[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 52 (Wednesday, May 4, 1994)]
[House]
[Page H]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: May 4, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
          SEXUAL HARASSMENT CHARGES PENDING AGAINST PRESIDENT

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from California [Mr. Dornan] is recognized for 5 minutes.

  Mr. DORNAN. Mr. Speaker, I had intended to come to the floor today 
and discuss Rwanda and the genocidal slaughter taking place in that 
tortured country. Genocide is a word that is overused, but in the case 
of Rwanda it fits. In fact, both sides in this horrible tribal war are 
attempting it. It is a tragedy.
  Last night, speaking live to an audience in Pennsylvania, it occurred 
to me that of the six Nazi extermination camps, not labor camps, not 
concentration camps, like Dachau, Borgen-Belsen, Ravensbruck, 
Buchenwald, but camps built to exterminate human beings, to eliminate 
the entire Jewish population of every country in Western and Middle 
Europe, that of those six extermination camps, only Treblinka, killing 
750,000 people, and the horror of Auschwitz and its huge satellite camp 
of Birkenau, which killed a million and a half or more people, only 
those two camps out of six, killed more than 500,000 people. It all 
took 2 or 3 years in gas chambers and a perversion of science and 
technology to do it. But in Rwanda, even more people have been killed 
in 3 weeks, most of them with machetes, than at Chelmo, Belzec, 
Mydanyck, or Sobibor.

  This is an unbelievable slaughter, and I will talk about it next week 
for an hour. I could also have spoken tonight about Haiti and the 
inconsistency in our policy which is on the front page of all the 
papers. Mr. Clinton contradicts himself almost every month now on that 
policy. Then there is Bosnia, Bosnia, Bosnia. It will not go away. 
There three peoples are engaged in ethnic slaughter with the Bosnian 
Serbs the main perpetrators.
  But, Mr. Speaker, all of that will have to wait, because in my 
remaining 3 or 4 minutes tonight, I must discuss this button that I 
have been wearing all day, I will take it off now, because 
parliamentary rules say it is a minidemonstration on the floor, which 
is not allowed.
  The button says, ``I believe Paula.'' That does not mean Paula 
Coughlin, lieutenant senior grade of the terrible Navy Tailhook Scandal 
in Las Vegas, even though I also believed everything that she said. 
What has hurt her was day one when she had her upper thigh shaved and 
wrote on a sign, ``You made me see God.'' That is not average conduct 
for a Catholic lady in or out of the service. I believed everything she 
said about the gauntlet and the degrading treatment of lady officers at 
Tailhook.
  The Paula referred to on this button is Paula Corbin Jones. I have 
known about her story since September of last year, before it went into 
print in the American Spectator.
  Mr. Speaker, this is the front page of the Washington Post, which by 
printing the story has redeemed its integrity. It says, ``Clinton Hires 
Lawyers as Sex Harassment Suit Is Threatened.''
  This former Arkansas State employee, Paula Corbin, now married so she 
is Paula Corbin Jones, alleges improper advance by then Governor 
Clinton in 1991, after the presidential campaign was underway. If you 
recall former Senator Tsongas, a colleague here of us once, had already 
declared. Others were also declaring. This was 5 months before Mr. 
Clinton himself declared. It was May 8, 1991.
  And Mr. Speaker, this Paula Corbin Jones case makes the charges 
against a Member of the other body involving 12, up to 30 instances of 
sexual harassment pale in comparison. It makes the Anita Hill story 
pale in comparison. It makes Paul Coughlin's story at Las Vegas pale.
  After you leave the front page with these two stories written 
principally by Michael Isikoff, who was suspended in a fight over this 
story, you go inside to discover it fills the entire 14th page. This is 
one of the three biggest papers in the country, along with the New York 
Times and the Los Angeles Times.

