Bill and Hillary Clinton’s alleged mistreatment of state employees, especially their own security details, may have been foreshadowed by accusations that Bill Clinton misused Arkansas state troopers while he was governor of that state from 1979-1981 and 1983-1992 and even after he was elected president.
Interviews with the famous women from Clinton’s past, freshly relevant as Hillary Clinton seeks to focus on gender issues this election cycle, may shed new light on the scandal that would become known as “Troopergate.”
And the troopers’ own stories of soliciting, managing and even covering up Clinton’s alleged affairs may face fresh scrutiny all these years later in light of recent claims by former guards of the Clintons.
Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones, Troopers
All these years later, Gennifer Flowers, Bill Clinton’s admitted mistress, confirmed to this reporter in a new interview that she was instructed to contact state troopers to communicate with Clinton.
“Yes I was instructed to go through them and a guard at the Governor’s Mansion,” Flowers stated. “Also remember Luther (also known as Jerry) Parks, was a guard at the Mansion. He was murdered in Little Rock. He was not one that I was instructed to use, but they all knew.”
Parks, who worked for the guard force that protected the governor’s mansion, was shot and killed while leaving a Mexican restaurant in Little Rock on September 16, 1993. His murder remains unsolved. Parks’ son, Garry Parks, claimed in interviews that his father was in possession of blackmail information on Clinton and that he was threatening to disclose the data before he was murdered. Snopes.com documents that Clyde Steelman, a homicide cop with the Little Rock police, dismissed Gary Parks’ theories as “unsubstantiated, nothing to grasp.”
Flowers says she was Clinton’s consensual mistress for more than 12 years. Clinton acknowledged in sworn testimony that he had a sexual relationship with Flowers, making her the only woman other than Monica Lewinsky with whom Clinton admitted to having an affair.
In her 1998 deposition for the Paula Jones sexual harassment lawsuit, Flowers stated that “Arkansas security officers assigned to the Governor’s office drove Bill” to her apartment building for meetings and “waited for him while he visited me.”
She also named two state troopers that Clinton instructed her to use to communicate with him.
Bill Clinton also instructed me to call either Larry Patterson or Roger Perry in order to communicate. He told me that he felt that he could trust them, and they were people that would help us communicate when necessary.
Patterson refused a request to be interviewed for this report. Perry could not be reached for comment.
In December 1993, Patterson, who spent five years in Clinton’s security unit, detailed Clinton’s alleged misuse of his services for matters beyond state affairs. “We were more than bodyguards. We had to lie, cheat, and cover up for that man,” Patterson told the Los Angeles Times.
Patterson and Perry both signed affidavits for the newspaper confirming that Clinton abused his power by ordering the state troopers to help with private matters, including procuring women and escorting him to his trysts.
“At Booker Elementary School, I saw the governor engaged in a sexual act with a female,” Patterson told CNN in a December 1993 interview. Booker was Chelsea Clinton’s elementary school.
Perry told the news network that Clinton’s behavior continued even after Clinton became president. He said a woman was sneaked into the governor’s mansion covered in a trench coat immediately after the election and before Clinton departed Arkansas for the White House.
Meanwhile, in interviews with this reporter, Paula Jones described how Clinton allegedly utilized the services of state troopers to hit on her. And she described the trooper who stood guard outside a room at the Excelsior Hotel in Little Rock, Arkansas, where on May 8, 1991 the future president allegedly groped and exposed himself to her.
“He sat on the couch and he was fondling himself and he asked me to kiss it,” Jones stated of Clinton.
Jones recounted:
I jumped up. Because I was leaning, like on the side of the couch arm, with his arm on it. I was kind of leaning up against that. And I jumped over and said, “No I’m not that kind of a girl. And I need to be leaving immediately.” So of course he was embarrassed. He turned red. He pulled his pants up. And I went up to the door and was trying to get out. And he momentarily put his hand on the door so I couldn’t completely get it opened. And he said, “You’re smart. Let’s keep this between ourselves.”
Asked whether she took Clinton’s alleged remark as a threat, Jones replied, “Yeah. Yeah. He said don’t tell nobody. Well of course, He didn’t want no body to know.”
Jones said the room was protected by a state trooper and that when she exited, the state trooper had a smirk on his face.
