Lewinsky Avoids Verbal Pitfalls in Deposition

In her deposition for President Clinton’s impeachment trial this week, Monica S. Lewinsky fenced deftly with prosecutors over key aspects of the case, referred them again and again to her earlier grand jury testimony and said that she thinks Clinton is “intelligent” and a good president.

“I have mixed feelings” about Clinton now, Lewinsky said, according to a transcript of her four-hour deposition obtained by The Times.

But she parried further questions about her sentiments, as well as many other subjects, with short and hedged answers, leaving the prosecutors frustrated and without substantial new evidence in the case.

At one point, after she dodged a question about the early stages of her relationship with Clinton, Rep. Ed Bryant (R-Tenn.), the House prosecutor leading the session, remarked in exasperation, “We’re obviously going to have to talk about some things for eight hours here, or else we can go home.”

“Sounds good to me,” she replied.

Lewinsky’s 170-page deposition--and the transcripts of similar sessions with Vernon E. Jordan Jr., a friend of the president, and White House aide Sidney Blumenthal--make clear that the prosecutors managed to coax some details and interesting rhetorical exchanges from the three but fell far short of the kind of bombshell needed to deflect the impeachment process from an expected acquittal vote next week.

At the same time, the witnesses did not back away from previous accounts that are troublesome for Clinton or other figures in the case.

Hints That Jordan Knew of Relationship

Lewinsky, in a deposition that was the 23rd time she has been questioned under oath since the scandal erupted last year, again suggested that Jordan, the Washington lawyer who is one of Clinton’s closest friends, seemed to know that she and the president had an intimate relationship when the presidential confidant was trying to find her a job in New York.

At one point, she recounted, Jordan told her: “Your problem is, and don’t deny it, you’re in love with him.”

Jordan has denied telling her that, but Lewinsky recalled it during the deposition at the Mayflower Hotel in the presence of two managers, a phalanx of White House lawyers, a group of senators and her own attorneys.

“I probably blushed or giggled or something,” she said when asked how she responded to Jordan.

Prosecutors consider this exchange, along with numerous others, as evidence that Clinton was trying to obstruct justice--using his friends to maintain the silence and loyalty of a witness who could deliver damaging testimony against him in the Paula Corbin Jones sexual harassment lawsuit, if she chose to do so.

Under repeated prodding by Bryant, Lewinsky made clear that she did not have to be enticed to conceal their illicit relationship from Jones’ lawyers or others, because she understood the ground rules of it.

She also acknowledged that her regard for Clinton has not completely soured.

“Do you still have feelings for the president?” Bryant asked.

“I have mixed feelings,” she said.

Bryant Is Turned Away

Pressed about those emotions, she turned Bryant away with this riposte: “I think what you need to know is that my grand jury testimony is truthful irrespective of whatever those mixed feelings are in my testimony today.”

Still, Bryant did not quit. “Do you still, uh, respect the president, still admire the president?”

“Yes,” she said, with no further explanation.

“Do you still appreciate what he is doing for this country as the president?”

“Yes.”

Later, Bryant came back to that question--a point that has intrigued much of the country. Many have asked whether the former White House intern feels betrayed by Clinton, who once told the world in a televised appearance: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky.”

“I assume you think he’s a very intelligent man?” Bryant asked.

“I think he’s an intelligent president.”

With that answer, the crowded presidential suite at the luxury hotel erupted into laughter, and Bryant, realizing that he would not be getting new incriminating evidence to bolster his case for impeachment on the Senate floor, joked that he hoped her strong defense of Clinton did not get out to the public.

“OK, thank goodness this is confidential,” he said in an aside to the White House attorneys. “Otherwise, that might be the quote of the day.”

With a little trepidation, he added: “I know we won’t see that in the paper, will we?”

In a separate bit of sparring that touched a nerve, Lewinsky took issue with Bryant’s characterization of her sexual affair with the president.

He referred her to what he called their “first so-called salacious occasion.”

“Can--can we--can you call it something else?” she responded. “I mean, this is my relationship.”

“What would you like to call it?” he asked.

She struggled for a moment, then said: “It was my first encounter with the president, so I don’t really see it as my first salacious--that’s not what this was.”

Again, Bryant persisted, pointing out that “salacious” has “kind of been the word that’s been picked up all around.” She agreed but then came up with “encounter, maybe?”--a compromise they settled on.

Bryant focused on the episode because it is part of the prosecutors’ perjury case against Clinton. The managers contend that the pair’s groping on that occasion in a White House office clearly fit the definition of sexual relations that Clinton was asked about later in the Jones lawsuit. In his grand jury testimony last year, Clinton insisted that he told the truth when he denied such relations in his Jones case deposition.

