Hillary Clinton Fired From Watergate Investigation For ‘Lying, Unethical Behavior’

http://patdollard.com/2013/05/flashback-hillary-clinton-fired-from-watergate-investigation-for-lying-unethical-behavior-conspiracy-to-violate-the-constitution/

Hillary Clinton might have a pretty hefty scandal brewing. The now-retired general counsel and chief of staff of the House Judiciary Committee, who supervised Hillary when she worked on the Watergate investigation, says Hillary’s history of lies and unethical behavior goes back farther – and goes much deeper – than anyone realizes. "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." George Santayana It may help you to remember this bit of history regarding Hillary Rodham Clinton.... Watergate-era Judiciary chief of staff: Hillary Clinton fired for lies, unethical behavior January 23rd, 2013 http://www.eohistory.info/2013/hillaryHistory.htm By DAN CALABRESE - Bet you didn't know this.

I've decided to reprint a piece of work I did nearly five years ago, because it seems very relevant today given Hillary Clinton's performance in the Benghazi hearings. Back in 2008 when she was running for president, I interviewed two erstwhile staff members of the House Judiciary Committee who were involved with the Watergate investigation when Hillary was a low-level staffer there. I interviewed one Democrat staffer and one Republican staffer, and wrote two pieces based on what they told me about Hillary's conduct at the time.

I published these pieces back in 2008 for North Star Writers Group, the syndicate I ran at the time. This was the most widely read piece we ever had at NSWG, but because NSWG never gained the high-profile status of the major syndicates, this piece still didn't reach as many people as I thought it deserved to. Today, given the much broader reach of CainTV and yet another incidence of Hillary's arrogance in dealing with a congressional committee, I think it deserves another airing. For the purposes of simplicity, I've combined the two pieces into one very long one. If you're interested in understanding the true character of Hillary Clinton, it's worth your time to read it.

As Hillary Clinton came under increasing scrutiny for her story about facing sniper fire in Bosnia, one question that arose was whether she has engaged in a pattern of lying.

The now-retired general counsel and chief of staff of the House Judiciary Committee, who supervised Hillary when she worked on the Watergate investigation, says Hillary’s history of lies and unethical behavior goes back farther – and goes much deeper – than anyone realizes.

Jerry Zeifman, a lifelong Democrat, supervised the work of 27-year-old Hillary Rodham on the committee. Hillary got a job working on the investigation at the behest of her former law professor, Burke Marshall, who was also Sen. Ted Kennedy’s chief counsel in the Chappaquiddick affair. When the investigation was over, Zeifman fired Hillary from the committee staff and refused to give her a letter of recommendation – one of only three people who earned that dubious distinction in Zeifman’s 17-year career.

“Because she was a liar,” Zeifman said in an interview last week. “She was an unethical, dishonest lawyer. She conspired to violate the Constitution, the rules of the House, the rules of the committee and the rules of confidentiality.” How could a 27-year-old House staff member do all that? She couldn’t do it by herself, but Zeifman said she was one of several individuals – including Marshall, special counsel John Doar and senior associate special counsel (and future Clinton White House Counsel) Bernard Nussbaum – who engaged in a seemingly implausible scheme to deny Richard Nixon the right to counsel during the investigation.

Why would they want to do that? Because, according to Zeifman, they feared putting Watergate break-in mastermind E. Howard Hunt on the stand to be cross-examined by counsel to the president. Hunt, Zeifman said, had the goods on nefarious activities in the Kennedy Administration that would have made Watergate look like a day at the beach – including Kennedy’s purported complicity in the attempted assassination of Fidel Castro.

The actions of Hillary and her cohorts went directly against the judgment of top Democrats, up to and including then-House Majority Leader Tip O’Neill, that Nixon clearly had the right to counsel. Zeifman says that Hillary, along with Marshall, Nussbaum and Doar, was determined to gain enough votes on the Judiciary Committee to change House rules and deny counsel to Nixon. And in order to pull this off, Zeifman says Hillary wrote a fraudulent legal brief, and confiscated public documents to hide her deception.

The brief involved precedent for representation by counsel during an impeachment proceeding. When Hillary endeavored to write a legal brief arguing there is no right to representation by counsel during an impeachment proceeding, Zeifman says, he told Hillary about the case of Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who faced an impeachment attempt in 1970.

