Crisis of Character: A White House Secret Service Officer Discloses His Firsthand Experience with Hillary, Bill, and How They Operate

by Crisis of Character- A White House Secret Service Officer Discloses His Firsthand Experience

  An attorney halted the proceedings. “I’m going to ask you to stop at this point and maybe ask you to step outside. Have you discussed this incident with your attorneys?”

  “Yep,” I said quickly.

  “You have? Have they discussed privileges with you?” she inquired unemotionally.

  “Yes. And that’s probably as far as I can go. Yeah. So… that’s what they decided I could talk about.”

  We all started to begin every sentence by saying, “Without revealing any privileged information…”

  I testified that the incident had traveled up the chain of command to the sergeant and the watch commander. I informed them that even in discussing the incident among ourselves within UD, we remained circumspect. An attorney asked why. The real answer, which I also couldn’t say, was to save ourselves from being dragged through the mud like this. The less you knew, the safer you were. Not to mention, we simply feared the Clintons.

  They asked me to disclose the name of the officer who told me the story of Monica at the Northwest Gate, they wanted me to corroborate, and I hated those attorneys for it. I told them that we officers recognized we had made a mistake even discussing it, but I had put the snare on myself. We had discussed the story because we were tired, wound up, overworked, and frustrated at the corruption and the bullshit. We hated hanging tight and wading through the new culture that consumed the White House. We knew not to talk about that stuff, because it could implicate us in a legal fray. I was compelled to tell the truth, but why the hell was neither the president nor Mrs. Clinton ever really compelled to tell the damn truth? We had to get dragged through their mud for this. I didn’t want to put another officer in the hot seat.

  “Who was this?” asked the attorney.

  “Do you—is it important? Do you need to know? I’d hate to disclose his name and—I mean, is it that important to you?” I asked. I pleaded.

  He snapped back at me, unequivocally, “Yes.”

  “I know for a fact you’ve already talked to him about it.… I know we made a mistake and I, I prompted this onto him. We made a mistake. I do realize it’s clear that you did need to know this but…”

  I told him who it was. My fellow officer would be dragged back in to their damn office to be cross-examined yet again over the excruciatingly fine details. I was pissed at myself. It was all because of Monica. No, it was all because of Bill and Mrs. Clinton and the way they governed.

  They asked me another question. I told them I needed to step outside.

  Out in the corridor, I got my head straight. I returned and they asked me a few more questions, and I invoked privilege. Their attorney feared that they had pressed me too far and worried that I’d now stonewall behind privilege and foggy memory.

  We took another break.

  Many a time in my preceding interviews, I’d asked, “The director [of the Secret Service] isn’t going to see this, right?” or “You guys aren’t going to release this deposition to the public, are you?” I was being asked to provide very sensitive information pertinent to some higher-ups’ careers. Some officers even had to divulge affairs not related to the president, snaring them into disclosing which directors or chiefs were having affairs with which staffers. It was all very bad. The stories got leaked to the press, and things got ugly for them. Again, lawyers conducting my depositions reassured me they wouldn’t release my testimony, as the other lawyers did to other witnesses. It’s what they told us all, those Justice Department and FBI bastards.

  Not long after my video deposition, I was talking to a Secret Service colleague who worked the West Wing Lobby. He had just resumed his shift after returning from his own testimony. The president had just visited him. That was extremely suspicious—my associate was spooked.

  “He just came out and came straight up to me like—like he was looking for me. Yeah, and he asked how I was by name. We chatted—like small talk—like normal. And then he asked how my wife and kids were.… We’ve never actually talked before.”

  Nothing about that was normal. It was obviously a subtle form of intimidation. The president was sending a message that he knew of the officer’s recent testimony—and perhaps was sending an even more sinister message. I certainly was glad to be at JJRTC, away from them. It was all so wild, so bizarre. Prior to that, the president didn’t seem to know my fellow officer by name. Someone—most likely the president’s attorneys—advised him to make small talk immediately after the officer testified. The president’s little “hint” spooked both of us. It confirmed to me what I suspected: That was indeed how they operated.