                              {time}  1750

  There is not an advertisement on it.
  I am going to ask to put these two stories in the Record.
  This is what they call, in the mass media, ``a fire storm.''
  Tomorrow the L.A. Times and all of the other big papers will pick up 
the wire service stories on Paula Corbin Jones' charges of the grossest 
sort of sexual harassment against the now sitting President who was 
then the sitting Governor of Arkansas.
  Then she will file the case tomorrow, which will be in all the papers 
on Friday, coast-to-coast. I understand it is the major topic of 
conversation on every talk show, whether the host is liberal or 
conservative or a raging moderate, all across the country. And the 
President has hired Bob Bennett, who is the lawyer of one of our 
colleagues, Mr. Rostenkowski.
  I just want to end by reminding my colleagues what I said back in the 
fall of 1992. I said if the country elected Bill Clinton all sorts of 
stories abut sex and other unsavory aspects of Mr. Clinton's past would 
come pouring out. I was ridiculed at the time. Well, I hate to be an 
``I told you so,'' but, well, I told you so. I take little satisfaction 
in being right, however, because this President is ripping the moral 
fiber of our country to shreds. What must the children of America be 
thinking.
  Mr. Speaker, I include for the Record the articles to which I 
referred.

                [From the Washington Post, May 4, 1994]

       Clinton Hires Lawyer as Sex Harassment Suit Is Threatened

   former state employee in arkansas alleges improper advance in 1991

    (By Michael Isikoff; Charles E. Shepard, and Sharon LaFraniere)

