What I remember was the comment that Bill supposedly made to Monica, “...there’s an embassy listening in.” Anybody know where that appears in the Starr report?
According to Ms. Lewinsky, she and the President had a lengthy conversation that day. He told her that he suspected that a foreign embassy (he did not specify which one) was tapping his telephones, and he proposed cover stories. If ever questioned, she should say that the two of them were just friends. If anyone ever asked about their phone sex, she should say that they knew their calls were being monitored all along, and the phone sex was just a put-on.(456)
I don’t know where that one appears, but one of my favorite passages from the testimony is where Dick Morris discusses his phone conversations with ‘ol Bill. Morris, you may recall, sometimes let the hooker he was with listen in on his conversations so he’d look like a big shot. Bill was phoning Morris frequently when the scandal first broke in the news and he asked Morris about whether anybody listened in. I’ll try to find that excerpt.
At pages 2930 to 2932, Dick Morris describes his second contact with bill clinton after the Lewinsky story broke on 1/21/98:
"A: On Thursday evening, at about seven p.m. roughly, I was in my apartment in New York--
Q: This is January 22nd?
A: Yes.
Q: All right.
A: And I got a telephone call from a newspaper, I believe it was USA Today,...
.............
And the reporter said that there's a line in the tape, meaning the Linda Tripp tape, the Monica Lewinsky/Linda Tripp tape, there's a line on the tape that refers to an incident when the President was with Monica Lewinsky having sex and he was on the telephone with you in the Jefferson Hotel where I lived during this period and that you were with the prostitute who I was subsequently exposed to have a relationship with and that you were having sex with her while he was having sex with Lewinsky and you were talking to one another.
And I said, 'That's ridiculous. That's absolutely crazy. It never happened. It could never have possibly vaguely happened.'
The President had no idea that I was doing what I was doing, and if he had known, I would have been fired in a heartbeat. And I had no idea he was doing what he said he was doing. So it was just completely fanciful.
And then I said, "If you print that, it's reckless and untrue." And the word "reckless" is the word you use to kill a news story because that means libel suit.
And I said, 'So you'd better have--' I said, 'If you have it on hard evidence, which is you have heard the tape and you can say that it's on that tape, then you can print it and you'd better print my denial. But if you do not know of yourself that it's on the tape, I'm telling you that it never happened and if you print it, the fact that you're printing it will be reckless and defamatory.', which means I'll sue.
So they didn't publish the story. When he hung up the phone, I was absolutely gleeful and I picked up the phone and I called the President because I felt that this was proof that Monica Lewinsky was making all this garbage up because this had never happened. You know, she was telling Linda Tripp that this had happened and she must be a nut, which I hoped that she was.
So then I called the President and he was in the White House. They told me he's in the White House theater [probably watching Wag The Dog and taking notes]. I believe I subsequently learned that he was with Arafat, but I'm vague on that.
.............
And then the President came out and said, 'I can't talk now. What's up?'
And I told him about the USA Today call and he said, 'This is fantastic. This is great.' You know, because we were both really happy about it....
........
About an hour later, I called him back and we--.... and I said, 'Let me read the statement I gave to USA Today.' I had in the meantime written a statement and called them back.
And I said, 'If you go with it, which is reckless and dangerous,' and whatever the words are, 'this is my statement, but only if you go with it. This isn't your license to go with it.' And the statement said that-- I said, 'This is the fevered fantasy-- this is the fevered fantasy of a teenage mind.'
And I said, 'If all of Monica Lewinsky's charges are as accurate as this one, then she owes the nation a massive apology for completely taking us down fantasy lane,' or something like that.
And I told them that I was planning to have a press conference the next day, Friday morning, releasing this fact and blasting Monica Lewinsky "out of the water" because I said, 'Nobody's going to believe this and this will destroy her credibility on everything else she's saying.'
And he said, 'Yeah, when I heard about it, I was just ecstatic. It was great.'
And I said-- I said, 'this is wonderful. And, you know, when the country hears the other garbage on her tape, if it's as fanciful as this, her credibility will just be destroyed.'
And he said, 'Yeah.'
And I said, "The country's never going to impeach a president over the word of a 21-year old girl on some kind of fantasy trip." And we talked in that vein for a moment. Then he said-- and I said, "I'm going to really just rip her tomorrow."
And he said,"You'd better be careful. Don't be too hard on her because there's some slight chance that she may not be cooperating with Starr and we don't want to alienate her by anything we're going to put out."
And I said, "Oh, okay. Well--
And he said, "Don't do anything until we talk in the morning."
And I said, "Fine."
Then he said,[this is my favorite part]"By the way, Dick, do you know the date of the, uh--" this is his "uh", it's not mine, "The, uh, the time with the woman?"
And I said, "What do you mean, sir?"
And he said, "The time, you know, with the woman in your hotel, the prostitute, you know, listening in on the calls?" And he was referring to an allegation that the prostitute who I had an affair with made which is that I had let her listen in and eavesdrop on conversations with the President.[Yes, a possible three-way with Bill, Monica & Dick]
] And I told the President that that was not true. I said, "As I've said before, this was not true. I never had her eavesdrop on a conversation with you. What I did was to pull the phone up to her ear for one minute so I could be a big shot and have her hear that I was talking to you and she just caught the sound of your voice."
And he said, "Well, what date was that?"
And I said, "Sir, a dozen times."
And he said, "Oh, all right."
And that was the conversation.
Q: All right. Let me ask you just a question with reference to that while we're here. During the times that-- these dozen times when you may have put the phone up, you were speaking with the President on the telephone and may have put the phone up to the woman's ear for a short time, as you've testified, during those conversations you do not know who may or may not have been with the President when you were speaking with him. Is that fair to say?
A: Yes. Fair. I mean, sometimes I would have the impression that he had staff with him or something, but I never had the slightest idea, impression or inkling of the rumor that this story indicated, that there was a time when he was talking to me while he was having sex with anybody.
Q: But you're not able to exclude that possibility.
A: No. I would consider it remote. He would constantly engage in conversation and talking and back and forth and byplay and there probably were times when he was less than attentive in 150 phone conversations, but sex would be a little farfetched.[But not too far fetched]
Q: All right, sir. Now.
A: Maybe it would be one of the times he indicated pleasure at my speech draft. Anyway, go ahead.
.............
Morris next indicates that he discussed the press conference idea with his wife and decided against it.
"And before I could tell him I was not going to have the press conference, he [Clinton, the next day] said to me either, "I'm glad you called," or "Here's why I called you." I mean, I would always call him because he would never call me, he would page me, and I don't know if I called him on my own or returning his page.
And he said, "Listen, my people don't think it would be a good idea for you to give that press conference because we're not at all sure that Lewinsky is going to cooperate with Starr, we think there's some chance that she won't and we don't want to alienate her."
Of course, at this time 'ol Bill did not know about the now-famous stained blue dress. Isn't it telling that Bill was trying to find out about the eavesdropping prostitute and what she may have heard?
I will look. I have a Clinton bedroom in my house complete with Starr Report, white house ash tray, a cigar and a blue dress.