Thaindian News

By Arun Kumar
Washington, Dec 18 (IANS) Monica Lewinsky, whose affair with Bill Clinton nearly ended his presidency, is back saying she believes the former president lied under oath when he described their encounters.

The former White House intern makes the assertion in a new book “The Death of American Virtue”, due out in February, by Ken Gormley. The book also claims that Clinton had yet another extramarital affair, with Susan McDougal of Whitewater land deal fame.

At the same time, Gormley, a Duquesne University law professor, offers a harsh portrait of independent counsel Ken Starr as a man out of his depth and who lost all sense of proportion, according to Politico, a newspaper focusing on national politics.

In three interviews with the author, Clinton makes clear how aggrieved he continues to feel over the whole episode, unspooling a stream of choice invective about his other accusers.

In Clinton’s telling, the head of the House impeachment team, Henry Hyde, is a “bitter right winger” and “hypocrite” and the judge who cited Clinton for civil contempt was merely currying favour with the conservative wing of the Republican party.

Among the book’s most attention-grabbing claims, Lewinsky now believes Bill Clinton lied about their relationship during his grand jury testimony, according to Politico.

“There was no leeway (there) on the veracity of his statements because they asked him detailed and specific questions to which he answered untruthfully,” she wrote to Gormley earlier this year. Longtime Clinton attorney David Kendall declined to comment.

The book suggests Starr’s successor Robert Ray was prepared to indict Clinton soon after he left office if he did not agree to admit that he made false statements about Lewinsky under oath and accept disbarment.

Ray “was ready to ‘pull the trigger’ if the conditions he imposed were not satisfied”, Gormley writes, and had to be “cajoled” by a colleague into signing off on the final deal.

“President Clinton would never fully grasp how close he came to being indicted,” Gormley writes.

The book also confirms a long-rumoured romantic affair between Clinton and McDougal, an Arkansas woman who spent 18 months in jail for refusing to answer questions from Starr’s prosecutors before a grand jury and later received a presidential pardon from Clinton.

Gormley writes he is now certain “some intimate involvement did occur”, though he will not say precisely how he knows it to be true.

“I feel very, very comfortable with that conclusion after having conducted extensive interviews and seen documents that were not generally accessible to the public,” Gormley told Politico.

Gormley says his evidence confirms the long-standing suspicions of Starr’s prosecutors that McDougal had a secret extramarital affair with Clinton. The author says he does not believe that entanglement, which took place years earlier, had anything to do with her refusal to testify about Bill and Hillary Clinton’s involvement with the Whitewater land deal or with the president’s decision to pardon her in 2001.

McDougal has previously denied any affair with Bill Clinton.