       On Feb. 11, former Arkansas state clerical worker Paula 
     Jones appeared at a Washington news conference and accused 
     Bill Clinton of making an unwanted and improper sexual 
     advance during a brief encounter in a Little Rock hotel room 
     in 1991.
       As Jones told it, a state trooper serving on then-Gov. 
     Clinton's security detail summoned her to meet Clinton while 
     she was working at a state-sponsored conference where he was 
     speaking. Alone with her, Jones said, Clinton tried to kiss 
     her, reached under her clothing and asked her to perform a 
     sexual act. She said she felt humiliated and walked out 
     within minutes.
       Asked by reporters to respond, White House aides said the 
     story was untrue and described it as a cheap political trick 
     engineered by avowed Clinton enemy Cliff Jackson, who had 
     helped arrange Jones's news conference at a gathering of 
     political conservatives. They said Clinton had no memory of 
     meeting the woman.
       Clinton's new attorney, Robert S. Bennett, said yesterday, 
     ``This event, plain and simple, didn't happen.'' Clinton has 
     retained Bennett as his personal attorney to defend against a 
     threatened lawsuit by Jones.
       Over the past three months, The Washington Post has 
     interviewed Jones extensively about what she said happened in 
     Little Rock's Excelsior Hotel. She said she was alone with 
     Clinton in the room--making it impossible to independently 
     resolve what, if anything, happened between them.
       Jones, who now lives in California, provided the names of 
     two longtime friends and two family members who said in 
     interviews that Jones had told them about the May 8, 1991, 
     episode the day it occurred. One of the friends, a co-worker 
     at the conference, said she witnessed the trooper's approach. 
     Jones's then-boyfriend, Steve Jones, now her husband, said 
     she told him at the time that Clinton had made a pass at her.
       Three Arkansas state troopers have said in published 
     accounts and in recent interviews with the Post that Clinton 
     used them and other members of his state security detail to 
     solicit women to whom he was attracted, although none was on 
     duty on the day Jones alleges she met with Clinton.
       Key aspects of Jones' account are a departure from past 
     allegations about Clinton's personal conduct. Jones worked 
     for an Arkansas state agency, and she contends that Clinton's 
     conduct toward her constituted sexual harassment of an 
     employee. No woman has ever publicly accused Clinton of 
     workplace harassment or the extreme behavior that Jones 
     recounts.
       ``What she alleges is simply inconceivable as Clinton 
     behavior,'' said Betsey Wright, Clinton's former chief of 
     staff in Arkansas who helped his 1992 presidential campaign 
     combat allegations of extramarital affairs.
       Aides to Clinton have suggested that, aside from political 
     motivation, Jones could be seeking financial gain, and her 
     attorney has acknowledged that before her news conference he 
     made an effort to negotiate an out-of-court monetary 
     settlement in exchange for her silence. Yesterday Bennett 
     accused Jones's attorney of seeking a job for Jones in return 
     for her silence.
       The first account of a story involving Paula Jones appeared 
     in the January issue of the conservative American Spectator 
     magazine. The article quoted an unnamed trooper who said he 
     approached a woman named ``Paula'' on Clinton's behalf, then 
     stood guard outside a hotel room while Clinton met with her. 
     The trooper said in the account that she told him, as she 
     left the room after less than an hour, that she was willing 
     to be Clinton's girlfriend.
       The trooper, later identified as Danny Ferguson, has 
     refused since Jones's news conference to discuss the American 
     Spectator article. He declined again last week to be 
     interviewed.
       Jones has said it was indignation over that article and 
     what she said was the untrue depiction of her encounter with 
     Clinton that caused her to speak out. Her attorney, Daniel 
     Traylor of Little Rock, said Jones had to go public because 
     Clinton indirectly had declined private appeals Traylor made 
     for a public clarification of the American Spectator story. 
     Traylor later confirmed that he did not know whether such an 
     appeal had actually reached the White House.
       Jones's allegations revolve around the 1991 Governor's 
     Quality Conference, a one-day session on management for 
     manufacturing executives and government officials held at the 
     19-story Excelsior Hotel at the edge of downtown Little Rock.
       Then 44, Clinton was in his fifth term as governor. Already 
     considered a possible Democratic candidate for the 
     presidency, he had just returned from a well-received 
     appearance before the national Democratic Leadership Council. 
     He was five months from announcing his candidacy.
       At the registration desk outside the hotel ballroom, Jones 
     (then Paula Corbin) and a coworker she had known since 
     childhood, Pam Blackard, were handing out name tags and 
     literature. Jones, then 24, had been hired two months earlier 
     as a $10,270-a-year clerk for the Arkansas Industrial 
     Development Commission, a job that required regular visits to 
     the governor's office in the capitol. The job was the 
     highlight of her resume: After secretarial classes at a 
     junior college, she had held a string of office and sales 
