope that millions of families all over America are in a way growing stronger because of this." And at another Florida fund-raiser, he expressed, "I've tried to do a good job taking care of this country, even when I haven't taken such good care of myself and my family, my obligations. I hope that you and others I have injured will forgive me for the mistakes I've made."

It was not until Clinton's appearance at a White House prayer meeting on the same day that the Starr report was released on September 11 that he showed contrition for the first time. Yet he never admitted that he was guilty of breaking any laws. His "broken spirit" speech was one which his advisers had hoped he would have given a month earlier. It was too much, too late.

In two short weeks after the American embassy bombings in Kenja and Tanzania, the Clinton administration remarkably claimed that it had tracked to one of principle terrorists responsible for over 200 deaths. Ironically, this came just three days after Clinton's testimony to the grand jury. The commander-in-chief ordered approximately 75 Tomahawk cruise missile strikes at alleged terrorist targets in Afghanistan and Sudan. The strikes were launched from ships in the Arabian and Red Seas. No Americans died, and the Islamic press agency reported two dozen dead and hundreds injured. The targets were identified by Pentagon officials as an extensive terrorism training complex in Afghanistan, 94 miles south of Kabul, and a factory which the CIA insisted was used for manufacturing chemical weapons near Khartoum, Sudan. Clinton linked both sites to Osama bin Laden, the exiled Saudi multi-millionaire who was suspected in the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. In the 1980s the CIA used Khartoum used as a training site for terrorists -- which the Reagan administration named "freedom fighters" -- to fight the Soviet controlled government in Afghanistan. Only a few weeks after the bombings, Mohammed Saddiq Odeh was arrested and possibly coerced into a confession in Pakistan. He implicated bin Laden in the Kenya bombing.

Clinton presented several reasons for the strikes. He wanted to punish suspect and terrorist bin Laden who, he claimed, presented an imminent threat, quoting his pledge this week to wage a war in which Americans were "all targets." The president claimed "key terrorist leaders" were gathered at the compound in Afghanistan. Clinton said he had "convincing" intelligence that bin Laden's terrorist network was behind the embassy bombings. Additionally, he accused groups tied to bin Laden of numerous murderous attacks. Clinton also described this as an act of self-defense against imminent terrorist plots and of retribution for the bombings of the American embassies.

Bin Laden moved from Sudan to Afghanistan in 1996 and allegedly continued to support the Sudanese military-industrial complex which operated the Al-Shifa factory which was bombed. The White House claimed that it manufactured pharmaceuticals which produce the components for VX gas and other chemical weapons. The Sudanese insisted that the factory produced medicine. Previously, Sudan never issued visas to American journalists because the United States has declared it a terrorist state. The government televised extensive footage of dark brown ibuprofen bottles and veterinary stocks from the bombed-out factory. This forced the Clinton administration today to do what it previously insisted it could not -- release details of evidence that it contended proved the factory's connection to chemical weapons. Reports from the White House indicated that several months earlier, the United States covertly obtained a soil sample from the plant site, and it contained "fairly high amounts" of a chemical used to produce deadly VX nerve gas. However, the administration acknowledged for the first time that the plant did manufacture common medicines. State Department spokesperson James Foley said, "The facility very well may have been producing pharmaceuticals."

Shortly after the bombings of the two embassies in Africa, Pakistani officials picked up to suspects, a Sudanese and a Saudi. The Pakistani government was ready to turn them over to the United States, but then Clinton made the decision to launch cruise missiles into Afghanistan. Some went astray and landed in neighboring Pakistan. Outraged by the missile attacks, Pakistani authorities released the suspects.

Since the attacks came just three days after Clinton's acknowledgment to the grand jury and to the American public of his relationship with Lewinsky, the Republican leaders felt that it was not in their best interest to continue to hurl barbs at the president. Speaker Gingrich expressed firm support, and Majority Leader Lott, said, "Our response appears to be appropriate and just." Hatch also sided with the decision which Clinton made to launch the attacks.

