Never ever trust a Clinton.
“And the next thing you know he pulls down his pants. He sat on the couch and he was fondling himself and he asked me to kiss it
What do I do here?
Do I get out?
What do I do?
The “truth” about Bill Clinton’s affairs and
alleged affairs would “destroy” Hillary Clinton’s political career, declares
Paula Jones, the former Arkansas state employee who sued President Clinton for
sexual harassment.
So I
walked over to the windowsill, and I was looking out to the river, because we
were right about near the river. And I thought, ‘you know, I need to talk to
him, get a distraction here.’ And I was looking right over the river and I was
talking about that. And he came over there and he proceeded to make faces at
me; then he started doing it again.
“And he pulled me kind of towards him and told me
things, and then he started kind of groping me. And then I pulled away
immediately and I walked toward the door. I didn’t know what I was going to do.
I just knew that I needed to get out of the situation. I started talking about
everything and anything to get the attention of off what was going on.
“So I did that.
Then he got a little closer to the door couches, and we were talking
about maybe political stuff or whatever. Because we had nothing in common.
Nothing we could possibly talk about….
“And the next thing you know he pulls down his
pants. He sat on the couch and he was fondling himself and he asked me to kiss
it.
“Umm, he asked you to kiss it,” said Klein. “So
what did you do?”
Jones recounted:
I jumped up. Because I was leaning, like on the
side of the couch arm, with his arm on it. I was kind of leaning up against
that. And I jumped over and said, ‘No, I’m not that kind of a girl. And I need
to be leaving immediately.’ So of course he was embarrassed. He turned red. He
pulled his pants up. And I went up to
the door and was trying to get out. And he momentarily put his hand on the door
so I couldn’t completely get it opened. And he said, ‘You’re smart. Let’s keep
this between ourselves.’
Asked whether she took Clinton’s alleged remark as
a threat, Jones answered, “Yeah. Yeah. He said ‘don’t tell nobody.’ Well of
course he didn’t want nobody to know.”
Jones said the room was protected by a state
trooper, and that when she exited, the state trooper had a smirk on his face.
The lawsuit Jones brought against Clinton “almost
brought down the president,” according to the Daily Mail.
The paper recounts the tumultuous court saga:
It wasn’t until two years [after the incident], in
1993, when former Clinton bodyguards spoke in a magazine interview about
escorting a woman called ‘Paula’ to his room in May 1991 that she was advised
to go public. She hired a lawyer, and in 1994 sued Clinton and asked for
$700,000 in damages, claiming she suffered emotional trauma.
Clinton denied the claims, or even that he had met
Jones. He dismissed her as an opportunist out for money and to damage him
politically. He asked that the civil suit be put off until he left the White
House, but in January 1997 an appeals court ruled the trial should go ahead.
A year later Judge Susan Webber Wright tossed out
Jones’s case saying she had not suffered any damages. She ruled that even if
Clinton’s behavior had been ‘boorish and offensive’ it did not amount to sexual
harassment under the law. Jones appealed and the Supreme Court reinstated her
case leading to the unprecedented step of President Clinton being forced to
make a deposition.
While working on the Paula Jones investigation,
independent prosecutor Kenneth Starr uncovered Clinton’s alleged affair with
White House intern Monica Lewinsky. It was the president’s original statement
to lawyers for Jones that almost led to his downfall – he denied any improper
relationship with Lewinsky, which was found to be untrue. Having been accused
of perjury, charges were drawn up and impeachment proceedings begun.
Although Democratic leaders preferred to censure
the president, Congress began the impeachment process against Clinton in
December 1998. A divided House of Representatives impeached him on December 19,
and the issue then passed to the Senate, where after a five-week trial, he was
acquitted. Clinton survived the political fallout what became known as the “Lewinsky
affair.” His marriage to Hillary also survived.
By the time Lewinsky was headline news, Jones had
already reached an out of court settlement with the President.
Clinton v. Jones, 520 U.S. 681 (1997), was a
landmark United States Supreme Court case establishing that a sitting President
of the United States has no immunity from civil law litigation against him or
her, for acts done before taking office and unrelated to the office.
Contents
[hide]
1 Background
of the case
2 The
court's decision
3 Aftermath
4 See
also
5 References
6 External
links
Background of the case
On May 6, 1994, former Arkansas state employee
Paula Jones filed a sexual harassment suit against U.S. President Bill Clinton
and former Arkansas State Police Officer Danny Ferguson. She claimed that on
May 8, 1991, Clinton, then Governor of Arkansas, crudely propositioned her. She
stated that David Brock had written, in the January 1994 issue of The American
Spectator, that an Arkansas state employee named "Paula" had offered
to be Clinton's mistress. According to the story, Ferguson had escorted Jones
to Clinton's hotel room, stood guard, and overheard Jones say that she would
not mind being Clinton's mistress.
