(7 of 7)
Whatever damage the filing may have done to Clinton's position in the Jones case, it is even harder to gauge its impact on Starr's criminal probe. It is by no means clear that suppression of gossip can be the foundation of a federal obstruction-of-justice case. The alleged sexual encounters may have been crude and boorish, but they are not criminal; if Clinton pressured paramours not to talk, it might be revealing, but it carries no criminal liability as long as he wasn't tampering with a case. Starr's best hope is to try to prove that Clinton or his friends sought to silence women after they had been subpoenaed to testify in the Jones suit--or used troopers or other government agents to keep their mouths shut.
In short, even if Starr could prove that Clinton fondled women, sought to obtain their silence through favors or intimidation and then lied about it, the prosecutor would still have difficulty lining up the chain of proof required in a criminal case. As a lawyer working on the case put it last week, Clinton "may have had sex with Monica, and he may have helped her with a job, but he can say it was never in an effort to silence her in the Jones case." That leaves Starr with an unpleasant choice: forwarding to Congress what looks like a circumstantial case of obstruction of justice, or testing the widespread assumption that lying about sex is not an impeachable offense. Which would leave Clinton where he started: facing a scandal-battered but still supportive public and confronting whatever it is inside him that triggered this mess in the first place.
In a room at a Dallas-Fort Worth airport hotel in May 1987, Clinton's old friend Dolly Kyle Browning said, she spoke with Clinton about what she considered to be her own problem with sexual addiction. Browning believed Clinton to be a fellow sufferer and wanted to share with him what she'd learned from a support group. As she ticked off a list of symptoms, she said, Clinton was "flippant" at first. He became "visibly upset" when Browning asked him--five years before his first presidential race--this question: "Have your sexual activities jeopardized your life goals?" Clinton started crying, she recalls. "He brought up incidents. He asked me questions." He described, she said, being faced with "temptation on every corner--How do you expect me to pass it up? ... I can't even walk down the street without someone literally trying to pick me up." Browning suggested they stop the discussion. "I can take it if you can," said Clinton.
The President now says he does not believe the conversation ever took place.
--Reported by Jay Branegan, Michael Duffy, Viveca Novak, Karen Tumulty and Michael Weisskopf/Washington