In Deposition, Clinton Quizzed About Lewinsky

President Clinton has acknowledged under oath that he talked with Vernon E. Jordan Jr. about his friend’s efforts to find a new job for Monica S. Lewinsky, but the president testified that it was his personal secretary, Betty Currie, who initiated the career help for Lewinsky, according to a detailed account of his sealed deposition in the Paula Corbin Jones sexual harassment case.

During Clinton’s five-hour deposition on Jan. 17--the first by a sitting president as a defendant in a court case--the president testified that Lewinsky visited his office on perhaps five occasions and that they may have been alone together.

But the president flatly denied ever having had sexual relations with Lewinsky, according to the account. For the purposes of the deposition, Jones’ lawyers produced a written definition of sexual relations that encompassed acts such as fondling and oral sex but not kissing on the mouth--a definition that leaves Clinton little room to offer a revised explanation of his relationship with Lewinsky.

In recent weeks, some advisors have suggested possible scenarios in which the president might admit to intimate contact short of the oral sex Lewinsky reportedly has claimed they engaging in, but any contradiction with his testimony risks a perjury charge.

For Clinton, the deposition was an excruciatingly long and specific look into his past, as lawyers questioned him not just about Jones and Lewinsky but about five other women who were named by the Jones team as well.

Much of the interrogation by the Jones team actually centered on Lewinsky. Clinton acknowledged exchanging gifts with the young woman--she gave him a tie and at least one book, he recalled, while he gave her souvenirs from Martha’s Vineyard and did not dispute that he may also have given her a hatpin, a gold brooch and a book of Walt Whitman poetry. Lewinsky and other interns once brought him pizza in the Oval Office during the federal government shutdown in 1995, he testified, and after her April 1996 transfer to the Pentagon, Lewinsky sent him personal messages through Currie.

In addition to denying a sexual relationship with Lewinsky, Clinton repeated his denial that he propositioned Jones for oral sex in a Little Rock, Ark., hotel suite in 1991. He denied sexual contact with three of the other women he was asked about. U.S. District Judge Susan Webber Wright, who was present for the deposition, ruled he did not have to answer regarding a fourth woman because she had no state or federal employment. But Clinton acknowledged for the first time in any known forum that he did have sexual relations with Gennifer Flowers, saying it occurred just one time in 1977.

Selected aspects of Clinton’s testimony in the Jones case have been reported by the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and other news outlets in recent weeks. But this account represents the president’s most detailed description about the frequency and nature of his contacts with Lewinsky to be made public.

It was secret tape-recordings of the young White House aide’s allegations of a sexual relationship with him--and her assertion in those ostensibly private conversations with a friend that Clinton had urged her to lie about it--that launched independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr’s investigation of whether the president suborned perjury or attempted to obstruct justice.

Starr, who obtained a copy of Clinton’s deposition through Wright’s Little Rock court, is investigating whether the interest of the Jones team in Lewinsky sparked an effort by Clinton and his friend Jordan to influence her testimony.

As Starr’s investigation enters its eighth week, the president has offered no public explanation for his dealings with Lewinsky beyond several emphatic denials that they engaged in sex.

Even in the sealed deposition, Clinton offers no explanation for his frequent contacts with Lewinsky or why he was kept informed about a former low-level aide’s job search--nor was he asked in open-ended terms by Jones’ lawyers. Clinton also testified that he spoke with Lewinsky at some point about the likelihood that she would be called to testify about the nature of their relationship in the Jones case. However, he described the conversation as a quick and casual exchange in the presence of his personal secretary, Currie.

Clinton’s legal team in the Jones matter was informed on Dec. 5 that Lewinsky was a potential witness. Thus, the president’s interactions with her and Jordan after that point are key to Starr’s obstruction of justice investigation. Clinton has said publicly that he never urged Lewinsky to lie about any sexual liaison. But in the deposition, he makes clear that he was aware that his secretary and close friend were looking for work for her at a time when her testimony could be critical to the Jones case.