‘We do this all the time for the governor’
In her deposition for the sexual harassment case, Jones identified state trooper Danny Ferguson as approaching her at the hotel to meet Clinton. “It’s okay, we do this all the time for the Governor,” Jones’s lawsuit quoted Ferguson as saying.
“Trooper Ferguson then escorted Jones to the floor of the hotel suite whose number had been written on the slip of paper Trooper Ferguson had given to Jones. The door was slightly ajar when she arrived at the suite,” the lawsuit states.
In his legal response, Ferguson denies some aspects of the story, but he admits escorting Jones to a hotel room. “Defendant Danny Ferguson admits traveling in an elevator with plaintiff Paula Jones and pointing out a particular room of the hotel. He has no information as to whether the door was opened or closed,” reads Ferguson’s response.
Troopers Propositioned Inside State Capital Building
The public largely thinks that Jones’ personal encounter with Clinton began and ended after that one incident at the hotel, when Clinton was Governor of Arkansas and Jones was a state employee.
However, Jones recounts being propositioned two more times after that initial incident – once by Clinton himself while he was being escorted by a state trooper, and a second time by a state trooper who was purportedly acting on Clinton’s behalf. The encounter with the trooper, Jones revealed, included a request for meetings while Hillary was out of town.
About two or three weeks after the incident at the hotel, Jones says she was entering the capital building when she was stopped by another state trooper who was deployed in the building.
She told this reporter:
I went into the governor’s office to give them their papers. When I started walking back out, someone came out right behind me, so I turned and looked and he goes, “Hey Paula.” And it was another state trooper. … He says, “Paula, the governor wants to know if you have a regular boyfriend.” And I said, “Yes, I live with him.” I lived with my boyfriend. We were going to get married at the time, so eventually he was my fiancé. …
He said, “Well, Bill was wanting to know if maybe you might want to meet with him sometime because Hillary is out of town a lot on business.”
Jones said she replied by telling the state trooper “Absolutely no. I’m living with my boyfriend and I’m not interested.”
During an incident at about the same time, Jones says Clinton spotted her in the governor’s office while he was walking with a state trooper. He put his arm around her and “he squeezed me real hard. Our sides were touching.” The encounter, she said, ended with a joke about Beauty and the Beast.
She recounted:
My regular job was to go twice a day from the Industrial Development Commission over to the governor’s office and deliver mail or pick up mail. So that was in my daily routine every day to go into the governor’s office. So one of the times after the incident happened at the hotel, I was going to go the treasurer’s office to receive payroll checks to take over to my office.
That’s when she says she was spotted by Clinton, who was being escorted by a state trooper through the rotunda of the Arkansas State Capital building.
I was walking towards the rotunda area because that was where the treasurer’s office was and they come walking in the front door of the state capital and instead of going to the direction of where they were coming from … he goes around the front of the rotunda because he saw me, and came over to me. And of course was laughing and giggling. And he said, “You look great.” And he liked my outfit that I had on, and he hugged me side to side. He squeezed me real hard. Our sides were touching. He looked at the state police[man] and he said,”‘Don’t we look like Beauty and the Beast.” And in my shock I didn’t know what to say other than, “You don’t look like the Beast.”
The second incident was briefly mentioned in Jones’ May 6, 1994 complaint against Clinton, but it received little news media attention.
Troopergate Led to Monica Lewinsky Disclosure
It is now largely forgotten that it was the exposure of “Troopergate” that led to the Jones lawsuit and the public disclosure of Clinton’s affair with Lewinsky.
The story was first reported by David Brock in a lengthy 1993 article on the subject for American Spectator based on the accounts of four Arkansas state troopers. The troopers detailed being used by Clinton to arrange and protect trysts with women, including one woman named “Paula.”
The publicity was followed by Jones’ sexual harassment suit, during which Clinton infamously lied about having sexual relations with Lewinsky, leading to impeachment proceedings.
“We lied for him and helped him cheat on his wife, and he treated us like dogs,” Patterson, who was quoted by name, told Brock.