     positions, none for more than nine months.
       Jones described herself in interviews as sometimes too 
     trusting and a talkative and outgoing person. ``A lot of 
     people take that as being a flirt,'' she said. ``That's just 
     me though. I like people, and I like to talk to people. . . . 
     It doesn't matter if it's a man or woman.''
       At some point during the day of the conference, Jones said, 
     she noticed Clinton standing nearby, answering questions from 
     reporters. Jones, who had never met Clinton, said she thought 
     he was staring at her. A few minutes later, she said trooper 
     Ferguson, a member of Clinton's security detail with whom she 
     had chatted earlier, approached the table and told her, ``The 
     governor said you make his knees knock.''
       She said Ferguson returned a short time later, at about 
     2:30, and handed her a piece of paper with a room number 
     written on it. ``The governor would like to meet you up in 
     his room and talk to you . . . in a few minutes,'' Ferguson 
     said.
       Jones said she had recognized the suggestive flavor of 
     Ferguson's ``knees knock'' comment, but reacted to his words 
     as a compliment, not a come-on. She said she had no reason to 
     expect what she said happened later. ``I was brought up to 
     trust people and especially of that stature--you know, a 
     governor.'' Jones said he hoped the meeting might yield a 
     better-paying job in Clinton's office.
       Clinton's schedule for that day, provided by the White 
     House last week after repeated requests, shows the governor 
     scheduled for ``phone time'' between 2:15 and 2:30 that 
     afternoon after a luncheon and videotaping at the governor's 
     mansion.
       The schedule indicates Clinton had the option of returning 
     to the quality conference between 2:30 and 4 p.m. Conference 
     organizers had asked Clinton to attend as much of the day as 
     possible.
       After Jones's news conference, a White House aide said her 
     account could not be true and referred The Post to Phil 
     Price, Gov. Clinton's senior assistant for economic 
     development in 1991 and now Arkansas' assistant bank 
     commissioner. Price said he is convinced Clinton did not 
     return to the Excelsior that afternoon because he does not 
     remember returning himself and he was Clinton's designated 
     staff member for such conferences. But management consultant 
     James Harrington, the featured conference speaker after 
     lunch, said he talked to and saw Clinton that afternoon. ``He 
     was milling about, meeting people, saying hello,'' he said.
       Jones said she followed Ferguson upstairs, and the trooper 
     stayed in the hallway. Clinton met her at the door, she said. 
     She said the room was furnished as a parlor and had no bed.
       After asking her about her job, she said, Clinton took her 
     hand. She said, she pulled it away, and tried to distract him 
     by chatting about Clinton's wife. But, she said, he 
     persisted, kissing her neck and putting his hand on her thigh 
     underneath her culotte.
       Jones said she objected, asking Clinton: ``What's going 
     on?'' She said he told her he had noticed her downstairs and 
     liked the curves of her body and the way her black hair 
     flowed down her back. ``I will never forget the look on his 
     face,'' she said. ``His face was just red, beet red.''
       Asked why she didn't leave the room, she said: ``I guess I 
     didn't know what to do. This is the governor, this is not 
     just anyone. I feel intimidated . . . by anybody that's 
     higher than me. I feel I've got to do everything possible not 
     to make them upset at me. I've always been like that.''
       Jones said she walked to the far end of a sofa and sat 
     down, averting her eyes. The next thing she knew, she said, 
     Clinton had dropped his trousers and underwear and was 
     sitting next to her on the couch. Then, she said, he asked 
     her to perform oral sex.
       ``I jumped up and I said, `No, I don't do that. I'm not 
     that type of person. I need to be going back downstairs,''' 
     Jones recalled saying. Clinton, she said, tried to reassure 
     her that she would not be in trouble with her boss if she 
     stayed, but she left the room. As she was leaving, she said, 
     Clinton asked her not to mention the episode to anyone.
       She said she passed Ferguson in the hallway without 
     speaking, and returned to the table where Blackard still sat 
     downstairs. She estimated she had been gone for no more than 
     15 minutes.
       In an interview, Blackard said she had seen Clinton staring 
     at Jones, watched the trooper ask Jones to meet Clinton, and 
     talked with her about whether to go. ``I did say to her . . . 
     `Find out what he wants and come right back. . . . If you're 
     that curious, go ahead,''' Blackard recalled saying.
       When she returned, Blackard said, Jones was ``walking 
     fast'' and ``shaking.'' She said Jones told her that Clinton 
     had made unwanted advances and Jones implored her to tell no 
     one. ``We were both kind of scared,'' Blackard recalled. ``We 
     weren't thinking straight. I thought I could lose my job. She 
     thought she could lose her job.''
       In an interview, Jones said that at the time she feared she 
     would be fired for leaving the registration desk or because 
     her refusal might have angered Clinton, who as governor 
     appointed her boss.
       Another friend, Debra Ballentine, said Jones showed up 
     unexpectedly at her office late that afternoon and told her 
