More info on potential witness intimidation (sorry about the formatting):
Washington Weekly
Feb. 9, 1998 Carl Limbacher
WHEN BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO GOOD WITNESSES
A Tale of Whitewater Violence from Gennifer Flowers to Betty Currie
By Carl Limbacher
[Posted for educational purposes only and with permission from the Washington Weekly. Submitted proudly by a
member of The Vast Right Wing Conspracy.]
OYSTER BAY--At this writing it appears that the Clinton scandal machine has finally produced its own John Dean.
The 90's version of the man responsible for Richard Nixon's slide into ignominy is a diminutive black woman who has
spent the last five years of her life working outside the office of the President of the United States. Betty Currie has
witnessed the comings and goings of kings and diplomats. She has waved through her gateway senators and special
agents. She is also the only person alive who has seen with her own eyes Monica Lewinsky pass by her desk dozens
of times to rendezvous with Bill Clinton inside the Oval Office. From her vantage point, she may have also observed
Catherine Cornelius, Clinton's alleged "distant cousin", and Kathleen Willey, as each entered Clinton's presidential
Plato's Retreat. As such, Betty Currie's recollections, should she decide to share them with Ken Starr, could be quite
enlightening.
According to Friday's New York Times, Mrs. Currie is doing exactly that - and more. The tale she's told prosecutors
has the president attempting to orchestrate her testimony and using Currie to round up inconvenient evidence one
jump ahead of the sheriff. The Currie story, if it stands, could spell the end for Bill Clinton. In part because of its
explosive implications. But also because Betty Currie's character is unimpeachable. Currie is described in various
reports as "trustworthy", "dignified", "gracious", "moral", "religious", etc. In short, she is everything her boss is
not. If Ken Starr's case boils down to who's telling the truth here, it's going to look like a contest between Mother
Theresa and Caligula.
In the face of such damaging testimony from such a convincing witness, the Clinton gang's options are limited.
Because she's an African American role model, they can't smear her as trash. (Can you imagine James Carville's
attack: "Drag a hundred dollar bill through the ghetto and there's no telling what you might find."?) And since Mrs.
Currie's Democrat credentials would seem to be beyond question, it is hard to place Currie in the midst of Mrs.
Clinton's grand hallucination: the "Vast Right Wing Conspiracy". (The truth is out there somewhere, Hillary.) The
crew at the White House may have figured they had but one option left. Intimidation.
It's an article of faith with the mainstream press that all the truly scary stories emanating from Bill Clinton's Arkansas
are nonsense. Drug smuggling at Mena? Sure, it might have happened but where's the evidence Bill Clinton was
involved? The Boys on the Tracks? Spooky stuff indeed - but how was it Clinton's fault? The governor using state
resources to maintain his own personal harem; using state jobs as necessary to keep the lid on? Absurd, the press
has told us for the last five years. Everyone knows those nasty troopers made it all up for that book deal. Or that
movie deal. Or maybe the Broadway Show deal. Whatever. It simply couldn't be true.
Enter Monica Lewinsky, with a story to tell that makes David Brock's 1993 "His Cheatin' Heart" Troopergate expose
look like a nursery rhyme. It's one thing to have witnessed a salesclerk burying her head in the governor's lap as they
sat in the parking lot of his daughter's elementary school. It's quite another when the ingenue becomes a 21 year old
White House intern - and the scene moves to the Oval Office.
And how did the governor-turned-president deal with those allegations? Publicly he denied them. But privately,
according to trooper Danny Ferguson, the damage control effort encompassed an offer of "jobs for silence." Unlike
Lewinsky, Ferguson wasn't interviewed for a spot at the U.N., or a cushy job at Revlon. Danny Ferguson alleged that
Bill Clinton personally called him from the White House to discuss those nosy reporters who were poking into his
past. And during those calls Clinton offered Ferguson and a fellow trooper a number of different jobs on the federal
payroll - in exchange for what the trooper clearly understood would be his silence on the sex front. (In his landmark
review of the Paula Jones case for The American Lawyer, legal expert Stuart Taylor suggests that Ferguson may
have the Clinton bribery attempts on tape.) Ferguson wouldn't bite, and the American Spectator published the article
responsible for Bill Clinton's current nightmare. It was there that Ferguson mentioned that woman named "Paula." It's
hard to remember now, but without Paula Jones we wouldn't know about Monica Lewinsky today.