“As soon as the impeachment resolutions were introduced by (then-House Minority Leader Gerald) Ford, and they were referred to the House Judiciary Committee, the first thing Douglas did was hire himself a lawyer,” Zeifman said.

The Judiciary Committee allowed Douglas to keep counsel, thus establishing the precedent. Zeifman says he told Hillary that all the documents establishing this fact were in the Judiciary Committee’s public files. So what did Hillary do?

“Hillary then removed all the Douglas files to the offices where she was located, which at that time was secured and inaccessible to the public,” Zeifman said. Hillary then proceeded to write a legal brief arguing there was no precedent for the right to representation by counsel during an impeachment proceeding – as if the Douglas case had never occurred.

The brief was so fraudulent and ridiculous, Zeifman believes Hillary would have been disbarred if she had submitted it to a judge.

Zeifman says that if Hillary, Marshall, Nussbaum and Doar had succeeded, members of the House Judiciary Committee would have also been denied the right to cross-examine witnesses, and denied the opportunity to even participate in the drafting of articles of impeachment against Nixon.

Of course, Nixon’s resignation rendered the entire issue moot, ending Hillary’s career on the Judiciary Committee staff in a most undistinguished manner. Zeifman says he was urged by top committee members to keep a diary of everything that was happening. He did so, and still has the diary if anyone wants to check the veracity of his story. Certainly, he could not have known in 1974 that diary entries about a young lawyer named Hillary Rodham would be of interest to anyone 34 years later.

But they show that the pattern of lies, deceit, fabrications and unethical behavior was established long ago – long before the Bosnia lie, and indeed, even before cattle futures, Travelgate and Whitewater – for the woman who is still asking us to make her president of the United States.

Franklin Polk, who served at the time as chief Republican counsel on the committee, confirmed many of these details in two interviews he granted me this past Friday, although his analysis of events is not always identical to Zeifman’s. Polk specifically confirmed that Hillary wrote the memo in question, and confirmed that Hillary ignored the Douglas case. (He said he couldn’t confirm or dispel the part about Hillary taking the Douglas files.)

To Polk, Hillary’s memo was dishonest in the sense that she tried to pretend the Douglas precedent didn’t exist. But unlike Zeifman, Polk considered the memo dishonest in a way that was more stupid than sinister.

“Hillary should have mentioned that (the Douglas case), and then tried to argue whether that was a change of policy or not instead of just ignoring it and taking the precedent out of the opinion,” Polk said.

Polk recalled that the attempt to deny counsel to Nixon upset a great many members of the committee, including just about all the Republicans, but many Democrats as well.

“The argument sort of broke like a firestorm on the committee, and I remember Congressman Don Edwards was very upset,” Polk said. “He was the chairman of the subcommittee on constitutional rights. But in truth, the impeachment precedents are not clear. Let’s put it this way. In the old days, from the beginning of the country through the 1800s and early 1900s, there were precedents that the target or accused did not have the right to counsel.”

That’s why Polk believes Hillary’s approach in writing the memorandum was foolish. He says she could have argued that the Douglas case was an isolated example, and that other historical precedents could apply.

But Zeifman says the memo and removal of the Douglas files was only part the effort by Hillary, Doar, Nussbaum and Marshall to pursue their own agenda during the investigation.

After my first column, some readers wrote in claiming Zeifman was motivated by jealousy because he was not appointed as the chief counsel in the investigation, with that title going to Doar instead.

Zeifman’s account is that he supported the appointment of Doar because he, Zeifman, a) did not want the public notoriety that would come with such a high-profile role; and b) didn’t have much prosecutorial experience. When he started to have a problem with Doar and his allies was when Zeifman and others, including House Majority Leader Tip O’Neill and Democratic committee member Jack Brooks of Texas, began to perceive Doar’s group as acting outside the directives and knowledge of the committee and its chairman, Peter Rodino.

(O’Neill died in 1994. Brooks is still living and I tried unsuccessfully to reach him. I’d still like to.)

This culminated in a project to research past presidential abuses of power, which committee members felt was crucial in aiding the decisions they would make in deciding how to handle Nixon’s alleged offenses.

According to Zeifman and other documents, Doar directed Hillary to work with a group of Yale law professors on this project. But the report they generated was never given to the committee. Zeifman believes the reason was that the report was little more than a whitewash of the Kennedy years – a part of the Burke Marshall-led agenda of avoiding revelations during the Watergate investigation that would have embarrassed the Kennedys.