But while Lewinsky confirmed that her account contradicts Clinton’s, she refused to say that the president was lying. “I really don’t feel comfortable characterizing whether what he said was truthful or not truthful,” she said. “I know I’ve testified to what I believe is true.”

Lewinsky also echoed Clinton’s many past statements that the Jones lawsuit, which alleged that Clinton confronted Jones with a demand for oral sex in a 1991 Little Rock, Ark., hotel room, was not “valid.”

“I don’t believe Paula Jones’ version of the story,” she said.

She recalled again, as she had before the grand jury, how she submitted a false affidavit in the Jones case denying her sexual relationship--but said that Clinton did not direct or encourage her to lie. “We never discussed perjury,” she maintained.

But she was mindful of the “cover story” that she and Clinton had created to hide their affair and said that “I thought to myself I knew I would deny the relationship” in the affidavit.

On the issue of the gifts, she insisted that the president’s secretary, Betty Currie, and not Clinton himself, wanted Lewinsky to return a number of gifts he had given her about the time their affair was becoming known publicly. That is another key point in the obstruction-of-justice case against Clinton.

Lewinsky also did not take the bait in questioning by Bryant on whether she was upset by Clinton’s comments after their affair became known. In the days after the scandal spread publicly, Clinton told several White House aides that Lewinsky was a “stalker” who made a sexual demand of him.

But Lewinsky seemed unnerved by this line of questioning.

“Did you come on to the president and make a sexual demand on the president?” Bryant asked.

Lewinsky answered in one curt word. “No.”

“Did he ever rebuff you . . . ?”

“No.”

“Did you threaten him . . . ?”

“No.”

When Bryant completed his questioning, Clinton attorney Nicole Seligman told the senators who were presiding over the deposition that “we have no questions of the witness.”

In legal arguments at the Senate trial Thursday, Bryant said that Lewinsky’s combative approach in the deposition was one reason the Senate should subpoena her for live testimony. But the Senate rejected that motion.

In the Jordan deposition, he acknowledged that he stepped up his search for a job for Lewinsky in the private sector after her name appeared on the witness list for the Jones case.

But Jordan said that he never told prospective employers at Revlon Inc. in New York that he was undertaking the job search “on behalf of” Clinton and through Currie.

“I think . . . that I have sufficient, uh, influence, shall we say, sufficient character, shall we say, that people have been, throughout my career, able to take my word at face value,” he said.

Denies Trying to Influence Testimony

Denying that his assistance for Lewinsky was an effort to shape her testimony in the Jones lawsuit, Jordan said that “getting jobs for people is not unusual for me, so I don’t view it as an assignment. I just view it as something that is part of what I do.”

He said that Lewinsky was “enthusiastic, quite taken with herself and her experience, uh, bubbly, effervescent, bouncy, confident.”

Jordan said that later, while his job search was still in progress, “I asked her directly if she had had sexual relationships with the president” because she was in “an emotional state” from being called into the Jones matter.

He said she answered, “No.”

“I am referring this lady, Ms. Lewinsky, to various companies for jobs, and it seemed to me that it was important for me to know in that process whether or not there had been something going on with the president,” he explained.

Jordan said that he raised the same subject with the president and that Clinton told him: “No, never.”

He also bristled at the suggestion by Rep. Asa Hutchinson (R-Ark.) of the House prosecution team that Jordan landed Lewinsky a job at Clinton’s “instructions.”

“I do not view the president as giving me instructions,” Jordan said. “The president is a friend of mine, and I don’t believe friends instruct friends. Our friendship is one of parity and equality.”

Jordan’s account tracked closely with his grand jury testimony on the job search, fending off the House prosecutors’ efforts to more closely link the job to a conspiracy to obstruct justice.

Jordan acknowledged that he misspoke in earlier testimony when he denied that he had eaten breakfast with Lewinsky during the job search effort, but he defended his testimony otherwise.

In the third deposition, Blumenthal recounted a conversation with Clinton in the Oval Office in January 1998 as the Lewinsky scandal first began to unfold.

Blumenthal said that Clinton appeared to be “very upset . . . a man in anguish.”

Blumenthal said he warned the president that “you can’t get near crazy people or troubled people.”

“You’re president,” Blumenthal said he told Clinton “You just have to separate yourself from this.’ ”

Times staff writers Geraldine Baum, Robert L. Jackson, Eric Lichtblau and Judy Lin contributed to this story.