by Crisis of Character- A White House Secret Service Officer Discloses His Firsthand Experience
My neighbor was doing the same thing. He exclaimed, “Oh Gary, you’re so f—ed!” and issued a nervous laugh. I was speechless.
A Justice Department lawyer soon explained to me that his department technically hadn’t lied. Nobody technically lies in this game, it seems. The department didn’t release the tapes to the public, but it knew damn well that it was going to release all its evidence to Congress, and once Congress got its own hands on the evidence, it would release as much or as little of it as it pleased. Congress released our tapes and more than three thousand pages of the Starr investigation’s findings.
I wasn’t out of the grinder yet. The media wasn’t buzzing, it roared over every word. It was the ultimate game of he said/she said and fell right on American party lines. The Republican third of the country hated the Clintons, another third wasn’t sure, the Democratic third vehemently toed the Clinton line. Folks in the middle waited for the smoke to clear—but kept lapping it all up.
Nothing was more embarrassing for this nation than the release of the president’s grand jury testimony. Starr’s investigators asked him to corroborate—or contradict—the sworn, often protected-by-immunity testimony of Monica, presidential staff members, Secret Service agents, and UD officers like myself. But his lies—and his earlier actions—trapped him in a painful, steel-strong web. Not even his elaborate legal weaseling could free him. For hours on end, a weasel did what weasels do, but a man was nowhere to be found.
For weeks and months, pundits debated its significance. They parsed the words and counted up the damage. The cost to President Clinton was incalculable. His character was laid bare.
The questions were relevant, though embarrassing, and often, when you got down it, obscene. News anchors prefaced accounts of the event by warning viewers that some of the language used was sexual, graphic, and vulgar, and that kids shouldn’t watch. They kept saying it was “not for children” and “explicit.” The world was glued to their sets and salivating to the drama.
The president swore to “tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” so help him God. He swore. They reminded him of his oath immediately after he took it and reminded him of his responsibilities. They couldn’t have made it any clearer, but the independent counsel had to, because it was now President Bill Clinton’s testimony against himself and what he had sworn before, and the word of others, including myself. I wanted vindication. But I also wanted this to go away. All of the USSS was watching, too, and they knew my part. Many were still pissed off.
They asked the president if he’d been truthful before, and he said he had. He was obviously, awkwardly, and painfully weaseling through a series of lies. They moved on to Monica Lewinsky, asking if he had been “physically intimate” with her. If he had lied about her—and he had—they’d shake his credibility regarding the Paula Jones case, Whitewater, and just about anything else, really.
The president got ahead of the line of questioning and asked to read from a prepared statement of his relationship with “Ms. Lewinsky.” But right off the bat, he admitted that he had been alone with her on multiple occasions. One weight had been lifted from my shoulders and another had been placed on my chest. During this slow-motion train wreck, the president confirmed what I had said, that he had been alone with her, thereby contradicting his previous affidavit, the one he said was still somehow true. He then continued, saying he hadn’t lied because he thought when asked about “sexual relations” he interpreted that phrase as “sexual intercourse,” which he hadn’t had. It was a huge stretch only a weasel with a law degree could make.
“If Monica Lewinsky says that you used a cigar as a sexual aid with her in the Oval Office area, would she be lying? Yes, no, or won’t answer?”
“I will revert to my former statement.”
Unbelievable! This is the man I was protecting? That’s what I tolerated? I had tried and tried to prevent harm to this president, but he failed us all!
He and investigators tangled over the definition of “sexual” regarding intercourse. President Clinton introduced an entire generation to the concept of oral sex—and worse, provided them with rationalizations for risky behavior.
They asked him, “If Monica Lewinsky says that you had phone sex with her, would she be lying?”
He responded, “Well, that is—at least, in general terms, I think, is covered by my statement.…”
The lawyer, getting frustrated, went on: “Let me define phone sex for purposes of my question. Phone sex occurs when the party to the phone conversation masturbates while the other party is talking in a sexually explicit manner. The question is, if Monica Lewinsky says that you had phone sex with her, would she be lying?”
Jeez. That phone line was one of the reasons I had recommended to Evelyn Lieberman that Monica be transferred or moved, but I never knew what the hell she and the president did over that drop line!
The president again responded, “I think that is covered by my statement.”
They followed that with a discussion of how the president ensured that Monica had an employment payback for her past “services” and maybe even for her future silence about the whole mess. The country would later gain more details of how the president had approached his friend, the influential Washington power broker Vernon Jordan, to assist Monica in securing private-sector employment. Jordan, who served on the board of directors of Revlon cosmetics, pulled strings to see that Monica got a look-see there. He did the same with another corporation on whose board he served.
Jordan was the president’s pal, but he was no dummy. He was nervous about assisting Monica when she had been subpoenaed in the Paula Jones case, and he even quizzed Clinton on whether he’d had sex with Monica. The investigator brought that up. Clinton pathetically continued to bob and weave, obfuscating and deflecting left and right.
