Little Rock a Battleground of Credibility in Clinton Flap : Arkansas: President’s former longtime aide flew to state capital in effort to get a trooper to partly recant.

Credibility has become the battleground after a weeklong furor over allegations that President Clinton, as governor of Arkansas, used state troopers to conceal and carry out extramarital affairs and then offered federal jobs to discourage the troopers from speaking out.

Those charges by some of Clinton’s former Arkansas bodyguards were met with strong denunciations by the President. First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton also criticized the allegations of infidelity.

The Clinton camp has since shifted to an intensive effort to discredit the accusers.

Early last week Betsey Wright, a longtime Clinton aide and confidante who is now a Washington lobbyist, returned to Little Rock, Ark., to manage efforts to persuade one trooper to approve an affidavit contradicting elements of his own story. She also acknowledged a role in helping to make public potentially damaging details about two other troopers’ private lives.

Wright, who served for years as Clinton’s chief of staff when he was governor, said she took those actions as a private citizen and at her own expense. She said she was in contact with the White House but was not sent by the Administration.

“I did it as a friend and because I couldn’t stand it, knowing that so many falsehoods were afoot,” she said in an interview.

In Little Rock, where subsequent criticism of troopers Roger L. Perry and Larry G. Patterson has ranged from accusations of lying to insurance investigators and collaborating in an alleged insurance scam to claims of sex harassment, the troopers have found their pasts under the same kind of scrutiny that their charges put the President under.

In an interview, Perry denied lying to investigators or engaging in insurance fraud, and said the sex harassment claim was brought by a former police association employee after Perry forced her to resign. The woman’s claim was rejected by a state hearing officer. But Perry is already living with the effects of the story he set in motion. Last week he was transferred from the governor’s security detail to narcotics investigation, and his suddenly controversial status led him to resign as president of the Arkansas State Police Assn.

“I have never felt so alone in my life,” he said.

The troopers’ Little Rock attorney, longtime Clinton critic Cliff Jackson, called the growing laundry list of criticism “a bunch of red herrings, a Clinton diversion. Sure, these guys (the troopers) have their shortcomings. They are no saints. But the issue isn’t whether in their whole lives they’ve never told a lie. The issue is whether they are telling the truth now about Bill Clinton.”

Indeed, that is the central issue to the White House, as well.

“People have begun to question the veracity of the men and their story,” Mark D. Gearan, the White House communications director, said Friday.

White House officials have been most concerned about allegations that Clinton tried to use an offer of federal jobs to discourage the troopers from speaking out. Last Sunday, senior Clinton aide Bruce Lindsey confirmed that the President had made phone calls this fall to trooper Danny Ferguson, but Lindsey denied that the President was offering jobs for silence.

Meanwhile, Wright drove to the governor’s mansion in Little Rock to find Ferguson. She took with her a copy of the American Spectator magazine that contained the allegations that Clinton had explicitly offered Ferguson a job for his help in thwarting publication of any stories.

Wright had a brief meeting with Ferguson, who was on duty there as a security officer. Wright showed him the article with the references to his phone conversations with the President underlined.

“She said, ‘Don’t worry about this infidelity stuff. We can handle that. But this (a reference to the underlined material) could get the man impeached,’ ” said one person who heard the conversation but asked not to be identified.

Wright said she could not recall the conversation verbatim and doubted using any reference to impeachment.

“But, yes, the phone calls were the most problematic,” she said.

She asked Ferguson to hold a press conference, but he refused, according to an account in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. The trooper also refused a suggestion to let Little Rock attorney Stephen Engstrom draft an affidavit for him. Engstrom had been contacted by Lindsey to assist the Clinton camp on the matter.

In the end, the trooper agreed to have his own attorney, Robert Batton, issue an affidavit speaking on his behalf in which the lawyer said that “President Clinton never offered or indicated a willingness to offer any trooper a job in exchange for silence or help in shaping their stories.”

Wright said she did not help draft the document but said Engstrom did confer with Ferguson’s lawyer.

The affidavit was released Wednesday, a day after The Times published its account in which Ferguson, at the time still unidentified at his request, was a key source of the job offer allegations. The affidavit immediately raised questions about the troopers’ stories.

Ferguson tried to clarify his contradictory statements later that day. He said the affidavit was meant to say that Clinton did not expressly offer federal jobs for silence. Clinton “didn’t say those words,” Ferguson said.

But Ferguson continued to stand behind key elements of his claims, made in prior interviews with The Times, that Clinton discussed federal jobs both for Ferguson and for Perry.

