by Roger Stone
The mainstream media refused to cover Perdue during the 1992 campaign and also neglected the campaign waged against her. They did not cover the illegal $60,000 bribe offered to her by Ron Tucker. Perdue had interviews taped with ABC, NBC, and Sally Jesse Raphael, but none of them went to air. They were shelved by the networks.78
CHAPTER 5
ATTACK IN THE OVAL OFFICE
“[Hillary] is the war on women, as far as I’m concerned, because with every woman that she’s found out about—and she made it a point to find out who every woman had been that’s crossed his path over the years—she’s orchestrated a terror campaign against every one of these women, including me.”
—Kathleen Willey79
In 1993, Kathleen Willey was a volunteer in the White House Social Office in the Clinton administration. By the fall of 1993, her husband, Ed, a prominent lawyer and Democratic fundraiser, was in deep financial straits. He had stolen from his clients and was in a deep tax debt.
Willey, who had met Bill Clinton during the 1992 presidential campaign, asked for an appointment to see the president. Due to her husband’s financial turmoil, Willey was seeking a paid full-time salary with the White House. The appointment took place on November 29, 1993, in the Oval Office.
Shortly after Willey arrived, Clinton suggested they get some coffee in the mini-kitchen and move to his study. The mini-kitchen was a side room where, due to its private nature, generations of presidents have engaged in amorous affairs; a sharp contrast to the large open space and prominent windows of the Oval Office. Monica Lewinsky would later remember that Clinton would use the sink in the mini-kitchen as a place to masturbate and spray his ejaculate.
Willey told Clinton about her financial woes and desperate need of a paying job. During her plea, presidential aide Andrew Friendly began knocking on the door of the Oval Office, loudly informing Clinton that he was late for his next meeting. Pressured for time, the president became more aggressive.
Clinton gave Willey a hug. The embrace lasted too long. He then started running his hands through her hair and on her neck.
The six-foot-two, two-hundred-twenty-five-pound Clinton was much bigger and stronger than the petite Willey, who stood almost a foot shorter and weighed a hundred pounds less.
“I’ve wanted to do this since the first time I laid eyes on you,” the president said as his face reddened.
“Then he took my hand,” Willey remembered. “I didn’t understand what he was doing. The president put my hand on his genitals, on his erect penis. I was shocked! I yanked my hand away but he was forceful. He ran his hands all over me, touching me everywhere, up my skirt, over my blouse, my breasts. He pressed up against me and kissed me. I didn’t know what to do. I could slap him or yell for help. My mind raced. And the only thing I noticed was that his face had turned red, literally beet red.”80
Luckily for Willey, Friendly continued to bang on the door. Clinton had a big economic meeting scheduled with Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen, OMB Chair Leon Panetta, and Laura Tyson, the head of the Council of Economic Advisors.
“I made a dive for the door, yanked it open, and burst into the Oval Office,” Willey said. “He followed me. As I scurried across that stately room, brushing my hair with my fingertips and checking that my blouse was tucked in, Clinton walked directly to his chair. His lechery aborted, the president of the United States concealed the remains of his arousal behind John Kennedy’s desk in the Oval Office.”81
Linda Tripp later described the condition of Kathleen as “flustered: hair messy, red face, no lipstick, an overall disheveled wreck.”82
On the same day that Clinton was sexually assaulting Willey, Kathleen’s distraught husband went out to the Virginia woods to a small marsh, put a gun in his mouth, and pulled the trigger.
Following her traumatic encounter and the death of her husband, “I still had a mountain of debt and no income,” Willey recalled. “My legal and financial situation was dire. Some dear friends sent me a check that sustained me for two months, but the fact remained: I needed a job.”83 So Willey began using her lawyer, Dan, to write Bill Clinton letters—friendly letters that asked for a paying job to replace her volunteering in the White House Social Office. Eventually, Willey got a job that paid $20,000 per year plus health care for twenty-four hours of work per week.