  It was reminiscent of the stories we had heard of some of the women who alleged that the president, while governor, had either raped or sexually assaulted them. In one of the stories Mrs. Clinton had homed in on the alleged victim, despite having never met her beforehand, just as the president zeroed in on the West Wing Lobby officer. I was glad to be at JJRTC, but I feared that I was not far enough away.

  Our Secret Service attorneys reassured us that our video depositions were supposed to be in lieu of actual in-person testimony. But that was never Starr’s intention, and two weeks later Starr summoned us back to the courtroom for us to testify in person. It was insurmountably stressful. I remember the feeling of being trapped or drowning.

  I, along with my fellow Secret Service staff, was still caught in the legal tug-of-war between the Treasury Department/Secret Service, who claimed protective privilege, and Ken Starr, who said that was pure hogwash. Not surprisingly, neither side would budge, and the issue went to court. In May 1998 Judge Norma Holloway Johnson (a Jimmy Carter appointee) sided with Starr, who said that USSS agents and UD officers could testify. The Treasury Department/Secret Service appealed. In early July 1998, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit unanimously sustained that opinion. The Treasury Department/Secret Service appealed again, this time all the way up to the United States Supreme Court. Now it was getting interesting.

  Particularly for me.

  Starr had already scheduled my appearance before the Whitewater grand jury.* But what was I free to say in front of it? Should I obey my bosses, who wanted everything hushed up? Or the appeals court, who wanted me to talk? If I listened to the appeals court and the Supreme Court ultimately ruled against it, I’d really be hung out to dry. Mark advised me to obey the law, tell the truth—and definitely not to “fall on my sword” for either Bill’s or Monica’s misdeeds.

  Just as in the old Gary Cooper movie, the shoot-out would occur at high noon—or, at least, that was the deadline on July 18, 1998, by which the U.S. Supreme Court had to decide whether to take up the Treasury Department’s appeal or to let the federal appeals court ruling stand—and allow me to testify.

  The clock ticked.

  Just four minutes before noon, word arrived from the Supreme Court: Chief Justice William Rehnquist had ruled. The Supreme Court would not grant the Justice Department’s appeal. The D.C. appeals court ruling held. The Presidential Protective Function Privilege was bogus.

  I could testify.

  But to whom? The normal audience before whom I would testify—Starr’s Whitewater grand jury—had been excused for a few days. I was sitting in the federal courthouse. They weren’t. Starr grabbed another grand jury, completely unrelated to that one, from down the hall. I would testify before them.

  The games would begin.

  Another atmosphere of high drama, near panic, filled the room. It certainly consumed me. I was a wreck. In the past two weeks I’d gotten only three hours’ sleep—three hours! I would run for seven miles a day trying to exhaust myself into some sleep. It never worked. I never slept.

  I wanted to throw up. Reaching for a wastebasket to heave in, I struggled not to barf on a U.S. marshal. They hustled me out of the grand jury room.

  I made it to the men’s room just in time.

  My grand jury testimony warred against everything that I believed in—and even against myself. No matter what I did, I could not e
scape a dreadful feeling of betraying someone or something: my fellow servicemen, my protectees, the protectee, and even my previous testimony! I’ve all but blacked it out of my mind, except for the horrible feeling of dread.

  We servicemen completed our highly constrained testimony and waited for the other dominoes to fall.

  Following a week of legal debriefing and further BS, I returned to my post at JJRTC’s security unit. It was time to work on my career goal of becoming an instructor.

  I kept checking in with my supervisor on my application to become an instructor. I wanted to teach others how to protect innocent lives and to halt bad guys.

  When an instructor spot opened, however, I was repeatedly denied an opportunity even to test for it. I finally pressed my supervisor. Initially, she had trouble looking me in the eye. Then she sighed, folded her arms, and looked me straight in the eye. “Gary, I keep sending up the paperwork, but honestly, higher up the chain your name is mud. They all know who you are.”