I heard them say:
QUESTION:… But isn’t that why Vernon Jordan asked you on December 19th whether or not you had sexual relationships with Monica Lewinsky and why he asked her, because he knew it would be so highly improper to be helping her with a lawyer and a job if, in fact, she had had a relationship with you?
CLINTON: I don’t know. I don’t believe that at all. I don’t believe that at all, particularly since, even if you look at the facts here in their light most unfavorable to me, no one has suggested that there was any sexual harassment on my part. And I don’t think it was wrong to be helping her.…
They went on to discuss gifts exchanged between Monica and the president, gifts swapped with Betty Currie as a conduit, gifts I knew of—and was extremely wary about.
He finessed his way through it all, playing the “I don’t recall” game. He played the same game when asked about how Betty and UD officers had inserted Betty’s name on their official visitors’ log when it was Monica who actually visited, so as not to betray the president. It was yet another obvious lie on his part. I knew that game. Everyone with eyes could see it.
He never recalled how she came to him with letters or papers. There was a back-and-forth on how the Clintons had garnered a lawyer for Monica so she could obfuscate matters and not implicate the president in his defense in Paula Jones’s civil sexual harassment case. They discussed how unethical that was, and that’s when the president had the nerve to blame the debacle on the information’s getting leaked, not that it actually happened.
Finally it came down to blaming Monica.
The president was on a roll, employing the most time-tested tactic from the Clinton Machine playbook:
“After I terminated the improper contact with her, she wanted to come in more than she did. She got angry when she didn’t get in sometimes. I knew that that might make her more likely to speak [to Paula Jones’s lawyers], and I still did it because I had to limit the contact. And thirdly, let me say, I formed an opinion really in early 1996, and again—well, let me finish the sentence. I formed an opinion early in 1996, once I got into this unfortunate and wrong conduct, that when I stopped it, which
I knew I’d have to do and which I should have done a long time before I did, that she would talk about it. Not because Monica Lewinsky is a bad person. She’s basically a good girl. She’s a good young woman with a good heart and a good mind. I think she is burdened by some unfortunate conditions of her, her upbringing. But she’s basically a good person. But I knew the minute there was no longer any contact, she would talk about this. She would have to. She couldn’t help it. It was, it was a part of her psyche. So, I had put myself at risk, sir. I was not trying to buy her silence. I thought she was a good person. She had not been involved with me for a long time in any improper way, several months, and I wanted to help her get on with her life. It’s just as simple as that.”
“It’s time for a break,” said his obviously frustrated interrogator.
The break failed to improve his memory. You had to wonder: If the man wasn’t president, how would he find his car keys in the morning?
Or maybe, as Nebraska senator Bob Kerrey, a Democrat, once observed of him, he was just “an unusually good liar. Unusually good.”*
The note about how Monica missed him that was in the book she gave him for Christmas—can’t recall. The conversations regarding her signing the affidavit—can’t remember. His conversations with Betty Currie—ditto. Weasel! He had no right to embarrass someone as dedicated to the country as Currie. He had no right to do this to me or the rest of us.
The deposition continued. They literally couldn’t agree on a definition of “alone,” as if his statements were just a form of miscommunication. Hey! There were other people on planet earth last night—so maybe I wasn’t alone with my wife.
It got worse, playing out on national television for all the world to see and devise its own judgments about. An attorney discussed with the president the semen on Monica’s dress and how he would touch her, “arouse” her, and “gratify” her.
The testimony grew even more contentious. I wanted to switch it off. I couldn’t. My head ached from all my head-shaking. On the screen before me they continued jousting regarding a conversation between the president and Betty that he told to jog his own memory, not to coach Betty, a potential witness, on what to say.
They discussed the president’s statement and the line of questioning’s scope, and how the investigation’s intention was not to embarrass the president and the office, but only to ask questions that pertained to his credibility and his perjury, and certainly not to delve into private details that would be kept for all of history and possibly released publicly.
That’s when the president really pissed me off by saying, “And, so, I think I am right to answer all the questions about perjury, but not to say things which will be forever in the annals of the United States because of this unprecedented videotape and may be leaked at any time. I just think it’s a mistake. And so, I’m doing my best to cooperate with the grand jury and still protect myself, my family, and my office.”
It was far too little, too late.
They asked him, “Well, the grand jury would like to know, Mr. President, why it is that you think that oral sex performed on you does not fall within the definition of sexual relations as used in this deposition?”
The weasel responded in a sweaty yet matter-of-fact way, “Because that is—if the deponent is the person who has oral sex performed on him, then the contact is with—not with anything on that list, but with the lips of another person. It seems to be self-evident that that’s what it is. And I thought it was curious—Let me remind you, sir, I read this carefully. And I thought about it. I thought about what ‘contact’ meant. I thought about what ‘intent to arouse or gratify’ meant. And I had to admit under this definition that I’d actually had sexual relations with Gennifer Flowers. Now, I would rather have taken a whipping than done that, after all the trouble I’d been through with Gennifer Flowers, and the money I knew that she made for the story she told about this alleged twelve-year affair, which we had done a great deal to disprove. So, I didn’t like any of this, but I had done my best to deal with it and the—that’s what I thought. And I think that’s what most people would think, reading that.”
