Warning: The following report contains sexually explicit language.
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[Monica Lewinsky is sworn in.]
...
Q. What I have placed in front of you is ... a chart that you have
... earlier testified about of contacts between yourself and the president.
As I indicated to you informally beforehand, this grand jury
session today is for you to answer questions from the grand jurors.
And so without any further ado, I will ask the grand jurors if they
have any questions of Ms. Lewinsky.
A. JUROR I think I'm going to start out.
Q. Okay.
Q. JUROR Ms. Lewinsky, in your testimony when you were with us on the
sixth, you mentioned some of the steps that you took to maintain secrecy
regarding your relationship: that you would bring papers or ... you would
accidentally bump into each other in the hallway. You always used Betty as
the excuse for you to be waved in and on many occasions you would go in one
door and out of the other door.
A. Yes. ...
... Q. JUROR: ... Were these ways to maintain your secrecy your
idea or were they recommended to you by anyone?
... A. Some of them were my idea. Some of them were things that I
had discussed with the President. I think it was a mutual understanding
between us that obviously we'd both try to be careful.
Q. JUROR: Do you recall at all specifically which ones he may have
recommended to you as an idea on maintaining the secrecy?
A. Yes and no. The issue of Betty being the cover story for when I
came to the White House, it became my understanding I think most clearly
from the fact that I couldn't come to see him after the election until
unless Betty was there to clear me in and that one time when I asked him
why, he said because if someone comes to see him, there's a list circulated
among the staff members and then everyone would be questioning why I was
there to see him. ...
Q. MR. EMICK: ... Were there ever any discussions between you and
the President about what should be done with letters that you - letters or
notes that you had sent to him? ...
A. It was my understanding that obviously he would throw them away
or, if he decided to keep them, which I didn't think he did, he would put
them somewhere safe. ...
Q. What about whether on your caller ID on your telephone the word
POTUS would appear and whether anything was done in order to make sure that
POTUS did not appear on your telephone?
A. My caller ID at work; it would - when the President called from
the Oval Office, it would say POTUS and when he'd call from the residence,
it was an asterisk. And I told him that. ...
Then one time he called me from the residence ... on a line that
had a phone number attached to it and so when he called, he said, "Oh, did
it ring up, you know, phone number? It didn't say my name, did it?"
And so it was - that was something that I was concerned about.
Q. Did he ever express to you a reluctance to leave messages on
your telephone voice message system?
A. At home?
Q. Yes.
A. Yes.
Q: All right. Tell us about that.
A. One time in a conversation he just said he didn't like to leave
messages.
Q. OK. What about the times that you would visit him? Were those times
selected in a way so that there weren't people around or that certain
people weren't around?
A. Yes.
Q. OK. Would you tell us about that?
A. There were obviously people at the White House who didn't like
me and wouldn't be understanding of why I was coming to see the President
or accepting of that and so there was always sort of an effort made that
either on the weekends - when I was working in the White House he told me
that it was usually quiet on the weekends and I knew that to be true. And
after I left the White House it was always when there weren't going to be a
lot of people around.
Q. And what about particular individual people? Would there be
particular individual people who would be - staffers in the oval area that
you would try to avoid in order to help conceal the relationship?
A. Yes. Nancy Hernreich, Stephen Goodin, Evelyn Lieberman. Pretty
much anybody on the first floor of the West Wing.
Q. How did all these people come to not like you so much? What were
you doing? Were you breaking the rules of the White House? What were you
doing to draw their attention to not liking you so much? Before the
relationship. From the time you got there all the way up to the time what
I'm saying is what did you do to deserve for them not to like you?
A. Before the relationship started?
Q. JUROR Yes. What did you do from -
A. I don't think there was anything I did before the relationship
started that - the relationship started in November of 1995. I had only
been at the White House as an intern in the Old Executive Office Building
for - for a few months, so most of my tenure at the White House I was
having a relationship with the President.
I think that the President seemed to pay attention to me and I paid
attention to him and I think people were wary of his weaknesses ...