Willey’s experiences with Hillary Clinton were dreadful. “She would emerge with her entourage, cursing up a storm,” Willey said. “And all day long, we heard her raised voice through the wall. Hillary always seemed to be miserable, unhappy, and angry.”84
Other witnesses to Hillary’s tantrums such as FBI agent Gary Aldrich said that it was quite a sight to see the First Lady shriek profanity at the president that ranged from “Come back here you asshole” to “Where the fuck do think you’re going?”85
“That’s the Hillary I saw,” Kathleen recalled. “I’ve walked behind her when she was cursing an aide with a very foul mouth. Then she would see somebody who mattered and instantly pour it on, all sweetness and light. A doey-eyed expression on her face, she’d act so sincere. The minute they were gone, she’d turn around and explode again, cussing a blue streak.”86
Hillary would play a big role in Willey’s life after she was dragged into the Paula Jones case. By February 1997, Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff had caught wind of the president’s sexual assault of Willey. Isikoff told Willey that he had gotten the information from the Jones lawyers.87 The Jones lawyers were eager to find other sexual assault victims of Clinton.
Isikoff, in hot pursuit of a scoop, was putting intense pressure on Willey to go on the record with a public account. “[Isikoff] pursued me and wouldn’t let up,” Willey said. “He called all the time. ‘Talk to me,’ he pleaded. ‘Talk to me on the record!’”88 Later in the year, the Jones lawyers were trying to get Kathleen deposed and under oath to describe what Bill had done to her. They were seeking to prove a pattern of sexual harassment by Clinton to add credibility to their case.
On July 25, 1997, the Jones team subpoenaed Willey to testify in their case. Matt Drudge posted a story about Willey regarding what she might say under oath.89 Well aware of her impending testimony, the Clintons began to engage in witness tampering.
After the Drudge story, Isikoff wrote an article for Newsweek, “A Twist in the Paula Jones Case.” The story quoted Clinton lawyer Bob Bennet, who said that the president “had no specific recollection of meeting” Willey.90 After the article ran, Isikoff received an anonymous phone call from a woman claiming to be the wife of an influential Democrat. The caller said she had met the president many times at political events and that sometime in 1996, he made a heavy, overbearing pass on her in the exact same spot in the Oval Office where he had sexually assaulted Willey. She said Clinton got physical with her, tried to kiss her, and groped her breasts. The mortified woman fought the rampaging pervert off and told Isikoff “I’ve never had a man take advantage of me like that.” Isikoff asked her what happened next. The female caller said, “I think he finished the job himself.”91 Bill, following the rejection, most likely masturbated until completion.
By mid-summer 1997, Kathleen Willey was a credible witness to Clinton’s outrageous sexual behavior.
Willey did not want to testify in the Paula Jones case, but by November 1997, it was ruled that she could be deposed. When she heard the intimate details of Paula Jones’s story, Willey knew it was the truth, particularly the familiar description of Clinton’s flushed countenance as he advanced on Jones.
Willey was scheduled to be deposed in early January 1998.
Increasingly desperate, the Clintons and their associates took highly illegal actions.
“They threatened my children,” Willey said. “They threatened my friend’s children. They took one of my cats and killed another. They left a skull on my porch. They told me I was in danger. They followed me. They vandalized my car. They tried to retrieve my dogs from a kennel. They hid under my deck in the middle of the night. They subjec
ted me to a campaign of fear and intimidation, trying to silence me.”92
The Clintons hired detective Palladino to “investigate” Willey. Palladino would be labeled as one of Clinton’s “secret police.”
The Clintons paid Palladino $93,000 in 1992 to do damage control on the women who were involved with Bill Clinton.93 Palladino was paid with campaign funds funneled through a law firm. Betsey Wright, the former chief of staff for Governor Clinton, was the “feminist” tasked to put pressure on the dozens of women who had had intimate encounters with the candidate. Wright was working hand in glove with Palladino to run suppression campaigns on these women that Michael Isikoff reported in a July 26, 1992, article, “Clinton Team Works to Deflect Allegations on Nominee’s Private Life.”94
Research into Palladino’s methods of “investigation” yield horrifying results. Think digging into a target’s past and present personal information and then using this information to make veiled threats and bare-knuckled attacks.