     the story. Jones trembled and ``was breathing really hard,'' 
     said Ballentine, who has known Jones about six years and is a 
     marketing coordinator for a large Little Rock company. 
     Ballentine said Jones ``couldn't believe she was so stupid'' 
     for going upstairs.
       Before Jones's news conference, both Balletine and Blackard 
     signed affidavits supporting Jones's account after 
     conferences in the office of Jones's attorney, Traylor. The 
     Post interviewed both women subsequently.
       Jones's two sisters said they talked to Jones that evening 
     at their homes outside Little Rock. Charlotte Brown said her 
     younger sister told her in a ``matter of fact'' way that 
     Clinton had propositioned her. Lydia Cathey, now 29 and 
     closer in age to Jones, said she ushered her sister into her 
     bedroom, shut the door and comforted her sister as she cried 
     on the bed.
       One voice silent in the Paula Jones controversy is that of 
     trooper Ferguson, who now guards Clinton's successor in the 
     Arkansas governor's mansion, Jim Guy Tucker (D).
       ``I am not going to say anything about it,'' Ferguson told 
     The Post after Jones's February news conference. ``I have to 
     think about my family.''
       Other troopers said Ferguson told them about soliciting a 
     woman at the Excelsior soon afterward and again last summer, 
     when he and three other members of the Arkansas governor's 
     security detail began talking among themselves about 
     experiences with Clinton, including times they say they had 
     sought out women on the governor's behalf.
       One story Ferguson told involved a woman named ``Paula,'' 
     according to the troopers. Trooper Roger Perry told The Post 
     he heard Ferguson tell how Clinton had noticed ``Paula'' at 
     the Excelsior and had described her as having ``that come-
     hither look,'' Perry said in an interview that Ferguson, at 
     Clinton's request, arranged to get a room, telling the hotel 
     Clinton expected a call from the White House.
       Last summer several of the troopers, looking for a book 
     deal, enlisted the help of Little Rock attorney Cliff 
     Jackson, who has worked for years to discredit Clinton 
     politically. Eager to get maximum impact, he arranged for the 
     troopers to talk to reporters for the American Spectator 
     magazine and the Los Angeles Times.
       The Spectator article, released in late December, quoted an 
     unidentified trooper as saying that he had recruited 
     ``Paula'' at Clinton's request and stood guard outside the 
     hotel room for ``no more than an hour.'' The magazine also 
     reported that the trooper recalled ``Paula'' saying as she 
     exited that ``she was available to be Clinton's regular 
     girlfriend if he so desired''--a remark at odds with Jones's 
     story. Fellow troopers told The Post that Ferguson had told 
     them ``Paula'' was willing to be Clinton's girlfriend.
       Jones said she learned about the Spectator article from her 
     friend Ballentine during a visit to Arkansas last January. 
     Jones said she felt humiliated by the magazine's description 
     of her encounter with Clinton and believed that some of her 
     friends and family would conclude that she was the ``Paula'' 
     described in the article. She said she wanted to ``clear my 
     name.''
       Jones said she did not accuse Clinton during the 1992 
     campaign, when his conduct with women was at issue, because 
     she still worked for the state and was convinced no one would 
     believe her.
       The day after Jones said she learned about the American 
     Spectator article, Jones and Ballentine recalled they ran 
     into Ferguson at a restaurant in the Little Rock area. Jones 
     said she asked Ferguson if he had been the magazine's source. 
     Ferguson became apologetic according to both Jones and 
     Ballentine.
       According to the two women, Ferguson said he had been 
     dragged into the interview with the Spectator by the other 
     troopers. They said he added that no one would know who Jones 
     was because he hadn't disclosed her last name and, ``besides, 
     Clinton told me you wouldn't do anything anyway.''
       Jones said she had several more contacts with Ferguson and 
     Clinton before she left her state job in February 1993. Once, 
     she said, she ran into Ferguson, who told her Clinton had 
     been asking about her, wanted her home phone number and was 
     interested in seeing her. Jones, who was living with the man 
     she would marry in December 1991, said she refused.
       Jones saw Clinton two more times before she left the 
     Arkansas Industrial Development Commission, she said. Once 
     she got a brief hello. The other time, in fall 1991, she 
     said, Clinton called out to her under the rotunda of the 
     Arkansas capitol. He was accompanied by another bodyguard, 
     Larry Patterson, one of the three troopers who has publicly 
     accused Clinton of womanizing. Patterson said in an interview 
     he recalls the encounter as Jones does.
       After Clinton spotted her, Jones said, Clinton called out 
     her name and walked over. Then, she said, ``he squeezed me up 
     close to him,'' her side to his. He turned with a smile to 
     Patterson, his arm still around her shoulder and said to 
     Patterson: ``Don't we make a beautiful couple? Beauty and the 
     Beast.''
       She said she replied, ``Well, you don't look like the 
     Beast.'' And with that, she said, Clinton bid goodbye, 
     saying, ``It was nice to see you, ``Paula.''
                                  ____