In those interviews, Ferguson said that Clinton had asked him for information about what the other troopers were planning to say. It was Clinton’s apparent intention, Ferguson later told Perry, “to come in the back door and shut (the story) down.”

Ferguson said that Clinton offered him jobs with either the Federal Emergency Management Agency or the U.S. Marshals Service. The affidavit was meant to underline that the job offers were not explicitly tied to silence.

By week’s end, the job offer issue remained clouded. Jackson called the Ferguson affidavit “a fraud” and “an exercise in semantics,” and accused Wright of orchestrating a White House “campaign of deceit and obfuscation.”

Another round of damaging criticism hit the troopers Thursday when it was disclosed that Patterson had lied to his superiors about the circumstances surrounding a serious car accident in 1990.

Late on a foggy December night, Patterson crashed his unmarked state police car into a tree when he said he had to swerve on an icy road to avoid another car. Perry, a passenger in his car, was hurled into the windshield and suffered a broken neck.

In a subsequent memo to state police superiors, Patterson failed to mention that prior to the accident he, Perry and a third state police employee had been drinking at a popular Little Rock nightclub.

Patterson admitted lying in his report. “I done the memo. I did not tell all the truth,” he told a Little Rock press conference Thursday. “I was in fear for my job.”

Although subsequently admitting under oath that he had consumed a number of cocktails, Patterson apparently passed a sobriety test at the crash site. Col. Tommy Goodwin, director of the Arkansas State Police, said the accident was investigated by Little Rock police and Patterson was not cited for driving under the influence.

Finally, on Friday, a lawyer for Patterson’s insurance company--which has refused to pay Perry’s medical bills and is fighting Perry’s still-pending lawsuit from the accident--accused both troopers of lying on their insurance claims.

“They lied as bad as anyone I’ve ever known,” attorney Roy G. Sanders told the New York Times in an interview published Friday.

Perry denied the allegation. “We had too much to drink. I never said otherwise,” Perry said. He acknowledged, however, that he had not gone to his superiors to inform them about Patterson’s misleading accident report despite the fact that he knew it to be deficient. “I didn’t want to do nothing that would get Larry fired,” Perry said.

Patterson ultimately was suspended without pay for two weeks for misuse of his state car--driving on personal business--at the time of the accident.

Perry, who had spinal surgery and spent two weeks in the hospital with a clamp and brace device bolted into his skull, said he incurred medical bills in excess of $40,000 and saw his small savings account wiped out in a few days.

Some of his doctors still have not been paid, he said.

Under pressure from his own medical insurance carrier, Perry said he finally had to sue his friend Patterson in order to force Patterson’s auto insurance carrier to engage in negotiations. The suit, still pending in Pulaski County Circuit Court, seeks $100,000 in damages, the liability limit of Patterson’s policy.

Perry said that he has twice authorized his attorneys to settle--once as recently as last summer--for accrued medical and legal costs. The case is scheduled for a hearing in April to determine if Patterson’s insurance company is liable for Perry’s bills.

Perry said his medical insurance carrier gets first claim on any recovered funds to compensate for about $40,000 in prior payments. He said that after legal expenses he is unlikely to get much from the suit or a settlement.

“Look, I’m no angel, but these things they’re saying about me are bull----,” Perry said. “And what we’re saying about Bill Clinton is the truth no matter what they say about us.”

The White House believes the intense scrutiny of the troopers is helping defuse the controversy. Gearan called the latest allegations surrounding the car accident “another example of people questioning their veracity.”

In addition, Arkansas officials said last week that they are investigating whether Perry and Patterson violated state police regulations by going public with the Clinton accusations. Rules prohibit “using their positions for personal gain.”

Both troopers have denied receiving any money--or any promise of money--for their stories. However, they acknowledged in interviews as early as last August that they were interested in writing a book. No negotiations for a book deal have been conducted, according to the troopers and their attorneys.

Meanwhile, Wright has returned to Washington vowing to continue helping Clinton.

Her brief campaign in Arkansas last week was reminiscent of her arrival in the 1992 presidential campaign, when she dropped out of a Harvard University fellowship program to return to Little Rock after Gennifer Flowers alleged a 12-year affair with Clinton. At that time, she hired Jack Palladino, a San Francisco-based private investigator, to collect information to combat what she called “bimbo eruptions” as reporters delved into rumors of Clinton’s womanizing.

And once again last week Wright turned to Palladino for consultation.

“I did talk to him (Palladino) when I was in Little Rock for moral support,” Wright told the Washington Post on Friday.