The fact that the report was kept under wraps upset Republican committee member Charles Wiggins of California, who wrote a memo to his colleagues on the committee that read in part:

Within the past few days, some disturbing information has come to my attention. It is requested that the facts concerning the matter be investigated and a report be made to the full committee as it concerns us all.

Early last spring when it became obvious that the committee was considering presidential "abuse of power" as a possible ground of impeachment, I raised the question before the full committee that research should be undertaken so as to furnish a standard against which to test the alleged abusive conduct of Richard Nixon.

As I recall, several other members joined with me in this request. I recall as well repeating this request from time to time during the course of our investigation. The staff, as I recall, was noncommittal, but it is certain that no such staff study was made available to the members at any time for their use.

Wiggins believed the report was purposely hidden from committee members. Chairman Rodino denied this, and said the reason Hillary’s report was not given to committee members was that it contained no value. It’s worth noting, of course, that the staff member who made this judgment was John Doar.

Hillary Rodham of the impeachment inquiry staff coordinated the work. . . . After the staff received the report it was reviewed by Ms. Rodham, briefly by Mr. Labovitz and Mr. Sack, and by Doar. The staff did not think the manuscript was useful in its present form. . . .

In your letter you suggest that members of the staff may have intentionally suppressed the report during the course of its investigation. That was not the case.

As a matter of fact, Mr. Doar was more concerned that any highlight of the project might prejudice the case against President Nixon. The fact is that the staff did not think the material was usable by the committee in its existing form and had not had time to modify it so it would have practical utility for the members of the committee. I was informed and agreed with the judgment.

Mr. Labovitz, by the way, was John Labovitz, another member of the Democratic staff. I spoke with Labovitz this past Friday as well, and he is no fan of Jerry Zeifman.

“If it’s according to Zeifman, it’s inaccurate from my perspective,” Labovitz said. He bases that statement on a recollection that Zeifman did not actually work on the impeachment inquiry staff, although that is contradicted not only by Zeifman but Polk as well.

Labovitz said he has no knowledge of Hillary having taken any files, and defended her no-right-to-counsel memo on the grounds that, if she was assigned to write a memo arguing a point of view, she was merely following orders.

But as both Zeifman and Polk point out, that doesn’t mean ignoring background of which you are aware, or worse, as Zeifman alleges, confiscating documents that disprove your argument.

All told, Polk recalls the actions of Hillary, Doar and Nussbaum as more amateurish than anything else.

“Of course the Republicans went nuts,” Polk said. “But so did some of the Democrats – some of the most liberal Democrats. It was more like these guys – Doar and company – were trying to manage the members of Congress, and it was like, ‘Who’s in charge here?’ If you want to convict a president, you want to give him all the rights possible. If you’re going to give him a trial, for him to say, ‘My rights were denied,’ – it was a stupid effort by people who were just politically tone deaf. So this was a big deal to people in the proceedings on the committee, no question about it. And Jerry Zeifman went nuts, and rightfully so. But my reaction wasn’t so much that it was underhanded as it was just stupid.”

Polk recalls Zeifman sharing with him at the time that he believed Hillary’s primary role was to report back to Burke Marshall any time the investigation was taking a turn that was not to the liking of the Kennedys.

“Jerry used to give the chapter and verse as to how Hillary was the mole into the committee works as to how things were going,” Polk said. “And she’d be feeding information back to Burke Marshall, who, at least according to Jerry, was talking to the Kennedys. And when something was off track in the view of the Kennedys, Burke Marshall would call John Doar or something, and there would be a reconsideration of what they were talking about. Jerry used to tell me that this was Hillary’s primary function.”

Zeifman says he had another staff member get him Hillary’s phone records, which showed that she was calling Burke Marshall at least once a day, and often several times a day.

A final note about all this: I wrote my first column on this subject because, in the aftermath of Hillary being caught in her Bosnia fib, I came in contact with Jerry Zeifman and found his story compelling. Zeifman has been trying to tell his story for many years, and the mainstream media have ignored him. I thought it deserved an airing as a demonstration of how early in her career Hillary began engaging in self-serving, disingenuous conduct.

Disingenuously arguing a position? Vanishing documents? Selling out members of her own party to advance a personal agenda? Classic Hillary. Neither my first column on the subject nor this one were designed to show that Hillary is dishonest. I don’t really think that’s in dispute. Rather, they were designed to show that she has been this way for a very long time – a fact worth considering for anyone contemplating voting for her for president of the United States.

