This is the big leak

However, the frequency and decibel of the story has decreased with the passage of time. But with a media monster hungry 24 hours a day and demanding to be fed, journos are forever sniffing around for fresh feed. Still, few would have bargained for the scoop that The Washington Post served up Thursday morning. On its front page: an exclusive unsourced report on PresidentClinton’s private deposition made on January 17 to lawyers for Paula Jones.

How the secret document leaked is something which not only exercised the rest of the media which went panting after the story on Friday, but also agitated all the parties concerned. Clinton’s aides accused Jones lawyers of leaking the deposition to tarnish the President; Jones lawyers accused Clinton’s lawyers of leaking it to forestall what they suggest is worse disclosures to follow; and Clinton’s lawyers pointed a finger at prosecutor Ken Starr.

The deposition itself gave a stark and startling insight into the six-hour grilling that Clinton underwent on January 17 — the first by a sitting President as a defendant in a court case. Despite the often personal, intrusive and humiliating nature of the questioning, Clinton answered everything in good grace although his voice was said to drop very low on occasions — causing the lawyers to ask him to speak up — and one rare occasion caused him to show a flash of irritation.

Theflagrant nature of the questioning was evident right at the beginning when Jones’s lawyers furnished the President with a document defining sexual relations as that term was to be understood in their questions. It defined sexual relations as contact by someone of the other’s groin, buttocks, breast or inner thigh.

With that ground rule, Jones’s six attorneys then proceed to grill the President on his alleged extramarital capers starting in the late 1970s. Half a dozen women — Jane Doe’s in legal parlance — were brought into the picture. Did the President have an affair with Sheila Lawrence, whose husband he appointed as an ambassador to Switzerland? How about Beth Coulson, a lawyer he appointed as a judge? How did she rise so rapidly in the Arkansas judiciary? Why did he visit Marilyn Jo Jenkins in the wee hours of the morning in 1992?

As a mob of journalists paced outside the law offices close to the White House that cold Saturday, Clinton kept his cool and answered in measured terms. No he did notrecall precise events that had occurred many years ago. But when allegation of sexual relations were raised, he unequivocally denied it. Except once. In one startling revelation, Clinton acknowledged for the first time in any known forum that he did have sexual relations with Gennifer Flowers, saying it occurred just once in 1977. Clinton had previously denied the affair except for acknowledging that he had caused "pain" in his marriage with Hillary Rodham.

But still, that was not the gravamen of what Jones’s lawyers were shooting for. Questions about other women was just a decoy. Unbeknownst to even the President at that time, Jones’s lawyers had come with a secret weapon –briefings by Linda Tripp about her tape recorded conversations with Monica Lewinsky detailing an alleged sexual relationship with the President. Having defined sexual relations at the outset, Jones’s lawyers gently lowered the boom. Did the President have sexual relations with the young lady?

No, the President said under oath watchedby his accuser Paula Corbin Jones. It was possible that he was with her (Lewinsky) alone a couple of times but there was no sexual contact. He vigorously denied that the Oval Office had a cubby hole that facilitated liaisons, telling the lawyers that there were no curtains even on the windows. At one point, when a lawyer asked him if he ever gave money to Lewinsky, the President snapped: "Is there something you are trying to ask me about?" Another time, he wearily told the lawyers: "You have to understand that during the Presidential campaign I went through accusations of drug dealing to cocaine and murder, and as a result I became paranoid."

In fact, he became so paranoid that when a woman reportedly ambushed him at a party and began to talk about their past, he hurriedly summoned one of his aides to act as a witness, put down on paper whatever she saw and heard and put away the document as evidence. As the lawyers chipped away at his answers, Clinton suggested that it was Currie, and not himself, who wasthe principal dealing with Lewsinsky. Soon after he was deposed on that Saturday, Clinton returned to the White House and called his personal secretary Betty Currie, to come into office so that they could together recollect and reconstruct Monica Lewinsky’s internship at the White House.

Deposition highlights