                [From the Washington Post, May 4, 1994]

   Bennett Sets an Aggressive Campaign on Public Relations and Legal 
                                 Fronts

                          (By Michael Isikoff)

       President Clinton has retained prominent Washington defense 
     lawyer Robert S. Bennett as part of an aggressive public 
     relations and legal strategy aimed at fighting allegations 
     from a former Arkansas state employee that Clinton sexually 
     harassed her three years ago.
       An attorney for Paula Corbin Jones said yesterday she 
     intends to file a civil suit in federal court on Thursday 
     accusing Clinton of violating her civil rights and causing 
     her ``severe emotional distress'' by making ``unwelcome 
     physical contact'' and asking her to perform a sexual act. 
     The three-year statute of limitations on these claims is to 
     expire at the end of this week.
       White House officials have denied Jones's allegations. This 
     week, believing Jones will make good on her intentions to 
     file suit, Clinton and White House counsel Lloyd Cutler 
     turned over the defense to Bennett, well known for his 
     spirited representation of prominent Washington clients, and 
     gave him new authority to mount a public relations 
     counteroffensive, knowledgeable sources said.
       ``Bennett is .  .  . savvy about both the law as well as 
     the ways of Washington and the press,'' said one White House 
     official ``He brings a lot of assets to this type of case.''
       Bennett said in an interview yesterday that the lawsuit was 
     ``really just an attempt to rewrite the results of the 
     election'' and released an affidavit from a Little Rock 
     businessman saying that Jones's lawyer, Daniel Traylor, 
     threatened to publicly ``embarrass'' Clinton last January 
     unless his client got money. Traylor also said that ``it 
     would help if President Clinton would get Paula a job out in 
     California,'' according to the businessman's sworn statement.
       Bennett becomes the second Washington lawyer hired by the 
     president to deal with controversies about Clinton's private 
     life and investments. David Kendall has been dealing with the 
     investigation of special counsel Robert B. Fiske Jr. about 
     Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton's investment in the 
     Whitewater Development Corp. and its ties to a failed 
     Arkansas savings and loan, Madison Guaranty. Kendall has also 
     been monitoring negotiations on Capitol Hill over the shape 
     and timing of congressional hearings on the matter.
       ``Bennett obviously has had considerable experience with 
     congressional hearings and I would expect he would be 
     involved in giving advice on those kinds of things,'' said 
     one senior administration official.
       Bennett was counsel to the Senate ethics committee in its 
     investigation of the ``Keating Five'' senators. He 
     represented Clark Clifford in the BCCI investigation, and is 
     Rep. Dan Rostenkowski's lawyer in the Justice Department's 
     investigation of the Illinois Democrat.
       The White House said both Kendall and Bennett are being 
     paid with the Clinton's private funds.
       Bennett is known as a lawyer who not only fights behind the 
     scenes for his clients but also is an outspoken public 
     advocate. ``there's a sense that a lot of this was political 
     and needed to be fought on a more public level,'' one source 
     said.
       Jones's charges have been a cause celebre in right-wing 
     circles since she first appeared last Feb. 11 at a news 
     conference organized by Cliff Jackson, a Little Rock lawyer 
     who is a longtime political opponent of Clinton's and 
     sponsored by the Conservative Political Action Committee. 
     Jackson had called reporters to attend the launch of a fund-
     raising effort for Arkansas state troopers who had accused 
     Clinton of abusing his office as governor to solicit women 
     for him.
       Charges that Clinton had engaged in extramarital liaisons 
     arose during the presidential campaign, when he was publicly 
     accused by an Arkansas woman, Gennifer Flowers, of having 
     conducted a years-long affair with her and then obtaining for 
     her a state job. Clinton said her story was untrue, but 
     confessed to having caused ``pain in my marriage.'' The 
     matter was largely dropped as other issues came to dominate 
     the campaign.
       It arose again in December, when a conservative magazine, 
     the American Spectator, published the allegations by the 
     state troopers.
       The mainstream media largely gave limited coverage to 
     Jones's allegations, leading several publications and 
     interest groups to publicly accuse them of covering up for 
     Clinton, and to insist that her charges be afforded the same 