“She would go around saying, ‘I’m dating a person who will some day be president,’” Polk said. “It was like a Babe Ruth call. And because of that comment she made, I watched Bill Clinton’s political efforts as governor of Arkansas, and I never counted him out because she had made that forecast.”

Bill knew what he wanted a long time ago. Clearly, so did Hillary, and her tactics for trying to achieve it were established even in those early days.

Jerry Zeifman — February 5, 2008 I have just seen Hillary Clinton and her former Yale law professor both in tears at a campaign rally here in my home state of Connecticut. Her tearful professor said how proud he was that his former student was likely to become our next President. Hillary responded in tears. My own reaction was of regret that, when I terminated her employment on the Nixon impeachment staff, I had not reported her unethical practices to the appropriate bar associations.

At the time of Watergate I had overall supervisory authority over the House Judiciary Committee’s Impeachment Inquiry staff that included Hillary Rodham-who was later to become First Lady in the Clinton White House.

During that period I kept a private diary of the behind the scenes congressional activities. My original tape recordings of the diary and other materials related to the Nixon impeachment provided the basis for my prior book Without Honor and are now available for inspection in the George Washington University Library.

Published in 1996 - Still available from Amazon.com After President Nixon’s resignation a young lawyer, who shared an office with Hillary, confided in me that he was dismayed by her erroneous legal opinions and efforts to deny Nixon representation by counsel-as well as an unwillingness to investigate Nixon. In my diary of August 12, 1974 I noted the following:

John Labovitz apologized to me for the fact that months ago he and Hillary had lied to me [to conceal rules changes and dilatory tactics.] Labovitz said, “That came from Yale.” I said, “You mean Burke Marshall [Senator Ted Kennedy's chief political strategist, with whom Hillary regularly consulted in violation of House rules.] Labovitz said, “Yes.” His apology was significant to me, not because it was a revelation but because of his contrition.

At that time Hillary Rodham was 27 years old. She had obtained a position on our committee staff through the political patronage of her former Yale law school professor Burke Marshall and Senator Ted Kennedy. Eventually, because of a number of her unethical practices I decided that I could not recommend her for any subsequent position of public or private trust.

Her patron, Burke Marshal, had previously been Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights under Robert Kennedy. During the Kennedy administration Washington insiders jokingly characterized him as the Chief counsel to the Irish Mafia. After becoming a Yale professor he also became Senator Ted Kennedy’s lawyer at the time of Chappaquidick-as well as Kennedy’s chief political strategist. As a result, some of his colleagues often described him as the Attorney General in waiting of the Camelot government in exile.

In addition to getting Hillary a job on the Nixon impeachment inquiry staff, Kennedy and Marshall had also persuaded Rodino to place two other close friends of Marshall in top positions on our staff. One was John Doar; who had been Marshall’s deputy in the Justice Department-whom Rodino appointed to head the impeachment inquiry staff. The other was Bernard Nussbaum, who had served as Assistant U.S. Attorney in New York-who was placed in charge of conducting the actual investigation of Nixon’s malfeasance.

Marshall, Doar, Nussbaum, and Rodham had two hidden objectives regarding the conduct of the impeachment proceedings. First, in order to enhance the prospect of Senator Kennedy or another liberal Democrat being elected president in 1976 they hoped to keep Nixon in office “twisting in the wind” for as long as possible. This would prevent then-Vice President Jerry Ford from becoming President and restoring moral authority to the Republican Party.

As was later quoted in the biography of Tip O’Neill (by John Farrell), a liberal Democrat would have become a “shoe-in for the presidency in 1976 if Nixon had been kept in office until the end of his term. However, both Tip O’Neill and I-as well as most Democrats-regarded it to be in the national interest to replace Nixon with Ford as soon as possible. As a result, as described by O’Neill, we coordinated our efforts to “keep Rodino’s feet to the fire.”

A second objective of the strategy of delay was to avoid a Senate impeachment trial, in which as a defense Nixon might assert that Kennedy had authorized far worse abuses of power than Nixon’s effort to “cover up” the Watergate burglary (which Nixon had not authorized or known about in advance). In short, the crimes of Kennedy included the use of the Mafia to attempt to assassinate Castro, as well as the successful assassinations of Diem in Vietnam and Lumumba in the Congo.

