Jones’ Attorneys Detail Allegations Against Clinton

Attorneys for Paula Corbin Jones unveiled the core of their case against President Clinton on Friday, releasing testimony they said shows that Clinton systematically preyed on women for sex and then used rewards or intimidation to win their silence.

The information, packed inside 700 pages of legal motions, transcripts and other material filed in Jones’ sexual-harassment case, provided a voluminous compendium of allegations against the president.

Among the new material made public was a large portion of Clinton’s Jan. 17 deposition in the Jones case, in which the president denies making sexual advances or having a sexual relationship with any of the women he was questioned about, except Arkansas singer Gennifer Flowers.

And his lawyer, Robert S. Bennett, said the documents show the case is nothing more than “cotton candy.”

“When you bite into it,” he said in a Los Angeles press conference, “there’s nothing there.”

The documents were filed in federal court in Little Rock, Ark., to counter motions by Clinton’s attorneys to have the Jones case dismissed before the scheduled May 27 trial. If Jones succeeds in that effort, she faces a tough challenge in proving that her career as an Arkansas state employee suffered after she rejected Clinton’s alleged sexual advance in 1991.

But the new depositions alone came as a public blow to the president. They included the first on-the-record accusation by a former White House volunteer, Kathleen E. Willey, that Clinton made an unwanted sexual advance in the Oval Office in 1993.

Willey becomes the fourth woman--after Jones, Flowers and Clinton’s Arkansas schoolmate Dolly Kyle Browning--to publicly accuse Clinton of sexual misconduct. White House officials have attacked the other women’s credibility, but they have not attacked Willey, who was a reluctant witness in the Jones case. But Willey now appears to be less reticent and has given a lengthy television interview to CBS News, which plans to broadcast it Sunday on “60 Minutes.”

The filing Friday mostly covered allegations of womanizing that already have been widely reported--and denied--by Clinton.

But there were some notable new details. Some came in first-person accounts, others in secondhand testimony.

Among the highlights:

* Clinton lawyer M. Samuel Jones III was quoted by a colleague in a deposition as saying that his job during the 1992 presidential election was to hunt down women who were claiming that they had affairs with Clinton and pay them hush money to “make them go away.”

The deposition was submitted by lawyer John B. Thompson, who recounted his conversations with Samuel Jones, his longtime friend. Jones is a partner in the law firm of Wright, Lindsey & Jennings, the former law firm of top Clinton aide Bruce R. Lindsey.

Jones labeled as “totally untrue” Thompson’s account, telling the Associated Press on Friday night that he never had a role in any of Clinton’s campaigns. “It never happened, never did that, was never asked to,” he said. “I wouldn’t know these women, whoever they might be, if they walked up and bit me in the leg.”

* Paula Jones’ attorneys alleged that Lindsey has repeatedly helped Clinton try to silence women with whom Clinton had been sexually involved, while also trying to suppress other witnesses from providing evidence against the president.

They charged that Lindsey twice talked with former White House aide Linda Tripp and attempted to convince Tripp to vary her recollections of Clinton’s alleged involvements with Willey and a White House intern, Monica S. Lewinsky.

* Browning, who said she had sex with Clinton over many years until 1992, said she negotiated a “deal” through Lindsey never to discuss the relationship. She said her brother, Walter Kyle, who was working on Clinton’s 1992 campaign, told her, “We will destroy you,” if she talked to the news media. She said that in a 1994 conversation, Clinton offered to help find a job for her in Washington. Her account has been disputed by Clinton.

* Flowers, with whom Clinton conceded he had one sexual episode, said in her deposition that Clinton encouraged her to lie under oath to an Arkansas review board investigating whether she had gotten a state job because of her affair with Clinton.

In his deposition, Clinton admits having a single sexual encounter with Flowers in 1977.

The new documents showed Clinton fielding a flurry of questions from Jones’ lawyers about Lewinsky before allegations of his affair with the 24-year-old woman came to light two months ago. That alleged relationship is now the subject of an independent counsel’s inquiry.

At one point, Clinton said the last time he saw the former White House intern was before Christmas and that he joked to her she might be called to testify in the Jones case.

“I said that you all might call every woman I ever talked to and ask them” to appear in court, Clinton said.

He also suggested that his personal secretary, rather than he, took the lead in trying to help Lewinsky get a job. Independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr is investigating whether Clinton and others helped arrange a public relations job in New York for Lewinsky to keep her from telling about having sex with Clinton.

Referring to his secretary, Betty Currie, Clinton said in his deposition: “I think that she and Betty were close, and I think Betty did it.”

Furthermore, when asked about the alleged encounter with Willey, Clinton said, “I emphatically deny” that it ever happened.

