Starr Looks for a Pattern in Job Offers by Clinton Camp

As investigators worked round the clock last month combing through tape recordings of former White House intern Monica S. Lewinsky, they heard plenty of salacious talk about her supposed intimacy with the president of the United States.

But what riveted career prosecutors--and prompted independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr to seek an extraordinary expansion of his jurisdiction--was hearing that unofficial presidential advisor Vernon E. Jordan Jr. had arranged for Lewinsky to be offered a job.

To Starr’s investigators, that echoed a pattern: More than once, from the governor’s mansion in Little Rock, Ark., to the White House, when Bill Clinton’s political life has been in jeopardy, he and his most trusted aides have been accused of offering to line up jobs and financial security for those who might hold sensitive information about Clinton.

The intended beneficiaries have included a reputed former mistress, former bodyguards and an ex-law partner of First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. In nearly every instance, Clinton’s allies have not shied from using government resources to help accomplish their aims.

Clinton supporters have defended the job assistance as nothing more than reasonable help for friends in need--and not much different from the traditional patronage that has been part of American politics for more than 200 years.

As investigators looked at the pattern, however, it suggested the possibility of cover-up: Was the aid designed to encourage potential witnesses to remain silent or otherwise withhold cooperation? Such actions could amount to obstruction of justice, encouraging perjury or other serious crimes.

And if Starr should succeed in amassing persuasive evidence of such wrongdoing, the furor over Clinton’s personal relationship with a former intern could be transformed into a major crisis--for the president and for the country.

Among the examples of the job pattern:

* Early in Clinton’s first White House term, according to one of his former bodyguards, the president dangled offers of federal jobs before two Arkansas state troopers who were threatening to go public with accounts of aiding his extramarital affairs as governor.

* Arkansas cabaret singer Gennifer Flowers, whose account of a long-running affair triggered an uproar during Clinton’s first presidential campaign, said Gov. Clinton landed her a state job. This, despite the fact that on a merit test Flowers scored ninth out of the 11 applicants.

* In the spring of 1994, top administration officials, including the White House chief of staff, used their influence and government offices to help round up hundreds of thousands of dollars in consulting deals for former Justice Department official Webster L. Hubbell when he became a target in the original Whitewater investigation.

Administration officials declined to comment. But Lanny J. Davis, who until two weeks ago was a White House special counsel, defended Clinton. He said it is typical for the president to help friends and associates.

“This does not sound to me like a pattern of people being paid off,” Davis said. “You could find numerous instances of Bill Clinton helping his friends get jobs.”

A pattern of providing jobs for potentially harmful witnesses is another matter--and it is that possibility that is drawing intense scrutiny from a federal grand jury as it examines the Lewinsky matter for evidence of obstruction of justice. Did Lewinsky receive a job offer in tacit exchange for silence? And if so, was it a component of a calculated scheme of witness tampering?

“These are people Bill Clinton is worried about, and he’s trying to keep them happy,” said a former official of the Clinton White House.

There is also the related question of whether the beneficiaries were positioned to--in effect--demand jobs for silence from Clinton, according to political science professor Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia.

“These are people getting favors because they have a twist on the president,” said Sabato, the author of “Feeding Frenzy” and other books on government and the media. “It’s the most personal kind of patronage in American history.”

Rooted in Allegations of Former Bodyguards

The ongoing investigation of Clinton’s dealings with Lewinsky actually is rooted in the allegations made by his former Arkansas bodyguards in the fall of 1993.

One of the stories conveyed in a series of interviews conducted by Times reporters included the eyewitness account of one trooper who said he arranged Clinton’s alleged encounter in a Little Rock hotel with Paula Corbin Jones, then a state employee.

It is Jones’ sexual-harassment lawsuit against Clinton and a co-defendant, Trooper Danny Ferguson, that eventually led her lawyers to seek out alleged paramours, including Lewinsky.

In 1997, when Jones’ lawyers signaled that they wanted to question the ex-intern under oath--to help establish Clinton’s alleged “pattern” of seeking sex from subordinates--Lewinsky was showered with job prospects and a chaperoned introduction to her own Washington lawyer.

Lewinsky’s experience echoed that of the Arkansas troopers four years earlier.

According to the troopers, Clinton offered them federal jobs when they still had not decided whether to allow their recollections to be published. Among their potentially damaging allegations: Corroborating details of the supposed Flowers affair and allegations that they had been required to help Clinton carry out and conceal numerous sexual trysts over the years.