Jordan, who returns for a second day of testimony before a Washington grand jury today, has said that he embarked on a job search for Lewinsky after being asked by Currie. He has told associates he inferred that the request had come from the president. According to the associates, Jordan has said he was not aware when he first intervened to help Lewinsky that she was involved in the Jones case, even though Currie’s call asking for his help in finding Lewinsky a job came three days after Clinton’s lawyers were told she might testify.

Later, Jordan told associates, both Lewinsky and Clinton assured him they had had no sexual relationship.

Even for a roller-coaster presidency, Jan. 17 had to be one of the lowest moments of Clinton’s tenure. Despite all his attempts to avoid it, he was being forced to submit to a daylong interrogation not about his politics or his business dealings but about his sex life.

To those inside the room where the questioning took place, Clinton appeared to keep his composure and answered in measured terms. In response to many of the particular questions, his language was imprecise. He said he did not recall certain events or know for sure if he had done some things he was asked about, although he often allowed that it was possible. But when the allegations regarding sex were raised, Clinton answered in firm, declarative sentences or unequivocal one-word answers like “no.”

He expressed aggravation at being accused of so many illicit acts by his conservative opponents, echoing what his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, would say later about a “vast right-wing conspiracy” after the Lewinsky story first became public Jan. 21. By lunchtime, Clinton had been asked about a number of women with no mention of Jones--the supposed focus of the deposition. He snapped at a Jones lawyer and seemingly dared him to ask more questions even though they were about to take a break.

Jones came personally to look Clinton in the eye as he discussed her allegations, and brought six lawyers. Gathered on the other side of the long conference table in the offices of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom were four of the firm’s lawyers representing Clinton, as well as White House counsel Charles F.C. Ruff. Attorney Bill W. Bristow attended for co-defendant Danny Ferguson, the former Arkansas state trooper assigned to then-Gov. Clinton’s security detail on the day when Jones has alleged he propositioned her. In addition, Judge Wright, a pair of video camera technicians and a Secret Service agent were present.

The indignity of the event was impossible to avoid. Rather than asking the president direct, perhaps uncomfortable, questions about specific sex acts, Jones’ lawyers produced at the outset a written description of what they meant whenever they asked about sexual relations. The document also provided to all a clear, indisputable definition so that no one could later argue about what was intended.

Under that definition, sexual relations meant any contact with someone’s groin, buttocks, breast or inner thigh if intended to stimulate sexual arousal. No specific mention was made of kissing lips.

Unbeknownst to Clinton or his lawyers at that point, Jones’ legal team had arrived with a secret weapon--full briefings from Linda Tripp about her tape-recorded conversations with her friend Lewinsky detailing a sexual relationship the young woman reportedly said she had with the president. Four days before the deposition, after Tripp had told her story to Starr and turned over to his office the tapes she secretly made of their telephone conversations, Tripp had made another tape. This one was recorded in person, via a wire worn on Tripp’s body at Starr’s behest.

On Jan. 16, the day before the deposition, Tripp had called Lewinsky to an Arlington, Va., hotel so that Starr’s investigators could confront her with her recorded assertions that Clinton and Jordan encouraged her to deny any affair under oath. As the prosecutors questioned Lewinsky, Tripp left the hotel and went to her Maryland home, where she met that evening with a Jones lawyer.

When the Jones team questioned Clinton the next morning, they were armed with extensive details of Lewinsky’s story--including not only her detailed account of sex with the president but also her description of Jordan’s efforts to help her find a job.

That information was invaluable to Jones’ lawyers, who were trying to prove that Clinton used his governmental power to reward women who succumbed to his sexual advances, in contrast to Jones, who maintained her own career as a state worker had been circumscribed after she rebuffed the then-governor. Lewinsky’s story was considered to be prime evidence of a pattern of Clinton behavior.

In some ways, Clinton’s sworn answers to questions about his ties with Lewinsky conflict with information that has been reported since the deposition. Most notably, he gave Jones’ lawyers a significantly different account of his last meeting with Lewinsky.

During the deposition, he said he saw her briefly just before Christmas, when she stopped by to visit Currie and he stuck his head out of the Oval Office to say hello. But White House entry logs turned over to Starr’s office showed that Lewinsky visited the White House the Sunday after Christmas, Dec. 28. Sources familiar with the session have said she met with Clinton, and they were not aware of anyone present other than the two of them.