Forget about waiting for Kenneth Starr’s report. If this is still America, where the law is king, rather than vice versa, Congress should rise up in anger today and demand President Clinton’s resignation on grounds of moral turpitude. End of story.
That’s how compelling is Kathleen Willey’s story of being unceremoniously groped by Clinton during a job interview.
Willey is not part of any “vast right-wing conspiracy.” She and her husband were Democratic Party activists who raised money for the Clinton presidential campaign. She volunteered her time in the White House. And as thanks, in her moment of greatest vulnerability, she was to be accosted sexually by the president.
To read Willey’s deposition in the Paula Jones sexual harassment case is torturous. This is clearly a woman who resisted with every fiber of her will against being drawn into this crossfire. She had nothing to gain through her testimony. She had no ax to grind against the president. But she could not bring herself to commit perjury for a man who obviously disappointed her.
Willey went to the president in desperation. Her husband was facing severe financial catastrophe. He was missing at the time she visited Clinton in the Oval Office. He would later be found dead – another apparent suicide, one of far too many associated with this administration.
I defy any open-minded person – anyone not blinded by partisanship or ideology – to compare Willey’s testimony with Clinton’s and conclude that she is not telling the truth. Clinton, therefore, is lying – committing perjury, more precisely.
And if he lied in this instance, why should we believe any of his other cover stories? Why should we believe that his recollections are so unclear about the details of meetings with other women at other times? More importantly, why should any American believe him on any other matter?
Think about it. This is a guy whose command of minute public policy details is astonishing. Yet he cannot even remember seeing Paula Jones before she announced in a press conference that she was suing him for sexual harassment. Yet, there is unimpeachable corroboration for the fact she was summoned to his suite in the Excelsior Hotel. Whom are we supposed to believe – especially now?
The president’s credibility is in tatters. No president can be trusted to serve out his term when he is not trusted to tell the truth – even under oath. After all, is not committing perjury a violation of his oath of office to uphold the Constitution of the United States?
What’s more, Willey goes further. She now charges that a presidential surrogate, a Democratic Party fat-cat fixer with close ties to Vince President Al Gore, attempted to coerce her to commit perjury, too. That’s another crime – subornation and, perhaps, obstruction of justice.
And don’t let any of those mealy-mouths in Congress try to suggest this is just a “he said, she said” issue. The context of this accusation comes in a civil suit charging Clinton with sexual harassment. It comes amid powerful evidence that other women were – willingly or unwillingly – abused sexually and emotionally by Clinton throughout his political career up to and including his presidency.
It appears he has made a practice of handing out government jobs to his sexual partners – either as a quid pro quo or as an attempt to buy silence. He did it with Gennifer Flowers. He did it with Monica Lewinsky. He did it with Willey.
If Congress doesn’t act, can we as a nation ever take sexual harassment laws seriously again? For that matter, will we be able to take any laws seriously again?
No one in Congress can claim they don’t know the story, either. This wasn’t a leak of grand jury testimony engineered by the “conspiracy.” This story was told on “60 Minutes,” the very same CBS News program that Clinton and his media friends used so effectively in 1992 to deny the affair with Flowers. He now admits he had sex with Flowers, meaning he lied to the entire nation in the original broadcast – one “60 Minutes” producer Don Hewitt has candidly stated rejuvenated Clinton’s first presidential campaign.
It’s time to act. Nothing less than the future and security of the nation is at stake.