Q. JUROR But you do admit a lot of the places that you weren't
supposed to be you were always found. You do admit that there were things
that you were doing, in order to see him that they were feeling that was
going against the rules of the White House? ...
A. Yes and no. There really weren't any of these staffers who saw
me in the places that I wasn't supposed to be. And that was part of the
effort to conceal the relationship. So does that make sense? ...
I did make an effort, I think, to try to have interactions with the
President and I think that was probably disturbing to them. I know that if
the President was in the hall and he was talking to people and I passed by,
he'd stop talking and say hi to me. I'm not really sure.
Q. JUROR Just a follow-up to that.
A. Sure.
Q. JUROR If they didn't see you, well, how did they know?
A. I don't know what they knew. ...
Q. JUROR: Because if you said you made an effort to hide yourself
... the Secret Service are the ones that saw you.
A. Mm-hmm.
Q. JUROR: Okay. So ... how did they know that you were there ... ?
A. I don't know. ... I've heard reported in the newspapers and on
TV that the Secret Service, someone said something to Evelyn Lieberman and
I ... had had a real negative interaction with Nancy Hernreich early on in
my tenure at the White House and so -
...I'm a friendly person and - and I didn't know it was a crime in
Washington for people - for you to want people to like you and so I was
friendly. And I guess I wasn't supposed to be.
Q. JUROR: So that interaction that you had with Evelyn Lieberman
was when she was telling you what?
A. She stopped me in the hall and she asked me where I worked, in
which office I worked, and I told her Legislative Affairs in the East Wing.
And she said, "You're always trafficking up this area." You know,
"You're not supposed to be here. Interns aren't allowed to go past the Oval
Office."
And she - she really startled me and I walked away and I went down
to the bathroom and I was crying because - I mean, when - you know, when an
older woman sort of chastises you like that, it's upsetting.
And then I thought about what she said and I realized that, well, I
wasn't an intern any more. I was working there. And I kind of believe in
clear communication, so I went back to Evelyn Lieberman, to Ms. Lieberman,
and I - I said, "You know, I just wanted to clarify with you that I work
here, I'm not an intern. So, you know, I am allowed to go past the Oval
Office." I don't think I said that, but I had a blue pass.
And she looked at me and said, "They hired you?" And I was startled
and then she said, "Oh, well, I think I mistook you for someone else or
some other girl with dark hair who keeps trafficking up the area." And ...
that was maybe in December or January of '95 or '96. ...
Q. JUROR: Ms. Lewinsky, were you ever reprimanded or chastised by
your immediate supervisor in Legislative Affairs for trafficking up the
area or being where you weren't supposed to be or being away from your desk
too much? Anything like that?
A. Being away from my desk had been mentioned to me, but
trafficking up the area and being where I'm not supposed to be, no.
... my view with work is that you get a lot more done and people
are a lot more willing to help you when you have a personal interaction
with them. And so the person who held the job before me would fax the
drafts of his letters to the staff secretary's office and then at some
point during the day when someone got the draft they would make the changes
and then fax it back.
And I found it to be much more effective to take things over to the
staff secretary's office and interact with the person - I can't remember
her name - Helen - to interact with Helen and have Helen edit the letters
right then and there and then I could go back and to me it was a faster
process.
So there was also - you know, I also wanted to try to see the
president. So, I mean, I did make efforts to try to see him in the hall or
something like that because -
Q. JUROR: So the route to the staff person's office was a route
that you could still veer off and see the president?
... Q. you have indicated earlier that it was Betty Currie who waved you in
all the times during 1997 that you saw the President. Did you ever talk
with the President about whether he could wave you in instead or whether it
would be a good idea for him to wave you in personally?
A. Yes. I think that that's what I mentioned earlier. ...
Q. OK. What about - you had mentioned that you took a different
route into the Oval Office than you would take out of the Oval Office. In
addition, did you ever take routes to get to the Oval Office that seemed
calculated to avoid certain Secret Service or White House personnel?
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