The suit, Jones v. Clinton, was filed in the U.S.
District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas. Judge Susan Webber Wright,
who had taken a class under then-Professor Clinton at the University of
Arkansas School of Law, ruled that a sitting President could not be sued and
deferred the case until the conclusion of his term (although she allowed the
pre-trial discovery phase of the case to proceed without delay in order to
start the trial as soon as Clinton left office).
Both parties appealed to the United States Court of
Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, which ruled in favor of Jones, finding that
"the President, like all other government officials, is subject to the
same laws that apply to all other members of our society."
Clinton then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court,
filing a petition for writ of certiorari.
The court's decision
In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court affirmed
the decision of the Court of Appeals.
In the unanimous opinion by Justice John Paul
Stevens, the Court ruled that separation of powers does not mandate that
federal courts delay all private civil lawsuits against the President until the
end of his term of office.
In his concurring opinion, Breyer argued that
presidential immunity would apply only if the President could show that a
private civil lawsuit would somehow interfere with the President's
constitutionally assigned duties.
Aftermath
On April 1, 1998, U.S. District Court Judge Susan
Webber Wright granted summary judgment to Clinton in Jones v. Clinton. A
witness in Jones v. Clinton, Monica Lewinsky, denied having engaged in a sexual
relationship with Clinton. A Lewinsky friend, Linda Tripp, had recorded
conversations where Lewinsky discussed her affair with Clinton. Tripp then
turned the tapes over to Kenneth Starr, an independent counsel investigating
Clinton's misconduct in office. The revelations from these tapes became known
as the Lewinsky scandal.
In the Court's opinion in Clinton v. Jones, Stevens
had written, "...it appears to us highly unlikely to occupy any
substantial amount of petitioner's time." The Supreme Court's ruling in
Clinton v. Jones led to the District Court's hearing of Jones v. Clinton, which
led to the Lewinsky scandal, when Clinton was asked under oath about other
workplace relationships, which led to charges of perjury and obstruction of
justice and the impeachment of Bill Clinton.
On April 12, 1999, Wright found Clinton in contempt
of court for "intentionally false" testimony in Jones v. Clinton,
fined him $90,000, and referred the case to the Arkansas Supreme Court's
Committee on Professional Conduct, as Clinton still possessed a law license in
Arkansas.[1]
The Arkansas Supreme Court suspended Clinton's
Arkansas law license in April 2000. On January 19, 2001, Clinton agreed to a
five-year suspension and a $25,000 fine in order to avoid disbarment and to end
the investigation of Independent Counsel Robert Ray (Starr's successor). On
October 1, 2001, Clinton's U.S. Supreme Court law license was suspended, with
40 days to contest his disbarment. On November 9, 2001, the last day for
Clinton to contest the disbarment, he opted to resign from the Supreme Court
Bar, surrendering his license, rather than facing penalties related to
disbarment.
In the end, Independent Counsel Ray said:
"The Independent Counsel’s judgment that
sufficient evidence existed to prosecute President Clinton was confirmed by
President Clinton’s admissions and by evidence showing that he engaged in
conduct prejudicial to the administration of justice."
More specifically, the Independent Counsel
concluded that President Clinton testified falsely on three counts under oath
in Clinton v. Jones. However, Ray chose to decline criminal prosecution in
favor of what the Principles of Federal Prosecution call "alternative sanctions".
This included being impeached:
"As a consequence of his conduct in the Jones
v. Clinton civil suit and before the federal grand jury, President Clinton
incurred significant administrative sanctions. The Independent Counsel
considered seven non-criminal alternative sanctions that were imposed in making
his decision to decline prosecution:
(1) President Clinton’s admission of
providing false testimony that was knowingly misleading, evasive, and
prejudicial to the administration of justice before the United States District
Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas;
(2) his acknowledgement that his
conduct violated the Rules of Professional Conduct of the Arkansas Supreme
Court;
(3) the five-year suspension of his license to practice law and $25,000
fine imposed on him by the Circuit Court of Pulaski County, Arkansas;
(4) the
civil contempt penalty of more than $900,000 imposed on President Clinton by
the federal court for violating its orders;
(5) the payment of more than
$850,000 in settlement to Paula Jones;
(6) the express finding by the federal
court that President Clinton had engaged in contemptuous conduct; and
(7) the
substantial public condemnation of President Clinton arising from his
impeachment."
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