  I wanted to scream. Long story short: I decided to short-circuit the chain of command by approaching someone I knew could help. He was as outraged as I was.

  “I’m not asking that you give me the position,” I told him. “Just give me the same chance as everyone else. Let me take the tests.”

  He agreed, and against the wishes of the higher-ups who had blackballed me I was allowed to test.

  Meanwhile, the Starr investigation played out sordidly. Only half its drama, my part, transpired behind closed doors. The rest unraveled in full public view. The Clintons kept burrowing. Starr kept digging after them the way a dog digs a fox from its den. But I was ready to put the events of my Oval Office posting behind me and launch a new life of teaching men and women of character, bright apples picked right off the tree, how to defend not only their lives but the lives of others. I had a wonderful wife—and a healthy newborn baby girl. She was the great gift of our lives, a little ball of joy. We had survived the Clintons’ hell and achieved something so victorious and so grand, our little firstborn, our baby girl.

  I so much wanted to get on with the rest of the American dream.

  On Monday afternoon, August 17, 1998, while still at the White House, President Bill Clinton became the first president to appear before a grand jury and testify regarding his own actions. It was videotaped just the way ours was, but he also appeared “live” (though remotely) to that grand jury via closed-circuit TV. Now he was cornered and finally had to pay the piper—or at least tell some portion of the truth. We all held our breath.

  That night he spoke via television to the entire nation, furiously trying to stay ahead of the shit storm he himself had created when, on Saturday, January 27, he made a demonstratively false sworn statement—outright perjury—that the allegations about him and Monica Lewinsky were false.

  He said emphatically and fervently, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky.” It was his word against ours with a titillated world watching. Only because of Linda Tripp, Monica Lewinsky’s infamous blue dress, and Ken Starr could the truth set us all free.

  Genny and I watched the president’s four-minute performance as if it were a made-for-TV movie, albeit begrudgingly. It took our beautiful baby girl’s hooting and hollering to break our stunned silence. That morning the president had presented his version of events to the Starr grand jury. We had stared at our TV as the president had commenced. He blinked twice. Someone behind the camera had delayed a few seconds too long to give him the wave signaling that they were on-air. It was a long, awkward, nail-biting two seconds.

  “Good evening,” he began. “This afternoon in this room, from this chair, I testified before the Office of Independent Counsel and the grand jury. I answered their questions truthfully, including questions about my private life, questions no American citizen would ever want to answer. Still, I must take complete responsibility for all my actions, both public and private. And that is why I am speaking to you tonight. As you know, in a deposition in January, I was asked questions about my relationship with Monica Lewinsky. While my answers were legally accurate, I did not volunteer information.

  “Indeed, I did have a relationship with Miss Lewinsky that was not appropriate. In fact, it was wrong. It constituted a critical lapse in judgment and a personal failure on my part for which I am solely and completely responsible. But I told the grand jury today and I say to you now that at no time did I ask anyone to lie, to hide or destroy evidence or to take any other unlawful action. I know that my public comments and my silence about this matter gave a false impression. I misled people, including even my wife. I deeply regret that. I can only tell you I was motivated by many factors. First, by a desire to protect myself from the embarrassment of my own conduct. I was also very concerned about protecting my family.”

  The camera slowly zoomed in. I wondered why. Was the president poised to say something dramatic?

  Nope. Just more bull.

  “The fact that these questions were being asked in a politically inspired lawsuit, which has since been dismissed, was a consideration, too.”

  To which lawsuit was he referring? Whitewater? Paula Jones? Dismissed? His misconduct never was. He was deflecting from the real issue: his character and his lies.