Writer Ian Halperin ran into the Palladino treatment when trying to publish a book on one of the PI’s celebrity clients. Palladino visited Halperin’s house and presented a long dossier he had complied on the author. “That’s an intimidation tactic, when some guy starts recounting addresses where you lived 15 or 20 years ago, where you worked, your past girlfriends,” Halperin recalled. “He said he could make my life miserable.”iii
After the Clintons hired Palladino, someone started making Willey’s life miserable. Three of her car tires were punctured by a nail gun. “I can remember standing at the tire place on a warm September day, waiting for them to fix my car,” Willey told attorney and bestselling author Candice Jackson. “The mechanic approached her, saying ‘It looks like someone has shot out all your tires with a nail gun; is there someone out there who doesn’t like you?’ I can hear the shiver in her voice as she says, ‘That really got my attention; that’s when I started getting worried.’” 95
Not only were Kathleen’s tires punctured, but the car tires of a close friend were also ruptured.
In a clear case of targeted vandalism, one of Kathleen’s tires had nine nails shot in it; another tire had four nails in it; yet another tire had nine nails shot in the whitewall of it. Bullseye, Willey’s cat of thirteen years, suddenly disappeared. The missing pet added to Willey’s trauma.
Then, two days before Willey’s deposition, a menacing stranger approached her and asked about her car tire vandalism, her missing cat, and then mentioned her children by name.
At the time, Kathleen was wearing a cervical collar around her neck. She was living in a rural part of Virginia, walking her dogs alone in the early morning on a barren country road.
Willey was about one half mile from her home when a man came jogging toward her “dressed in dark sweats, running shoes, and a plain baseball hat.”96
Fixating his eyes on Willey, the stranger asked, “Hey did you ever find your cat?” Wiley replied that she had not. “Yeah, that Bullseye, he was a nice cat. He was a really nice old cat,” the stranger replied.97
The mysterious man then asked Willey if she had gotten her tires fixed. “Whoa—how did he know my tires had been vandalized a few months back?” Willey asked herself. “I didn’t think I’d told any of my neighbors. I felt the hairs stand up on the back of my neck and a sickening feeling welled up in the pit of my stomach.”
“’Who are you?’ I demanded.”
“And how are your children doing? How are Shannon and Patrick?”98
Confronted with another barrage of intimate details, Willey was overtaken by a feeling of dread.
The stranger then mentioned her friend and her friend’s children by name.
“Oh God! The realization suddenly exploded into my consciousness. He means me harm! He means my loved ones harm!” Willey recalled.99 She backed away from the man, shaken, as her legs felt almost paralyzed.
“As I backed up, he walked toward me. He was closer now. He looked at me, hardness in his eyes. He spoke deliberately and quietly.
‘You’re just not getting the message, are you?’”100
Willey, still wearing the cervical collar, broke out into a full sprint toward her home. She ran all the way home without thinking about potential damage to her neck.
“I started to understand,” Willey said. “He was there to scare me, to let me know that I was being watched. But it was more than that. I realized that Bullseye’s disappearance was part of it, that the damage to my tires was part of it. And the noises on my phone. It was all part of their message: Keep your mouth shut. Don’t talk about the incident in the Oval Office.”101
Palladino’s possible role in the Willey terror campaign invited even more suspicion in 2003 when Melanie Morgan, a conservative activist and former talk radio host, talked with Palladino and his business partner’s wife, Sandra Sutherland, at the Passage Mystery Writers Conference in California.102
Morgan told her account of this meeting to Art Moore of World Net Daily in November 2007. This account is revisited in Willey’s book.