After hiring Hillary, Doar assigned her to confer with me regarding rules of procedure for the impeachment inquiry. At my first meeting with her I told her that Judiciary Committee Chairman Peter Rodino, House Speaker Carl Albert, Majority Leader Tip O’Neill, Parliamentarian Lou Deschler and I had previously all agreed that we should rely only on the then existing House Rules, and not advocate any changes. I also quoted Tip O’Neill’s statement that: “To try to change the rules now would be politically divisive. It would be like trying to change the traditional rules of baseball before a World Series.”

Hillary assured me that she had not drafted, and would not advocate, any such rules changes. However, as documented in my personal diary, I soon learned that she had lied. She had already drafted changes, and continued to advocate them. In one written legal memorandum, she advocated denying President Nixon representation by counsel. In so doing she simply ignored the fact that in the committee’s then-most-recent prior impeachment proceeding, the committee had afforded the right to counsel to Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas.

I had also informed Hillary that the Douglas impeachment files were available for public inspection in the committee offices. She later removed the Douglas files without my permission and carried them to the offices of the impeachment inquiry staff-where they were no longer accessible to the public.

Hillary had also made other ethically flawed procedural recommendations, arguing that the Judiciary Committee should: not hold any hearings with-or take depositions of-any live witnesses; not conduct any original investigation of Watergate, bribery, tax evasion, or any other possible impeachable offense of President Nixon; and should rely solely on documentary evidence compiled by other committees and by the Justice Department’s special Watergate prosecutor.

Only a few far-left Democrats supported Hillary’s recommendations. A majority of the committee agreed to allow President Nixon to be represented by counsel and to hold hearings with live witnesses. Hillary then advocated that the official rules of the House be amended to deny members of the committee the right to question witnesses. This recommendation was voted down by the full House. The committee also rejected her proposal that we leave the drafting of the articles of impeachment to her and her fellow impeachment-inquiry staffers.

It was not until two months after Nixon’s resignation that I first learned of still another questionable role of Hillary. On Sept. 26, 1974, Rep. Charles Wiggins, a Republican member of the committee, wrote to ask Chairman Rodino to look into “a troubling set of events.” That spring, Wiggins and other committee members had asked “that research should be undertaken so as to furnish a standard against which to test the alleged abusive conduct of Richard Nixon.” And, while “no such staff study was made available to the members at any time for their use,” Wiggins had just learned that such a study had been conducted-at committee expense-by a team of professors who completed and filed their reports with the impeachment-inquiry staff well in advance of our public hearings.

The report was kept secret from members of Congress. But after the impeachment-inquiry staff was disbanded, it was published commercially and sold in book stores. Wiggins wrote: “I am especially troubled by the possibility that information deemed essential by some of the members in their discharge of their responsibilities may have been intentionally suppressed by the staff during the course our investigation.” He was also concerned that staff members may have unlawfully received royalties from the book’s publisher.

On Oct. 3, Rodino wrote back: “Hillary Rodham of the impeachment-inquiry staff coordinated the work. The staff did not think the manuscript was useful in its present form.” No effort was ever made to ascertain whether or not Hillary or any other person on the committee staff received royalties.

Two decades later Bill Clinton became President. As was later to be described in the Wall Street Journal by Henry Ruth, the lead Watergate courtroom prosecutor, “The Clintons corrupted the soul of the Democratic Party.”

from "Sell Out' by, David Schippers:

Because of the nature of the alleged offenses, both the [Kathleen] Willey case and the Broaddrick case were important -- if the charges could be proven -- in establishing a pattern of obstruction, perjury, and witness tampering. In the Willey case in particular, the President had given a deposition in which he emphatically denied the allegations. Julie Steele, a former friend of Willey's, had testified against her, saying that Willey had encouraged her to lie.

To avoid the media, Al Tracy, Nancy Ruggero, and I met with Willey and her lawyer, Daniel Gecker, at a restaurant in Fredericksburg, Virginia, midway between Washington and Willey's home in Richmond.

The story Willey told us is one I came to believe. If we had been able to call live witnesses in the Senate trial, I would have called her to the stand.

We first met Clinton at the Richmond airport during the 1992 campaign. He gave a short speech and shook hands. He also gave Willey a hug. A friend had this captured on videotape. A short time later Clinton had his aide Nancy Hernreich get Willey's telephone number.