  He continued. “In addition, I had real and serious concerns about an independent counsel investigation that began with private business dealings twenty years ago, dealings I might add about which an independent federal agency found no evidence of any wrongdoing by me or my wife over two years ago. The independent counsel investigation moved on to my staff and friends, then into my private life. And now the investigation itself is under investigation. This has gone on too long, cost too much, and hurt too many innocent people. Now, this matter is between me, the two people I love most—my wife and our daughter—and our God. I must put it right, and I am prepared to do whatever it takes to do so. Nothing is more important to me personally. But it is private, and 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. Our country has been distracted by this matter for too long, and I take my responsibility for my part in all of this. That is all I can do. It is past time to move on. We have important work to do—real opportunities to seize, real problems to solve, real security matters to face. And so tonight, I ask you to turn away from the spectacle of the past seven months, to repair the fabric of our national discourse, and to return our attention to all the challenges and all the promise of the next American century. Thank you for watching. And good night.”

  My heart started to climb down to a normal beat. I rubbed my eyes and patted Homer. My wife turned to me and I to her. I so hoped we could now move on. I didn’t want to see Secret Service guard Gary Byrne in the newspaper anymore, that was for damned sure.

  We cleaned up the kitchen and made ready to start the day early tomorrow. I considered going out for another run to cool my nerves. We didn’t know what he had said in the testimony, but later as I lay in bed, trying to translate the president’s highly crafted words, I realized a few things—and I was pissed.

  As I listened to his cunning, scripted message, I became even angrier. He never apologized to us. He never apologized for putting us in that position. He lied out of both ends of his mouth, blaming the Secret Service while saying he wanted to be forthcoming but couldn’t—two lies in one! He and his staff created the Protective Function Privilege. He was the one who did the deed, committed the misconduct. He was the one who lied. Not only did he never apologize for costing the taxpayers, the Justice Department, the Secret Service, his staff, his constituents, or anyone for putting them through the ringer, endangering our careers, and our very lives. He wanted us to believe that he was sorry for embarrassing his family, Chelsea and Hillary. (I can understand about Chelsea.)

  In typical Billary fashion, they claimed they hadn’t crea
ted the problem. The media had, the Republicans, the lawyers—anyone but them. He was sorry, he said.

  I couldn’t stand it anymore.

  I grew angrier, got out of bed, and went out for a run. I just hoped the president was right: I hoped it was time to get back to work. But why should any of his lies be different from the others?

  August turned into September. Genny and I were still living in “the shitbox,” a run-down rental home that sheltered us as we awaited the building of our new home. While driving there one day, I received a call from former UD colleague Sandy.

  “Byrne,” I said. Cops answer phones like cops even when they’re home.

  “They f—d us, Gary! They f—ed us!”

  “Whoa, whoa. Calm down. Who f—ed us? What are—?”

  “I can’t believe it! I can’t believe it! Are you watching? They f—ed us, Gary! They released the g-ddamn tapes! Our depositions are playing on the damn television. We’re all over the g-ddamn news! They’re showing our faces!”

  She kept repeating herself frantically and angrily.

  Get a call like that, and your mind races. Her voice resembled the intonation of a fellow officer calling for backup, one hand on the walkie-talkie, one on a drawn gun. Sandy sounded just like the K-9 officer who had called for backup when I had hopped the barricade and raced across the park to assist her against that knife-wielding suspect. But Sandy’s trouble—and mine—was on television screens nationwide, on every news channel. I raced home and told Genny about it.

  A neighbor appeared at our door. “Hey, Gary.” He saw my expression, my nervous attitude.

  I asked, “Everything okay?”

  “Something’s going on. Do you have cable?”

  We didn’t. He nodded. He led me down to his half-finished basement. His kids were watching cartoons and playing with race cars and Barbie dolls. I grabbed the remote and started flipping through channels.

  There was C-SPAN. And there I was on it. This was only the second time I had seen my video deposition. The first was during my testimony when I’d been asked to confirm my testimony. But there I was on TV. I remember thinking, The Justice Department and the FBI did f—us! My neighbor’s kids stopped pleading for their cartoons and sat speechless. They looked at the TV, the man on it, and then back at me, back and forth.