IRS Jones Audit Reported Probe Target

The inspector general of the Treasury Department is investigating whether politics prompted an IRS audit of Paula Corbin Jones, the woman who is suing President Clinton for alleged sexual harassment, her lawyer said Tuesday night.

Jones and her husband, Stephen, were notified in September that the IRS intended to audit their 1995 tax returns. The audit notice, coming days after Jones rejected a potential settlement offer in the harassment case, was at the time questioned by Jones’ representatives as “peculiar.”

“We are very pleased that the Treasury Department is responsible and responsive enough to conduct an official examination of the very suspect circumstances surrounding the initiation of this tax audit,” Jones said in a statement released at a Long Beach news conference held immediately after she and her attorneys had met with inspector general investigators for two hours.

Dallas attorney Donovan Campbell, the lead attorney in Jones’ sexual-harassment suit, told reporters the “the impetus for the Treasury Department review came from certain elements in Congress . . . It did not come from Congress as a whole. . . . It was a number of Congress members, we are told.

“We didn’t ask for it,” Campbell said. “We were contacted by the Treasury Department investigators and asked to cooperate with them and we are.”

Speaking to reporters in a Dallas hotel, Clinton’s lawyer, Robert Bennett, speculated that the audit was initiated by those in Congress “who want to humiliate the president.”

“I’m sure we’ll find that those people are the same people who have been trying to beat up on President Clinton since the beginning,” Bennett said.

In Washington, Treasury Department spokeswoman Susan Sallet said the agency had no comment. The department said last fall when it received a letter from members of Congress raising questions about the Jones audit that any investigation would be conducted by the inspector general’s office.

Campbell said among the things being investigated by the Treasury Department inspector general was “the possibility of improper or political motives in selecting the Jones tax return for an IRS audit,” and “the overall handling of the audit to date.”

Treasury Department representatives contacted Jones and her attorneys in early December, Campbell said, but Jones did not meet with investigators until Tuesday night in a Long Beach hotel.

Although Campbell would not say that he believes Clinton ordered the Jones’ audit, he remarked that “it would be fair to say the timing concerns us.”

When news of the audit surfaced in September, the White House emphatically denied any involvement.

In her lawsuit filed in May 1994, Jones claims Clinton exposed himself and asked for oral sex in a Little Rock, Ark., hotel room in 1991 while Clinton was Arkansas governor and she was a state employee.

Clinton has denied Jones’ allegations and said he does not recall meeting her.

Jones recently revised her lawsuit after receiving a judge’s permission. In the modified complaint, she claimed Clinton--as governor--granted governmental and employment benefits such as raises and promotions to female state employees who succumbed to his sexual advances.

The new complaint reduced the financial amount she wanted from $700,000 to $525,000 and dropped a defamation claim against Clinton’s co-defendant, Danny Ferguson, an Arkansas state trooper who helped guard the former governor.

Jones, who lives in Long Beach, had claimed Ferguson tarnished her reputation by saying she was eager to be Clinton’s mistress. Without the claim, lawyers may have less reason to delve into Jones’ past.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.