Later that afternoon, Willey was surprised to receive a telephone call from Clinton. He told her he would be in Williamsburg, Virginia, for the evening, without his wife, and that he could get rid of his Secret Service detail. Willey didn't respond. At about 6 PM Clinton called again with the same offer. Willey refused to meet him.

Two days later Willey and her mother attended a large rally on the grounds of the Virginia State Capitol in Richmond. Clinton was present, so Willey approached him and introduced her mother. Clinton talked to her mother will caressing Willey's neck and hair.

On Election Night, 1992, Willey, her husband, her two children, and a friend attended a victory celebration in Little Rock, where she met the President-elect and congratulated him.

About a week later, Clinton called her at home. He was attending a party in Washington and wondered, "Do you think you could come up here and see me?"

"Like how?"

"I mean could you come up and spend some time with me."

Willey told him she was not sure, and he dropped the subject. Later, he worked as a volunteer on several inaugural events, in the White House Correspondence Office, and in the White House Social Office.

After her husband's death, she obtained a part-time job working for White House Counsel Bernard Nussbaum.

~snip~ Discovering that her husband -- who was slipping into depression -- had put the family into deep financial straits, Willey desperately sought a better paying job. She asked for an appointment to see the President. On November 28, 1993, the day before she met with Clinton, her husband disappeared. She didn't yet know that he had committed suicide.

Kathleen Willey told us -- in detail -- everything that happened from the moment she met Clinton in the Oval Office until she met Linda Tripp and other White House staffers immediately after the encounter. There is no need at this point, when they are so well known, to go over the sordid details again.

Shortly after Willey went public, The White House -- in an action one federal judge ruled was illegal -- released several letters she had written to the President. The letters evinced no animosity. To the contrary, Willey seemed interested in supporting the President, and some of the letters were written after her encounter with the President in the Oval Office. The White House said the letters proved Willey was lying about the groping incident. Releasing the letters may have violated the Privacy Act and could have been an abuse of the Presidency. But before I could call Kathleen Willey as a witness in an impeachment inquiry or trial, I needed an explanation.

Willey told us that it wasn't until after her husband committed suicide that she learned how dire her financial straits were. She was an unemployed widow, deeply in debt, with two children.

The last time Kathleen had met with the President, she had stalked away angrily after having been groped by him. But in her desperation, she saw the President as the one powerful person who could quickly set her up in a well-paying job. Perhaps, she thought, if I write conciliatory letters to Clinton, giving the impression that all is forgiven and that I hold no grudge, I could reopen the dialogue, and he will help me find a good job. Willey had no intention of ever going public with the President's misbehavior.

Willey discussed what to do with her lawyer and friend Daniel Gecker. He knew about the groping incident and warned her that anything she wrote would need to be completely innocuous, without the remotest suggestion of a backmail, extortion, or veiled threat or suggestion that she wanted a job in exchange for keeping quiet. Kathleen understood. To ensure that nothing she wrote could be misconstrued as a threat, Willey had Gecker review and approve the letters.

In 1994 Kathleen was invited to attend a World Summit in Copenhagen, and in 1995 she represented the United States at a biodiversity summit in Jakarta, Indonesia. She was totally unqualified for either position.

But bad things happened after Willey was subpoeaned to give a deposition in the Paula Jones case. This story was even more shocking than the President's alleged assault on a married woman.

On July 31, 1997, Gecker received, without warning, a fax from the office of the President's attorney. Both Willey and her attorney, who was present during our interview, confirmed to us that it was a document entitled "Statement of Kathleen Willey" and that it came with the instruction that she was to read it as a public statement. It said: "The President of the United States never sexually harassed me in any way, and I have always considered myself to be on excellent terms with him." She ignored the request.

In August 1997 the groping incident was reported in the Drudge Report and Newsweek. Around this time she received a phone call from an acquaintance who was a major financial donor to President Clinton. He told her to avoid giving a deposition if she was subpoenaed in the Jones case and to deny that anything had ever happened because only two people knew and "all you have to do is deny it, too."

Willey was subpoenaed in the fall of 1997 but wasn't actually called to testify until January 10, 1998. Shortly after she received the subpoena, Gecker was visited by one of the President's lawyers. Gecker told Kathleen the gist of the meeting: Clinton's lawyer was suggesting she avoid testifying by taking he Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination. Gecker told Clinton's attorney that his client wouldn't take the Fifth because she had done nothing wrong.