The troopers’ veracity and motives have come under criticism. In 1993, they were associated with a critic of Clinton’s, and initially some troopers sought a book deal to compensate for the expected loss of their state jobs.

They ultimately gave their recollections without such a deal. They later received a few thousand dollars in contributions from conservative sources and retained their trooper jobs, but two of troopers were forced to give up secondary jobs as a result of the controversy following their public statements.

Ferguson earlier told The Times that he held a series of telephone conversations in October 1993 with the president--including, he said, three in one day--during the course of which Clinton offered him and Trooper Roger Perry federal jobs.

Ferguson said the president asked about what the troopers were saying to reporters.

In one interview, the trooper described how Clinton specifically asked if he wanted a job in Washington.

“I said [to President Clinton], ‘No, sir.’ He said, ‘Well, there is going to be a regional job [opening] up [with the Federal Emergency Management Administration].’ He didn’t specify a city. ‘Or, there is a U.S. marshal’s job open,’ ” Ferguson quoted Clinton as saying.

Ferguson said he told Clinton he was not willing to uproot his family, and he declined the offers. However, “the very next day” a Clinton aide called Ferguson’s wife and asked if she wanted a job in the White House, Ferguson said.

That Clinton aide, a regional FEMA director from Texas who had been the former governor’s chief of security, also called the other troopers to warn them that their reputations would be harmed if they spoke out about Clinton, according to two troopers. “He told me he was speaking for the president,” Perry said.

If that message was “the stick,” Perry regarded Clinton’s talks with Ferguson as “the carrot.” Perry said he got a clear signal that he could be considered for a federal job “if I kept quiet.”

Instead, Perry was one of the troopers who agreed to go on the record with public accounts of Clinton’s sexual conduct in Arkansas. Two months later, in December 1993, The Times and the conservative American Spectator magazine published some of the troopers’ allegations. The Times also reported that Clinton had sought to discourage troopers from speaking out by offering federal jobs.

Clinton immediately denied offering jobs for silence, though a White House aide acknowledged that the president had talked to one trooper.

“The allegations on abuse of the state or the federal positions I have--it’s not true,” Clinton said on Dec. 22, 1993. “That absolutely did not happen.”

Behind the scenes, the then-emerging story prompted turmoil. Clinton’s former gubernatorial chief of staff, Betsey Wright, who was then a Washington-based lobbyist, flew to Little Rock to press Ferguson to recant his account of presidential phone calls.

A witness to her confrontation with Ferguson told The Times that Wright was “scared to death” about those phone calls.

“She said, ‘This infidelity stuff we can handle--don’t worry. But . . . this [jobs for silence allegation] could get the man impeached,’ ” the witness, an Arkansas state employee, said.

Wright later conceded that “the phone calls were most problematic” but said she did not recall making any reference to impeachment.

Ferguson’s personal attorney eventually issued a statement that said there had been no explicit quid pro quo, that Clinton did not specifically say he would provide the jobs in exchange for the troopers’ silence.

But Ferguson stood by his original account that Clinton offered the jobs during the same conversations in which the president expressed his desire to preempt the troopers’ disclosures.

Sex Controversy Came in 1992 Primaries

Clinton’s first brush with a high-profile sex controversy came early in the presidential primaries of 1992. The emergence of accusations related to his dealings with Flowers was particularly nettlesome because, it was alleged, Clinton not only had an adulterous affair, but he also used his authority and high office to get her an administrative assistant’s job with the state of Arkansas.

At the time, Clinton denied having the affair and he denied helping Flowers get the state job. According to recent reports, Clinton may have acknowledged some sort of affair with Flowers in his sworn deposition last month in the Jones case. It is not known whether Clinton was asked about any role in getting Flowers a state job.

According to Flowers, she went to Clinton and said: “Get me a job.” She said he agreed to help.

Clinton sent her to one of his aides who coached her, Flowers said, on how to apply for the job. Flowers said the job description also had to be altered to better fit her application.

One of those passed over in favor of Flowers filed a grievance. This led to an internal investigation that was critical of the Flowers appointment. The matter was headed for arbitration and possible public exposure when Flowers taped some of her telephone conversations with Clinton--calls in which Clinton is heard advising her to deny their relationship if confronted by the press.