What the hell does that even mean? Only the most lawyerly of weasels or the most weaselly of lawyers could concoct something so insane. This was our president. Still the suffering continued. Each awkward minute of this embarrassing back-and-forth mattered deeply to me. How hard we trained, how particularly we UD agents were selected to be “worthy of trust and confidence” was completely thrown away in his service.
Then things really got heated. The president tried employing his classic charm, but now it seemed more like venom than honey. Shifting sideways and forward and back, he two-stepped around each word and its definable wiggle room to lie some more, creating as much doubt as anyone might dare.
“Well, you’re not telling our grand jurors that you think the case was a political case for setup, Mr. President, that that would give you the right to commit perjury?” the lawyer asked.
“No, sir. No, sir. In the face of their—the Jones’s lawyers—the people that were questioning me, in the face of their illegal leaks, their constant unrelenting illegal leaks, in a lawsuit that I knew—and that by the time that this deposition and this discovery started, they knew—was a bogus suit on the law and bogus suit on the facts.”
He went on, “In the face of that, I know that in the face of their illegal activity, I still had to behave lawfully. But I wanted to be legal without being particularly helpful. I thought that was what I was trying to do. And this is the—you’re the first person to ever suggest to me that I should have been doing their lawyers’ work for them when they were perfectly free to ask follow-up questions. On one or two occasions, Mr. [Clinton lawyer Bob] Bennett invited them to ask follow-up questions. It now appears to me they didn’t because they were afraid I would give them a truthful answer, and that they had been in some communication between you and Ms. Tripp and them. And they were trying to set me up and trick me. And now you seem to be complaining that they didn’t do a good enough job. I did my best, sir, at this time. I did not know what I now know about this. A lot of other things were going on in my life. Did I want this to come out? No. Was I embarrassed about it? Yes. Did I ask her to lie about it? No. Did I believe there could be a truthful affidavit? Absolutely…”
Again he was caught in another lie of his own making! I wondered if this was how I looked when I gave my statement, but then again I knew how I looked—I saw it on C-SPAN. I didn’t weasel; I followed the rules that had been laid out for me by the Secret Service, the Justice Department, and my lawyers. It was simple: I didn’t weasel. Until Chief Justice Rehnquist gave me permission I followed the rules that had been laid out for me by the Secret Service, the Justice Department, and my lawyers. It was why I had to preface so much with “Without revealing any privileged information, on the advice of my counsel…” But the president admitted that he lied only to save face. Investigators caught him on it.
“You’re not going back on your earlier statement that you understood you were sworn to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth to the folks at that deposition, are you, Mr. President?” the lawyer asked.
I remember thinking, Don’t help him; don’t feed his statements. Cut him down! The president went on treading his own legal minefield as if he forgot where he placed the mines. He babbled on about how he deplored how Ken Starr and Paula Jones’s lawyers, funded by his “political enemies,” were trying to gather intel and then illegally leak it against him. In reality, it was Linda Tripp, his own former White House employee, who despised him for who he really was, who trapped him. It was Monica, his cohort, his mistress, who couldn’t keep her mouth shut and made Tripp’s involvement possible. How was this president so different from Richard Nixon when Nixon arrogantly claimed, “I’m saying when the president does something, it’s not illegal”?
I watched Clinton continue: “So I will admit this, sir. My goal in this deposition was to be truthful, but no
t particularly helpful.…”
Oaths such as “the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God,” it was clear to me, meant as much as “shall not be infringed,” or “swear to uphold and defend,” among others. For men of character, life is very simple. It’s best to keep it that way. But clearly for the guy I was watching on television, life was just a sharp answer to woo a voter. Bill Clinton thought he had all the answers. But he never even understood the real questions in life.
I watched the rest of his proceedings in pieces, not being able to stand the deposition for more than a few minutes at a time. It was an embarrassment to me and the nation.
Later I watched it again, and that time I noticed how they discussed the witness list in the Paula Jones case and when the president had seen Monica’s name on it. This was a part of the story I hadn’t known about. I wasn’t privy to such things.
That was December 6, 1997. And it was a date I knew very well but not because of Paula Jones, but because that was the day Betty Currie stalled Monica at the Northwest Gate.
Ken Starr’s investigator continued: “Now, on the morning of the sixth [of December], Monica Lewinsky came to the NW gate and found that you were being visited by Eleanor Mondale at the same time and had an extremely angry reaction. You know that, sir, don’t you?”
Holy shit. He was screwing with Eleanor in the Oval Office on that same day, the same day that the witness list for Paula Jones came out! You couldn’t write this shit, I’ve always said, because these people were frankly so g-ddamn unprofessional.
Clinton responded flatly, “I know that,” but underneath his cool demeanor I saw he was seething.
Bottom line, he couldn’t keep his mistresses, where he saw them, and how he communicated with them, straight. I burst out laughing.