He also suggested that his way of embracing people to welcome or comfort them could be misunderstood.

“I did to her what I have done to scores and scores of men and women who have worked for me or been my friends over the years,” Clinton said.

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The depositions outlined the scenario Jones’ attorneys are envisioning for the May 27 trial, with a series of women taking the witness stand to bolster Jones’ case by describing their own intimate episodes with Clinton both as governor of Arkansas and as president.

Donovan Campbell, the lead Jones attorney, charged that the Clinton White House has mounted “a vast suppression-of-evidence attempt in this case.”

Neither Clinton nor his wife, Hillary, responded to the Jones allegations. The couple left the capital late in the afternoon for the presidential retreat at Camp David, Md.

White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry, when asked to describe how the president felt about the Jones filing, said of Clinton: “He’s a human being and he has human reactions when he reads stuff like that.”

In Los Angeles, Bennett said Jones and her counsel are pursuing a claim that is not only frivolous but politically damaging for the country.

“Her filing is really not a serious legal document,” he said. “It is a scurrilous paper which really proves what we have been saying all along--namely, that the plaintiff and her political and financial backers are pursuing this case as a vehicle to humiliate and embarrass the president and to interfere with his presidency.”

The next move in the Jones suit will be Bennett’s, who now can file a response to the Jones filing. U.S. District Judge Susan Webber Wright will hear both sides and rule whether Clinton will become the first sitting president to be tried over his personal conduct.

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As part of his defense, Clinton has maintained that others are out to ruin his political career--at any cost. In his deposition he touched on the theme, saying he believes people were offered incentives to tell untrue tales about him.

Clinton said an Arkansas trooper, Danny Ferguson, related that he had been offered $700,000 “if they would trash me.”

The president claimed that Ferguson told him “that what they said about me did not have to be true” and “if three of them told the story they could get it printed anywhere, whether it was true or not.”

Lewinsky, in her affidavit filed in the Jones lawsuit, denied having intimate relations with Clinton either while she was an intern, a paid employee at the White House or afterward.

“I have the utmost respect for the President who has always behaved appropriately in my presence. . . . I have never had a sexual relationship with the President, he did not propose that we have a sexual relationship, he did not offer me employment or other benefits in exchange for a sexual relationship, he did not deny me employment or other benefits for rejecting a sexual relationship.”

At the time, Lewinsky was resisting any attempt to be deposed by Jones’ lawyers in the lawsuit.

The new Jones documents also include a sworn declaration from Linda Tripp, the former friend and co-worker of Lewinsky who originally went to Starr’s office with the allegations of a Lewinsky-Clinton affair.

Tripp also has assisted attorneys for Jones. For instance, she provided the Jones lawyers with information on Jan. 16--the day before they questioned Clinton under oath.

Tripp, in her Jan. 21 declaration, said “Lewinsky . . . revealed to me in detailed conversations on innumerable occasions that she has had a sexual relationship with President Clinton since Nov. 15, 1995.”

Tripp added: “She [Lewinsky] played for me at least three tapes containing the President’s voice and showed me gifts they exchanged. . . . She said that she was going to deny everything, that President Clinton would deny everything and she repeatedly stated that I must lie and deny that she had ever told me anything about a relationship with President Clinton.”

Willey, the former White House volunteer, testified in her deposition that when she went to the Oval Office to ask Clinton for a paying job, he hugged her, tried to kiss her, touched her breast and “put [her] hands on his genitals.”

“I recall him saying that he had wanted to do that for a long time,” she said.

Willey said she was “surprised” and “unnerved” at the incident, pushed him away and left the room.

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Though Willey clearly described the incident as an unwanted sexual advance, she said she had no trouble putting a stop to it.

“There was not a struggle,” she testified. “He was very kind and solicitous.”

Willey later obtained several key White House appointments, including working as a paid staffer at conclaves in Copenhagen and Indonesia, she said.

Willey was a reluctant witness, and Jones’ attorneys attribute this to White House intimidation. She later corrected her deposition on one key point. She originally said nobody had encouraged her to remain silent about the incident.

She corrected that answer by saying: “Nate Landow discussed my upcoming deposition testimony with me.” Landow is a major Democratic fund-raiser from Maryland. He has publicly denied trying to influence her account and said he was only trying to help her through a difficult period in her life.

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Times staff writers David Willman, Doyle McManus, James Risen, Robert L. Jackson, Ronald J. Ostrow, Norman Kempster, David G. Savage and Tom Schultz in Washington and Greg Krikorian in Los Angeles contributed to this story.

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* NEW ALLEGATIONS: Ex-White House aide accuses Clinton of fondling her. A8

* CLINTON’S TESTIMONY: President admits touching but calls it innocent. A10