Long after the 1992 controversy had faded and Clinton had moved into the White House, one of his former bodyguards corroborated Clinton’s role in dispensing a state job to Flowers. Arkansas Trooper Larry Patterson said he witnessed a Clinton telephone call to a state employment office official.

“I was in the [governor’s] car when he made the call on the cellular phone,” Patterson told The Times in a 1993 interview. “I remember Clinton was insistent. He finally said something like, ‘Do whatever it takes . . . get her a job.’ ”

The state official denied receiving such a call from Clinton. However, he acknowledged recommending that Flowers be given the job.

A Hurried Effort to Help Hubbell

Barely a year after Clinton had taken up residence in the White House, another crisis bloomed, provoking the president’s aides to hurriedly solicit jobs and other assistance for a plunging member of their inner circle.

It was the second weekend of March 1994. Prosecutors in the budding Whitewater investigation had Hubbell squarely in their cross-hairs. The president’s golfing partner and Hillary Rodham Clinton’s former law partner had worked along with her on disputed land transactions at the center of the controversy.

Hubbell, it was decided that weekend, would resign as associate attorney general of the United States to fight accusations that he had bilked clients and partners at the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock.

At the conclusion of a Whitewater-related meeting on March 13, 1994, White House Chief of Staff Thomas F. “Mack” McLarty informed Mrs. Clinton that efforts were underway to assist Hubbell. Mrs. Clinton nodded her assent, administration officials have said.

Among other matters, Whitewater investigators had hoped that Hubbell, in exchange for leniency, would shed light on why certain Rose Law Firm records were missing.

But before prosecutors sought to exert leverage over Hubbell, Clinton aides and supporters swung into action:

* The head of the Small Business Administration, Erskine Bowles, a presidential appointee who is now the White House chief of staff, contacted at least three men to seek consulting deals on Hubbell’s behalf.

* Clinton’s trade representative, Mickey Kantor, in 1994 and 1995 helped Hubbell financially by raising money for a trust fund organized to pay costs of educating his children. Kantor also helped Hubbell’s son land two jobs, the first in the U.S. Trade Representative’s Office.

And months after Hubbell pleaded guilty to fraud and tax-evasion charges, Kantor helped dislodge a disputed consulting fee from the city of Los Angeles.

* Clinton’s chief of staff in spring 1994, McLarty, helped lead the efforts on Hubbell’s behalf by making numerous calls to prospective benefactors from the White House.

* And McLarty conferred with Clinton confidant Jordan, who arranged a consulting deal for Hubbell that brought him more than $60,000 in fees from Revlon Inc., the New York cosmetics firm.

Jordan, who sits on Revlon’s board and is a Washington-based lawyer for the company, told congressional investigators in July that he spoke with at least three Revlon executives about hiring Hubbell, including Chairman Ronald O. Perelman.

Jordan was asked under oath by lawyers for the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee whether Clinton knew at the time that Jordan “had gotten any work” for Hubbell.

“I told the president in an informal setting that ‘I’m doing what I can for Webb Hubbell,’ ” Jordan testified. “The president said, ‘Thanks.’ ”

It was Revlon that also offered employment to Lewinsky--after Jordan intervened two months ago to help her. The company offered Lewinsky a $40,000-a-year job last month at about the same time that she filed her affidavit swearing that she never had sexual relations with Clinton.

Jordan also had selected Lewinsky’s first lawyer in Washington, Francis D. Carter, and drove her to her first meeting with him.

Immediately after reports of his activity appeared, Jordan called a news conference.

“I want to say to you absolutely and unequivocally that Ms. Lewinsky told me in no uncertain terms that she did not have a sexual relationship with the president,” he said, adding, “At no time did I ever say, suggest or intimate to her that she should lie.

“Throughout my professional career, I have been privileged to assist people with their vocational aspirations. I have done so for two reasons. First, I stand on the shoulders of many individuals who have helped me. And second, I believe to whom much is given, much is required. And so I believe in giving a helping hand.”

As for Lewinsky specifically, Jordan said, “I was pleased to be helpful to Ms. Lewinsky, whose drive, ambition and personality were impressive.”

Revlon rescinded the job offer Jan. 21, the same day the imbroglio broke publicly in The Times and the Washington Post.

Political science professor Sabato said that with such examples, Clinton has given the country “a whole new definition” for patronage.

Times staff writer Glenn F. Bunting contributed to this story.

* SALVOS AT STARR: Clinton aide accuses independent counsel of ‘witch hunt.’ A15