However, others were more critical and reacted with skepticism, noting that the action followed by only three days Clinton's acknowledgment to the public and a grand jury of his relationship with Lewinsky. Senator Dan Coats of Indiana accusing Clinton of "lies and deceit and manipulations and deceptions" and that the president's record "raises into doubt everything he does and everything he says, and maybe even everything he doesn't do and doesn't say."

More criticism was directed at Clinton, Executive Order 12333, issued by President Ford in 1975, placed a ban on assassinations. The White House said that this order did not limit them on attacks at "infrastructure" targets rather than at individuals. The statement reads: "No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination." However, the order failed to address various key questions, including whether the ban was ever meant to apply to the leaders of terrorist organizations as well as heads of state or government. The Clinton administration maintained that it had latitude to strike back at terrorists. However, the president could not legally authorize military commandos or undercover agents to use deadly force against the leadership of an organization that has hurt or threatened Americans. A White House spokesperson justified the attacks by saying that a country has the fundamental right of national self-defense and that the United Nations charter endorses every nation's right to defend itself from attack. Additionally, the Clinton had to publicly acknowledge such attacks after they occurred in order to be held accountable. But the American people were never directly notified of numerous past incidents, including the numerous attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro as well as the murder of Chile president Salvador Allende and other world leaders who failed to cooperate with the American government.

redeeming social value under the public's right to know."

- Kenneth Starr, 1987, 60 Minutes interview

with Diane Sawyer.

• President Clinton lied under oath in his civil case when he denied a sexual affair, a sexual relationship, or sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky.

• The president lied under oath to the grand jury about his sexual relationship with Lewinsky.

• The president lied in the Jones civil deposition when he made a false statement about the sexual relationship. He also lied under oath about being alone with Lewinsky and about the many gifts exchanged between Lewinsky and him.

• The president lied under oath in his civil deposition about his discussions with Lewinsky concerning her involvement in the Jones case.

• During the Jones case, the president obstructed justice and had an understanding with Lewinsky to jointly conceal the truth about their relationship by concealing gifts subpoenaed by Jones's attorneys.

• During the Jones case, the president obstructed justice and had an understanding with Lewinsky to jointly conceal the truth of their relationship from the judicial process by a scheme that included the following means: (a) Both Clinton and Lewinsky understood that they would lie under oath in the Jones case about their sexual relationship; (b) Clinton suggested to Lewinsky that she prepare an affidavit that, for the president's purposes, would memorialize her testimony under oath and could be used to prevent questioning of both of them about their relationship; © Lewinsky signed and filed the false affidavit; (d) Clinton used Lewinsky's false affidavit at his deposition in an attempt to head off questions about Lewinsky; and (e) when that failed, Clinton lied under oath at his civil deposition about the relationship with Lewinsky.

• The president endeavored to obstruct justice by helping Lewinsky obtain a job in New York at a time when she would have been a witness harmful to him were she to tell the truth in the Jones case.

• The president lied under oath in his civil deposition about his discussions with Jordan concerning Lewinsky's involvement in the Jones case.

• The president improperly tampered with a potential witness by attempting to corruptly influence the testimony of Currie in the days after his civil deposition.

• The president endeavored to obstruct justice during the grand jury investigation by refusing to testify for seven months and lying to senior White House aides with knowledge that they would relay the president's false statements to the grand jury -- and did thereby deceive, obstruct, and impede the grand jury.

• The president abused his constitutional authority by: (a) lying to the public and the Congress in January 1998 about his relationship with Lewinsky; (b) promising at that time to cooperate fully with the grand jury investigation; © later refusing six invitations to testify voluntarily to the grand jury; (d) invoking executive privilege; (e) lying to the grand jury in August 1998; and (f) lying again to the public and Congress on August 17, 1998 -- all as part of an effort to hinder, impede, and deflect possible inquiry by Congress.