Morgan, then a budding mystery author, sidled up to Palladino, engaged him in conversation and established a friendly connection. “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself with the business you did for Hillary Clinton?” Morgan eventually asked Palladino. “You know, come on. That stuff with Kathleen Willey was pretty outrageous. What was that? You guys ran over her cat? What was that all about?”103
“Well, I’m not really going to comment about that, but let me say this,” Palladino answered. “The only regret that I had about the whole thing was that Hillary did not pay me in a timely fashion.”104
Sutherland then made some vicious comments about Hillary. As Morgan told World Net Daily, “It was crystal clear to me at the time that he was bragging about the fact he had done it. Literally, his body puffed up, a slow grin spread across his face. I could see conflicting emotions playing out: ‘Should I say anything?’”105
“He definitely acknowledged that there was something that had transpired there with Kathleen Willey and her cat and that his biggest regret was that he didn’t get cash up front from Hillary Clinton!” Morgan recalled. She quoted Palladino as saying “I saved Hillary Clinton’s ass. You’d think she’d be more grateful to me.”106
Willey knew that Hillary had initiated the baneful attacks. “She’s worse than he is,” Willey told Fox News anchor Neil Cavuto. “She’s behind the secret police.”107
For the two days before her deposition, Willey could not sleep. On January 10, 1998, she testified. The scare tactics had worked. Willey answered sixty-three times that her memory of the Clinton assault was hazy. Candice Jackson pointed out that Willey’s testimony was probably indeed affected and softened by the months-long intimidation campaign directed toward her, the previous comments of Clinton’s lawyer, Bob Bennett, who told Kathleen to get a criminal lawyer if she were deposed, and “the terrifying verbal threat made against Willey and her children by a thug just two days earlier.”108
Seven days later, President Clinton gave his deposition in the Jones case and flatly denied making a hard and crude sexual pass. He said nothing about trying to kiss Willey, nothing about putting his hand up her skirt, nothing about putting her hand on his erection.
“All I can tell you is, in the first place, when she came to see me she was clearly upset,” Clinton said while deposed. “I did to her what I have done to scores and scores of men and women who have worked for me or been my friends over the years. I embraced her, I put my arms around her, I may have even kissed her on the forehead. There was nothing sexual about it. I was trying to help calm her down and trying to reassure her.”
The recollection by Clinton was particularly interesting when held against the statement of his lawyer, Bob Bennett, five months earlier that he had “no specific recollection” of meeting with Willey.
January of 1998 was a rough time for the Clinton presidency. Bill Clinton lied in his Paula Jones deposition about not having an affair with an intern, Monica Le
winsky; it was also when Drudge Report scooped the mainstream media on January 17, letting folks know that Newsweek was not allowing Michael Isikoff to run a story that would expose the Clinton-Monica Lewinsky affair.
On January 26, Bill, with Hillary at his side, told some forceful lies about his relationship with Lewinsky. “I want you to listen to me,” Clinton professed. “I’m going to say this again: I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time; never. These allegations are false. And I need to go back to work for the American people. Thank you.”109
The next day, Hillary sat down with Matt Lauer on NBC’s Today Show. “The great story here for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it is this vast right wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for the presidency,” the First Lady said.
By late January, the Clinton presidency hung in the balance. Bill had lied in his deposition that he had never had sex with Monica Lewinsky, but the Paula Jones lawyers were aware that intern had kept a blue dress stained with the presidential semen. Clinton had not only lied in a court case, but also to the American people. A judge subsequently fined Clinton $90,000 for giving false testimony and he later had his law license suspended in Arkansas.
The Clintons decided to buckle down, maintain the lies, and try to intimidate any other women who could damage the president. In hindsight, it seems that the booming stock market and favorable economy of the late 1990s ultimately saved Clinton from either being kicked out of office or forced to resign. Most Americans thought that with the economy so flush that it was not worth having Congress impeach and convict Clinton of “high crimes and misdemeanors.”
Private investigator Jared Stern said that in March of 1998 he was asked by Robert Miller (then head of a private investigation firm, Prudential Associates) to do a noisy investigation of Willey meant to scare and intimidate her—looking at her phone records, finding if she took medication, going through her trash. Miller was working at the behest of the lawyer of Nathan Landow (a huge Democratic fundraiser). Miller told Stern that the “White House” was behind the intimidation campaign request.110