Half Dozen Regular Mistresses
Reported Brock:
The troopers said their “official” duties included facilitating Clinton’s cheating on his wife. This meant that, on the state payroll and using state time, vehicles, and resources, they were instructed by Clinton on a regular basis to approach women and to solicit their telephone numbers for the governor; to drive him in state vehicles to rendezvous points and guard him during sexual encounters; to secure hotel rooms and other meeting places for sex; to lend Clinton their state cars so he could slip away and visit women unnoticed; to deliver gifts from Clinton to various women (some of whom, like Flowers, also had state jobs); and to help Clinton cover up his activities by keeping tabs on Hillary’s whereabouts and lying to Hillary about her husband’s whereabouts.
According to Brock’s account from the troopers, Clinton’s activities with women increased as time went by and included about six regular mistresses.
As the troopers described the situation, the scale of Clinton’s extramarital activities only increased after he won election to a second term in 1982. When Perry returned to security duty at the mansion in the late 1980s, other troopers regaled him with tales of Clinton’s affairs in the 1982-to-1987 period. During the last five years of Clinton’s governorship, while Patterson worked at the residence, he said he gained first-hand knowledge that Clinton was involved with a group of Little Rock women — regular mistresses or girlfriends — numbering about a half-dozen.
Some of the women were connected to politics, Brock reported.
According to Patterson, the long-term mistresses since 1987, in addition to Gennifer Flowers, included a staffer in Clinton’s office; an Arkansas lawyer Clinton appointed to a judgeship; the wife of a prominent judge; a local reporter; an employee at Arkansas Power and Light, a state-regulated public utility; and a cosmetics sales clerk at a Little Rock department store. They ranged in age from their early 30s to their early 40s. According to both Patterson and Perry, throughout the period of their employment at the governor’s residence, Clinton visited one of these women, either in the early morning or the late evening, or one of them came to the residence to see him, at least two or three times a week.
Continued Brock:
Clinton also had a series of brief affairs and one-time encounters from 1987 through early 1993 of which the troopers had direct knowledge. He often met women at social functions in Little Rock or on the road. Sometimes he would even use troopers as intermediaries, sending them off with messages and outright propositions to women to retire to back rooms, hotel rooms, or offices with him.
The troopers were even assigned to specific regular women, Brock reported:
Over time, as both Patterson and Perry described it, each mistress was assigned a particular trooper whose job it was to call her and find out when she could see Bill at her home, drive her to various events where Bill was appearing, and deliver gifts to her.
“After the presidential election, Bill instructed the troopers to clear women through the outer Secret Service blockade on the street by falsely identifying them as staff, or as cousins of the troopers,” Brock further reported.
Hillary Watch, Chelsea’s School
Brock reported that part of the troopers’ duties were to alert Clinton if Hillary woke up while he was on one of his nighttime trysts or if she was returning to the house if Clinton was inside with a woman, the troopers were quoted as saying.
The troopers said Chelsea’s elementary school was utilized as a front to meet women.
More than once, Larry Patterson said, he stood guard and witnessed the department store clerk performing oral sex on Bill in a parked car, including in the parking lot of Chelsea’s elementary school, and on the grounds of the governor’s mansion.
In one instance, in the fall of 1988 or 1989, as Patterson remembered it, he was driving Clinton to an annual reception for the Harrison County Chamber of Commerce in a hospitality suite at the Camelot Hotel in Little Rock. On the way, Clinton suggested a detour to Chelsea’s school, Booker Elementary. When they arrived, Clinton told Patterson the sales clerk was sitting in her car, which was parked in the otherwise deserted front parking lot. “I parked across the entrance and stood outside the car looking around, about 120 feet from where they were parked in a lot that was pretty well lit. I could see Clinton get into the front seat and then the lady’s head go into his lap. They stayed in the car for 30 or 40 minutes,” Patterson said.
Brock strongly defended his story after it was first released. “The abuse of power aspect of it is really what justifies talking about what is really private sexual behavior,” Brock stated.
He penned a January 1994 piece for the Washington Post titled, “I Judged the Troopers To Be Credible,” in which he opined, “The real controversy, then, seems to revolve not around whether the charges are true but whether they are news.”
But as a freelance journalist in March 1998, Brock changed his tune. He apologized to Clinton for the Troopergate story in an open letter published at Esquire magazine. He also used the publication several months earlier to renounce his supposed position as a “right-wing hit man.”
