Then-President Bill Clinton Wrote Paula Jones An $850,000 Check
Patrick Howley
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Then-sitting president Bill Clinton sent his sexual misconduct accuser Paula Jones an $850,000 check right before his trial in the Senate to remove him from office for lying under oath about his Monica Lewinsky affair.
President Donald Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen paid off some women who were prepared to make affair allegations against candidate Trump during the presidential campaign, including pornography actress Stormy Daniels. But none of the funds came from the Trump campaign, and Alan Dershowitz and the White House both confirm what the media already knows: Trump did not break any laws whatsoever, even if he knew about the payments.
Let’s remember Bill Clinton’s check to Paula Jones, which occurred when he was literally the commander in chief, and supposedly came from a blind trust even though the numbers in that trust did not match up with the amount paid.
The New York Times reported on January 13, 1999:
Just as the Senate is about to begin President Clinton’s impeachment trial in earnest, Mr. Clinton sent $850,000 to Paula Corbin Jones today to settle the sexual misconduct lawsuit that started it all.
Clinton Administration officials said a check for $850,000, the amount agreed to in November to settle the case, was being sent by overnight mail to Ms. Jones and her lawyers. The officials, who asked that their names not be used, said that a little more than half of the money, $475,000, came from an insurance policy against civil liability the President held with Chubb Group Insurance. Most, if not all, of the remainder was withdrawn from a blind trust in the name of Mrs. Clinton, which officials said last year had assets of slightly more than $1 million.
A blind trust that is in Mr. Clinton’s name was reported in financial disclosure forms last year to have less than $100,000 in assets. A White House official said that although the trusts were in separate names, they were, in effect, joint accounts.
It was unclear why the amount not covered by insurance was not withdrawn from the Clintons’ legal defense fund as officials had once suggested it would be. A conservative legal organization said it would sue to prevent Mr. Clinton from using that fund to pay the settlement.
The payment ends Mr. Clinton’s involvement in the lawsuit itself, but its repercussions continue as the Senate prepares to hear opening arguments on Thursday in his trial on two articles of impeachment stemming from Ms. Jones’s complaint. It was in a deposition that the President gave in Ms. Jones’s lawsuit last Jan. 17 that he first denied having sexual relations with Monica S. Lewinsky, a former White House intern.
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