Topic: White WaterThe Trashing of Clinton's Women
The Village Voice
The forces of evil, genuine evil, are supporting the impeachment of the president.
Impeachment is all about a coup over a cock. He's turned people of color into defenders of a president whose crime and welfare policies hurt us.
The first article of impeachment in the Senate concerns the president's perjury. Except for those who believe the earth is flat, there isn't the slightest doubt that Clinton is a perjurer. His own White House chief counsel, Charles Ruff, testified before the House Judiciary Committee that a reasonable person might well conclude that the president had lied under oath.
If you still have doubts, read "The Perjury Precedent" by NYU law professor Stephen Gillers on the Op-Ed page of the December 28 New York Times.
The second article charges that Clinton "prevented, obstructed, and impeded the administration of justice and has to that end engaged personally, and through his subordinates and agents, in a course of conduct or scheme designed to delay, impede, cover up and conceal the existence of evidence and testimony."
This obstruction of justice charge has been underplayed in the press and in the referral to the Senate by the House Judiciary Committee. It has many dimensions, but the most disgusting and pertinent involves what Clinton and his emissaries have done to threaten his discarded women in order to prevent their testifying against him.
It has become brutally clear that any former object of his lust who threatens his presidency should be put into the Witness Protection Program.
This series about the trashing of Clinton's women begins with the first to have publicly spoken of their relationship. Gennifer Flowers revealed a long-term affair and had the tapes to prove it. On one of them, Mario Cuomo's name came up. Flowers said she thought Cuomo was "connected" with the Mafia. You can hear Bill's unmistakable sound and cadence answering her: "Well, he acts like one."
Clinton and his cover-up team vigorously vilified Flowers as a hustler who invented the story for money. Clinton finally admitted on 60 Minutes that he had slept with her— once. The tapes tell a different erotic story.
In an interview with Larry King on CNN, Flowers said that after she went public, her house was broken into three times and ransacked. And her mother was threatened.
A San Francisco–based private eye, Jack Palladino, was on the Clinton payroll during the Arkansas years. His job was to intimidate the governor's "bimbos" into silence. Rooting about, he somehow found an allegation that Flowers was tied to a right-wing conspiracy. That was a dog that wouldn't hunt.
Palladino was paid $100,000 in 1992 to pile up dossiers on the Clinton women. (New York Daily News reporters Thomas DeFrank and Thomas Galvin in the August 4, 1997, Weekly Standard.)
Roger Morris is a highly credible historian (Richard Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician; Uncertain Greatness: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy).
In Partners in Power: The Clintons and Their America (Henry Holt; an updated paperback is due in early 1999), Morris tells of Sally Perdue, a former Miss Arkansas, who got to know Clinton intimately in 1983. She told Ambrose Evans Pritchard of the London Sunday Telegraph that in 1992 she was visited by a Democratic Party staffer. "They knew that I went jogging by myself and he couldn't guarantee what would happen to my pretty little legs." (As further reported in the Wall Street Journal International, October 27, 1998.)
On March 15, 1998, Frank Murray reported in the Washington Times that Donovan Campbell, a lawyer for Paula Jones, speaking of Clinton's "vast cover-up enterprise," explained why Jones waited so long to publicly complain about the president's exposing himself to her and telling her to "kiss it."
She didn't hurry to use the normal grievance procedures for Arkansas state employees "because she saw others pay the price" for speaking out about Clinton's serial pillaging of women. She was frightened, her lawyer said, by the "vicious attacks" on Flowers and Perdue by Clinton's janissaries.
Women were not the only targets of Clinton's expensive secret police. Thomas DeFrank and Thomas Galvin report that when Republican congressman Jim Leach of Iowa began investigating Whitewater, he found a stranger— Jack Palladino— skulking about his home.
But Clinton's discarded women were the main objects of the Clinton team both in Arkansas and later in Washington. Next week, we shall follow the White House– directed detectives stalking Dolly Kyle Browning, Elizabeth Ward Gracen, Kathleen Willey, and the woman who may yet cause the president to resign— Juanita Broaddrick.
But what do the obstructions of justice of Clinton-the-night-crawler in Arkansas have to do with his attempts to suppress evidence in his august role as president of the United States? It's all an addictive whole— pattern and practice, as lawyers say. That's why Monica Lewinsky was subpoenaed to tell her story during the preliminaries to the Paula Jones trial. She wasn't in Arkansas, but he committed perjury about his actions in both Arkansas and Washington.
The president's acolytes— such as Alan Dershowitz— continually bray, "Sex lies! It's all sex lies!" They insist that these thrown-away women are making all this up, including the threats and intimidation.
But is every one of these women lying?
Excellent analysis from a source that can hardly be complained of by the media establishment.
January 13 - 19, 1999
Nat Hentoff
Nat Hentoff
The Trashing of Clinton's Women
Obstruction of Justice by Threats and Coercion of Discarded Women
Gennifer Flowers: Her house was broken into three times and ransacked. (Photo by: AP/ Wideworld)
— Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz
—Feminist scholar Blanche Wiesen Cook
— Gwendolin Mink, professor of politics, University of California at Santa Cruz