Six months later Trooper Ferguson was in the news again, this time as the co-defendant in Paula Jones' sexual
harassment suit against the president. Like Betty Currie today, Ferguson was a crucial witness. They both knew what
went on when women disappeared behind closed doors with their boss. Jones filed suit on May 8, 1994. And just
five days later something happened that surely had an impact on Danny Ferguson. His ex-wife Kathy, a nurse at
Baptist Memorial Hospital, was found in her Sherwood, Ark. apartment with her brains blown out. A month later,
Kathy's boyfriend, Sherwood police officer Bill Shelton, was dead as well. The Arkansas Democrat Gazette didn't
even bother concealing the suspicious fact that Shelton was shot behind the ear in classic execution style. Both
Kathy Ferguson and Bill Shelton's deaths were ruled suicides.
The "respectable" press has never found anything odd about this episode. The idea that his ex-wife's untimely
violent death might have given co-defendent Ferguson second thoughts about his Jones case testimony is, for them,
beyond the pale. And so our incurious media has ignored what Whitewater aficionados have dubbed "The Body
Count," a list of scandal connected figures who now sleep with the fishes. For the most part, that's perhaps as it
should be, since these folks are no longer around to implicate anybody in anything.
But what of the list of witnesses still very much alive, bearing tales long a part of the public record about threats,
physical violence and bribery attempts. Take the most famous witness of all, Gennifer Flowers. Twice in the last 6
months Ms. Flowers has told of the death threats she had received when news of her Clinton affair threatened to
torpedo her ex-lover's presidential campaign. (WABC radio-7/97, Larry King Live - 1/98). Investigative reporters now
panting over Lewinsky-gate remain uninterested. Another ex-Clinton girlfriend, Sally Perdue, revealed four years ago
that she was threatened to keep her lip zipped, or "we couldn't guarantee the safety of your pretty little legs." The
press snores on. Trooper L.D. Brown, the man responsible for much of what we know about Clinton's Mena
involvement, claimed only last summer that Clinton operatives offered him $100,000 to tailor his Whitewater
testimony. The story was picked up by only the Washington Times and the New York Post - then dropped like a hot
potato, never to be heard of again. And one would never know that there's a tape of Whitewater's main character, Jim
McDougal - telling Arkansas Republican Sheffield Nelson in 1992, "I could sink the Clintons' Whitewater story faster
than they could lie about it if I could get into a position where I wouldn't get my head beaten off." (This clip was
played on Frontline's recent PBS special, "Once Upon a Time in Arkansas". But McDougal's "head beaten off"
remark failed to even raise narrator Peter Boyer's eyebrows.)
Gennifer Flowers' onetime Quapaw Towers neighbor Gary Johnson claimed he had videotaped evidence of her
Clinton affair. He says the tape was confiscated by thugs whom he took to be state police, who then beat him and
left him for dead. In 1994 respected writer L.J. Davis, while researching a piece about Little Rock's Rose Law Firm for
The New Republic, claims he had phone threats warning him that he'd "entered a red zone" and had better leave
town. When he didn't, Davis was knocked unconscious in his Little Rock hotel room. Upon awakening, some of his
notes had gone missing.
What are the odds that all of these disparate people; girlfriends, police officers, a lawyer, a banker and a writer for a
high toned magazine, are making these stories up? To believe that these folks have somehow come together and
fabricated incident after incident; the beatings, the threats, the bribes, is to believe in Mrs. Clinton's Vast Right Wing
Plot. And journalists, while they pretend to be too sophisticated for that nonsense, reveal themselves as true
apostles of the First Lady's gospel as they treat each and every one of these reports as bogus or merely coincidental.
Here's another coincidence for them to ponder. On Jan. 28, The Arkansas Democrat Gazette reported that Paula Jones
Judge Susan Webber Wright has decided to beef up her personal security big time. Suddenly, Judge Wright is
surrounded by four armed U.S. Marshals, who will continue to shadow her every public move until the Jones case is
over. Has she been threatened? According to the Democrat Gazette:
One of Wright's law clerks said he was under orders not to comment when asked about the heightened security. U.S.
