Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [118]
There were stories galore about Bill Clinton’s purported affair with former Miss Arkansas Sally Perdue, who had gone public by telling London’s Sunday Telegraph that she had engaged in numerous clandestine liaisons with Clinton during his governorship. (According to Perdue, state troopers would drop off the governor in a wooded area near her home and wait for Clinton to flick her patio light on and off as a signal that it was time to retrieve him.) Perdue told the press: “I want this affair wrapped up and dropped in the garbage can.” There were also stories about an affair between Clinton and Dolly Kyle Browning, one of his classmates from Hot Springs High, who had recently published a book about her “affair with a Southern pol who happens to be Bill Clinton.”
Gil Davis wrote a note to himself in the Paula Jones file, as a reminder: “Take the deposition of Gennifer Flowers and the troopers regarding Clinton’s use of troopers as goons, in addition to use as pimps [and whatever else they were used for].” Interestingly, in an undated notation that Davis scribbled on a piece of paper some time before 1997, the lawyer wrote that he had received a call from a private investigator who “has info that Clinton made unwanted sexual advances to an intern.”
In sketching out legal arguments that he hoped to make at trial, Davis wrote out numerous memos to himself. One such memo stated: “What makes [this conduct] so outrageous is the unequal power between the Governor and some little State employee.” What Clinton did, scribbled Davis, was “he took advantage of a weaker person. This is despicable and outrageous.”
There is no question that from the start, the Jones team believed that if it could show Bill Clinton was taking advantage of female government employees in other situations, this would convince a jury to buy Jones’s story. Davis’s personal notes to his file now confirm that he was planning to pursue aggressively the subject of “other women” from the moment he entered the case. One piece of dictation shows Davis formulating questions to ask Trooper Danny Ferguson under oath, the first of which was, “Were you given assignments, as part of Governor Clinton’s Security Detail, by the Governor or anyone else, to play any role in the Governor’s sexual liaisons with women?”
Appearing as a guest on CNN during the early stages of the Jones case, Davis was asked if he intended to “speak to other women who possibly would be able to support Mrs. Jones’ claims.” He replied openly, on national television, that he would do that in a heartbeat if it furthered “the welfare and vindication of the rights of our client.”
So there was never any serious question that the Jones lawyers would try to get Bill Clinton under oath and force him to answer questions about “other women,” assuming the case wasn’t thrown out first. As early as June 13, 1994, on his to-do list, Davis’s first priority was: “Supoena [sic] to President Clinton to give deposition in this case.” Numerous clues were dropped that any more recent episodes of hanky-panky with female subordinates in the White House ultimately would be sniffed out—since anti-Clinton lawyers were busily searching for such evidence.
Every litigation strategy brings with it unexpected pitfalls. Davis and Cammarata were faced with their own problems if they kicked open the door on the subject of Bill Clinton’s sexual exploits. Penthouse magazine had obtained partially nude photos of Jones from an ex-boyfriend named Mike Turner, publishing them in a slick issue appearing in January 1995. In an article provocatively titled “The Devil in Paula Jones,” Penthouse writer Rudy Maxa turned the tables, giving readers an eyeful of this