“I don’t know what happened between you and Monica Lewinsky any more than I know how much of Troopergate or Paula Jones’ story is true,” he wrote to Clinton. “If sexual witch-hunts become the way to win in politics, if they become our politics altogether, we can and will destroy everyone in public life.”
“I’m saying that story was bad journalism, that I don’t stand by the story anymore,” Brock said in a subsequent interview, although he didn’t name any inaccuracies. “I can’t point to anything specific … [that] might be wrong.”
At the time, CNN reported that Brock’s apology might aid his career:
Brock’s political transformation may also help his career. Once dismissed as a fringe writer with a right-wing agenda, he is working hard to win newfound respectability as a mainstream journalist.
Indeed, Brock went on to align himself with the Clintons and in 2004 he founded Media Matters for America, which has received millions of dollars in financing.
Troopers Bribed for Silence
The Troopergate story did not rise or fall with Brock. In December 1993, the L.A. Times quoted four state troopers disclosing Clinton’s alleged misuse of their services, with the newspaper reporting the troopers revealed that Clinton “sought to discourage them from speaking out by offering them federal jobs.”
The newspaper reported the troopers said they “shielded [Clinton’s] infidelities, they allege, from his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, as well as the public.”
“It was that part, the troopers said, that they came to resent, along with what they regarded as an increasingly cavalier way Clinton began to treat them,” the paper reported.
The newspaper reported on the troopers’ involvement in facilitating Clinton’s alleged affairs:
The troopers said they were often called upon to act as intermediaries to arrange and conceal his extramarital encounters. They say they frequently picked up and delivered gifts from Clinton to various women and often drove Clinton in his state limousine to meetings with women.
Patterson and Perry also went on CNN in December 1993 to repeat their allegations against Clinton.
Pattern of Behavior
Troopergate may have been the start of a larger pattern of behavior with the Clintons.
Gary Byrne, a secret service agent stationed outside Clinton’s Oval Office, is set to release a book later this month reportedly detailing some of what he witnessed in the White House. The Drudge Report says the book has the Clinton camp worried.
A section of the introduction to the new book, titled, “Crisis of Character,” is available at Amazon. In it, Byrne relates he was complicit in covering up Clinton’s affairs.
“I even secretly disposed of sordid physical evidence that might later have been used to convict the president,” writes Byrne.
Journalist Ron Kessler’s book, “The First Family Detail,” contains tidbits about Hillary Clinton’s alleged mistreatment of Secret Service agents.
“Hillary was very rude to agents, and she didn’t appear to like law enforcement or the military,” former Secret Service agent Lloyd Bulman was quoted as telling Kessler.
“She wouldn’t go over and meet military people or police officers, as most protectees do. She was just really rude to almost everybody. She’d act like she didn’t want you around, like you were beneath her.”
That mentality was confirmed by Linda Tripp, a pivotal figure in the Monica Lewinsky scandal, who told this reporter in a recent interview that the Clintons’ showed disdain for classified material and military agents.
Tripp had unique access to the Clintons because her office was directly adjacent to Hillary’s second floor West Wing office for the entire time she served in the Clinton White House from 1993 to the summer of 1994 with the exception of the first three months of the Clinton administration, when she sat just outside the Oval Office.
Back in his 1993 piece, Brock described Hillary’s alleged disdain for the State Troopers charged with protecting her husband and her home:
The troopers were also objects of Hillary’s wrath. Patterson recalled the early morning of Labor Day in 1991, when Hillary came out of the mansion, got in her car, and drove off. Within a minute or so of leaving the gate, her aging blue Cutlass swung violently around and came charging back onto the grounds, tires squealing in the dust. “I thought something was terribly wrong, so I rushed out to her. And she screamed, ‘Where is the goddamn f—ing flag?’ It was early and we hadn’t raised the flag yet. And she said, ‘I want the goddamn f—ing flag up every f—ing morning at f—ing sunrise.’”
With additional research by Brenda J. Elliott.
Aaron Klein is Breitbart’s Jerusalem bureau chief and senior investigative reporter. He is a New York Times bestselling author and hosts the popular weekend talk radio program, “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio.” Follow him on Twitter @AaronKleinShow. Follow him on Facebook.
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