Word: starr
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...alleged pattern is meant to buttress Jones' claim that after she refused Clinton's sexual advances at Little Rock's Excelsior Hotel in 1991, her career with the state of Arkansas was roadblocked. But the filing may do even more to help explain the leads independent counsel Kenneth Starr is pursuing as he tries to build a broader obstruction case against Clinton in the matter of Monica Lewinsky. For a scandal-weary public trying to make sense of it all, the Clinton depicted in these documents is a chilling character indeed: not the charming rogue of Primary Colors...
...compelling and seamless as Willey's 60 Minutes performance may have been, her tale is by no means free of contradiction or conundrum. Starr's investigators have heard conflicting testimony about her state of mind after the Clinton encounter. According to Linda Tripp, who claims to have encountered Willey after she left the Oval Office that day, she seemed "flustered" but "happy." When Newsweek's Michael Isikoff was pursuing her story last year, Willey put him in touch with a friend, Julie Steele, who first said Willey had confided in her the night of the encounter, then recanted and said...
...Lewinsky's reliability as a witness became more suspect with every different account of her story, Starr apparently became increasingly interested in Willey. Last Tuesday, the day Willey appeared before Starr's grand jury in Washington, two FBI agents appeared at Steele's front door in woodsy Midlothian, Va., a suburb of Richmond. Starr's agents didn't appear to be interested in quizzing Steele about Willey's credibility. Instead, sources familiar with the interview tell TIME, they spent much of three hours putting Steele on the defensive. Though they did inquire whether Willey had ever asked...
Whatever damage the filing may have done to Clinton's position in the Jones case, it is even harder to gauge its impact on Starr's criminal probe. It is by no means clear that suppression of gossip can be the foundation of a federal obstruction-of-justice case. The alleged sexual encounters may have been crude and boorish, but they are not criminal; if Clinton pressured paramours not to talk, it might be revealing, but it carries no criminal liability as long as he wasn't tampering with a case. Starr's best hope is to try to prove...
...short, even if Starr could prove that Clinton fondled women, sought to obtain their silence through favors or intimidation and then lied about it, the prosecutor would still have difficulty lining up the chain of proof required in a criminal case. As a lawyer working on the case put it last week, Clinton "may have had sex with Monica, and he may have helped her with a job, but he can say it was never in an effort to silence her in the Jones case." That leaves Starr with an unpleasant choice: forwarding to Congress what looks like a circumstantial...