A short time after that initial meeting, Gecker told us, he received an unsolicited package from the President's lawyers. It contained a form affidavit, a form motion to quash the deposition subpoena, and a memorandum of law in support of the motion to quash.

A short while before Willey was scheduled to testify, Gecker received another visit from the same lawyer. This time Gecker was told that he was only "a real estate lawyer" and that Kathleen Willey should really be represented by a top criminal attorney. Gecker responded that he was perfectly capable of handling a deposition and that he could not see any possible reason that Kathleen needed a criminal lawyer. Gecker added that even if she wanted such a lawyer, Willey was broke and could not afford the fees charged by top Washington criminal lawyers. The President's attorney offered that she wouldn't need to worry about fees because "we will take care of that."

After that conversation, Gecker reported, he received a call from one of the best criminal lawyers in Washington about representing Kathleen Willey. When Gecker again mentioned that she had no money, the lawyer replied that there would be no fees to pay.

Gecker conveyed this to Willey. She was frightened and convinced that if she testified she would be indicted by Janet Reno's Justice Department. She had seen how Billy Dale of the White House Travel Office had actually been indicted and tried for crimes he had not committed, reportedly because he had gotten in the way of the Clinton administration. She had seen the smears and attacks on Paula Jones. To add to her fears, she felt intimidated by events that followed.

Shortly before her January 10 deposition, Willey came out of her Virginia home to find all of her tires flat. Her mechanic asked, "Who the hell did you tick off? Your tires were flattened with a nail gun."

In another incident, a man called -- supposedly from the local electric company -- saying her electricity would be turned off that evening so they could run some tests. Later that afternoon, she called the electric company to find out how long the tests would last. She was told there was no plan to interrupt service and no record of anyone calling her.

Kathleen lives in a semirural area. The anonymous caller was reminding her that she was vulnerable and alone.

As the deposition of Kathleen Willey got closer, the intimidation increased. One day her cat, Bullseye, disappeared. On January 8, two days before she was to testify, Willey was walking her dogs in a secluded area early in the morning. A man in a jogging suit approached her.

JOGGER: Good morning, did you ever find your cat?

WILLEY: No, we haven't found her yet.

JOGGER: That's too bad. Bullseye was his name, wasn't it? [This shocks Willey, because she has not revealed the cat's name to anyone.]

JOGGER: Did you ever get those tires fixed?

WILLEY: They're fine [Kathleen starts to edge away and look around for help.]

JOGGER: So,---and---[Willey's children's first names]? [Kathleen walks faster toward her house.]

JOGGER: And our attorney, Dan, is he okay?

WILLEY: He's fine

JOGGER: I hope you're getting the message.

Willey was terrified. She turned and ran. The jogger called after her, "You're just not getting the message, are you?"

As a result of that meeting, Kathleen feared that she, her children, and her lawyer were at risk of physical harm. She told Gecker about the jogger but didn't mention the not-too-veiled threat against Gecker himself. As she put it, "He was my only hope--I didn't want to lose him." Willey confessed that even during the deposition she was contemplating whether to lie or to tell the truth and possibly suffer terrible consequences.

The deposition began as scheduled. However, before the questioning began, the President's lawyer said, "You know, I've talked to the President, and he just thinks the world of you. You don't really think this was sexual harassment. It wasn't unwelcome, was it."

"Not only was it unwelcome, it was unexpected."

In the room during the deposition were the court reporter, the Jones attorneys, the President's attorney, Daniel Gecker, Kathleen Willey, and the presiding judge.

Gecker saw that Willey was nervous. When the Jones attorneys asked about the incident in the Oval Office, she looked terrified. Gecker asked for a short recess to consult with his client. He took Kathleen aside and told her they were about to go into the heart of the subject.

"Kathleen, there is no turning back, what are you going to do."

"I'm going to tell the truth, the whole truth," she answered, with tears in her eyes. She went back and answered every question put to her.

The next morning, Willey stepped outside to pick up the newspaper. There on the porch, within a few feet of the front door, the skull of a small animal lay facing her.

I asked Willey if she would be willing to testify. As she looked at Gecker, I could see real fear in her eyes. He said it was up to her.

I confessed that we couldn't vouch for the tactics of the President's lawyers, but we would not embarrass her.

Okay, if I'm subpoenaed, I'll testify."

Because of that meeting, we planned to have Kathleen Willey and Dan Gecker as witnesses at the Senate impeachment trial.

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