     attention as the sexual harassment allegations Anita F. Hill 
     made during the Senate confirmation hearings of Clarence 
     Thomas for the Supreme Court.
       Last month, the conservative watchdog group Accuracy in 
     Media ran advertisements in The Washington Post and the New 
     York Times criticizing them for ignoring the story.
       Republicans have concentrated their anti-Clinton fire on 
     the Whitewater investigation of land deals by Clinton and his 
     wife in Arkansas, rather than allegations by Jones or the 
     troopers.
       Jones has said that while working at a state government 
     conference on May 8, 1991, she was approached by Arkansas 
     state trooper Daniel Ferguson and was asked to meet Clinton 
     in an upstairs room. Once inside, she said, Clinton made 
     unwelcome sexual advances.
       Traylor said that the suit will charge that Clinton had a 
     regular ``practice'' of using state troopers to approach 
     women for sex with him and that he also will seek testimony 
     from the troopers.
       ``Paula Jones is a victim of that practice,'' Traylor said.
       Bennett said the lawsuit Traylor is contemplating is 
     ``unprecedented'' and he questioned whether a president may 
     be sued for alleged events that took place before he entered 
     office.
       Jones has said she did not file her claims after they 
     happened because she was frightened she would lose her state 
     job if she accused the governor of misconduct. Because 
     federal law requires that sexual harassment claims be filed 
     within 180 days of the alleged offense, Jones long since 
     missed her chance to do so.
       But Traylor said he intends to make a variety of other 
     legal claims against the president, including intentional 
     affliction of emotional distress, and civil rights 
     violations, based on the allegations that state troopers 
     targeted women. Both of those claims have a three-year 
     statute of limitations.
       Traylor, a sole practitioner with little trial experience, 
     said he reached out to prominent trial lawyers around the 
     country as well as feminist groups and others for help in 
     handling Jones's case, only to be turned down.
       Traylor said he was set to file the complaint last Friday 
     on his own when he received a last minute fax from the 
     conservative Landmark Legal Foundation, asking him to hold 
     off because it had just recruited an experienced litigation 
     firm that could help him.
       But Traylor said that that offer never materialized and he 
     has since found another experienced trial lawyer, whom he 
     declined to identify, to assist him in the case.
       Yesterday, Bennett focused his attacks on Traylor's 
     conduct. Traylor said in interviews earlier this year that he 
     had tried before Jones's news conference to relay a message 
     to the White House through a Little Rock businessman, George 
     L. Cook, that his client was willing to say nothing publicly 
     in return for an apology from Clinton and money to compensate 
     for the harm she claims Clinton did.
       In the affidavit released yesterday by Bennett, Cook said 
     Traylor had told him that if Jones didn't get money for her 
     claim, ``she would embarrass him publicly.''
       Cook states in the affidavit that he asked Traylor during 
     their January meeting why he had taken the Jones case. ``He 
     said he knew his case was weak, but he needed the client and 
     he needed the money. . . . Traylor said it would help if 
     President Clinton would get Paula a job out in California 
     [where she now lives]. I told Traylor that would be 
     illegal.'' Cook said he decided on his own not to relay 
     Traylor's message to the White House.
       Traylor acknowledged yesterday that he suggested a variety 
     of possible ways to settle the case out of court, including 
     arranging jobs for Jones and her husband, an airline ticket 
     agent and aspiring actor, as well as a public apology from 
     Clinton. Traylor said he told Cook: ``Bill's got lots of 
     Hollywood contacts.''
       But Traylor insisted there was nothing improper about the 
     discussions and that Jones had never suggested that he seek a 
     job for her or money from the president. ``She ain't in it 
     for the money,'' Traylor said. Traylor said he regrets 
     ``contaminating'' Jones's allegations by the involvement with 
     Jackson, Clinton's longtime political enemy. Traylor said he 
     contacted Jackson thinking mistakenly that Jackson was 
     representing trooper Ferguson, the source for the Spectator 
     article that named ``Paula.''
       That connection prompted Clinton senior adviser George 
     Stephanopoulos to call Jones's allegation ``a cheap political 
     fund-raising trick.''

     

                          ____________________