Marshal Conrad Pattillo also declined to say anything and refused to reveal whether Wright was trying to avoid
reporters or whether threats had been made to prompt the increased security. James McCormack, district clerk for the
Eastern District of Arkansas, also declined the comment.
The question becomes, if Judge Wright has not been threatened, then why are court employees under orders not to
explain why she now needs four armed guards to walk her to and from the courthouse?
This recalls the example of key Whitewater witness David Hale, whose well documented testimony led to the 1996
convictions of Jim and Susan McDougal - along with Ark. Governor Jim Guy Tucker. Hale had turned state's
evidence in March of 1994, back when Robert Fiske was still running the Whitewater probe. But what went
unreported till late November of that year was that from the outset, Hale's physical safety was considered so
precarious that Fiske kept him in a succession of "safe houses" in undisclosed locations scattered throughout the
Southwest. Ken Starr continued the practice.
When this was discovered, The New York Post front page headline screamed: "ON THE RUN - DEATH FEARS
FORCE KEY WHITEWATER FIGURE INTO HIDING". On the inside pages Hale's lawyer, Randy Coleman, was
quoted as saying, "We're not supposed to comment. But certainly, that's why he's being protected."
Now, it's one thing when tales of Whitewater violence come from mere common folk, people like Flowers, McDougal,
and Perdue whom the press will never believe aren't "imagining for dollars". But here we had Robert Fiske, the
Democrats' favorite Republican special prosecutor, acknowledging that bearing witness against the Clintons can be
hazardous to one's health. The same goes for Judge Wright, with her four armed Marshals. If none of these tales are
true, why do top law enforcement agents like Fiske and Wright go to such extraordinary lengths to protect against
phantom threats?
So what about Betty Currie? Well, if our news editors weren't the cowards they are, the headline might read -
"TRAGEDY STRIKES YET ANOTHER CLINTON SCANDAL WITNESS". According to the Jan. 28 edition of The
Oregonian (Portland's newspaper), which ran a story on Currie's recent testimony before Ken Starr's grand jury, Mrs.
Currie was also deposed by Senator Thompson's committee last August. The paper reports: "Although White House
lawyers advised her to postpone the session because her brother had been severely beaten and hospitalized the
night before, Currie sat through the five hour grilling without complaint."
Add to that this tidbit, brought to us by the February 9 edition of TIME Magazine:
A source close to the White House....acknowledged to TIME that Clinton and Lewinsky met that night (12/28/97)
with Currie present. The secretary's brother had just been killed in a car wreck, the source explains, and Lewinsky
came to bring her a Christmas gift.
It is unclear whether Mrs. Currie has two brothers, each suffering his own separate misfortune, or whether the
brother beaten in August was the same one killed in the December car crash. And, in truth, taken in isolation, there's
absolutely nothing at all now on the public record that suggests anything untoward about these incidents. It's only
against the backdrop of all the aforementioned events that any such tragedy becomes suspicious. And therefore,
one wonders.
One wonders about Betty Currie's demeanor as she departed the courthouse steps after testifying before Starr's
grand jury. All the other White House witnesses, Leon Panetta, George Stephanopoulos, Evelyn Lieberman, etc, took
to the steps to chant their mantra: "I know of no improper relationship...yada, yada, yada". Not Betty Currie. She
made no public statement and needed the support of two aides as she made her way through the crowd. In fact, Mrs.
Currie looked like a freight train had just hit her. Was that because she had just given damaging testimony against
her boss? Or was there something else weighing heavily on her mind?
Perhaps we will never know. Then again, if Betty Currie's cooperation is the catalyst for Bill Clinton's downfall, then
the entire cover-up may begin to unravel. Other witnesses may begin to talk - and not just about Monica Lewinsky.
We know there are plenty of Gennifers, Sallys and Monicas in Bill Clinton's secret life. Let's hope there are at least
one or two more Betty Curries.
(Cathy Leahy assisted with research for this article.)
Published in the Feb. 9, 1998 issue of The Washington Weekly
Copyright 1998 The Washington Weekly (http://www.federal.com)
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