Vast Right-wing Conspiracy - The Today Show Interview

The Today Show Interview

In response to ongoing accusations surrounding the Clintons' investment in a real estate development known as Whitewater in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Clinton's Attorney General Janet Reno had appointed an independent counsel, Kenneth Starr, to investigate those accusations in 1994. Starr's investigation began to branch out into a variety of unrelated issues, from Filegate to Travelgate to allegations that Bill Clinton had an affair with Paula Jones prior to his presidency. White House intern Monica Lewinsky signed an affidavit that she had not had a relationship with Clinton, but Lewinsky's confidant Linda Tripp had been recording their phone conversations and offered Starr tapes of Lewinsky describing her feelings for, and alleging encounters with, the president. The president was asked to give a deposition, and accusations that he lied about an affair under oath first made national headlines on January 17, 1998, when the story was picked up by the conservative-right e-mail newsletter The Drudge Report. Despite swift denials from President Clinton, the media attention grew.

On January 27, 1998, Hillary Clinton appeared on NBC's The Today Show, in an interview with Matt Lauer.

Matt Lauer: "You have said, I understand, to some close friends, that this is the last great battle, and that one side or the other is going down here."

Hillary Clinton: "Well, I don't know if I've been that dramatic. That would sound like a good line from a movie. But I do believe that this is a battle. I mean, look at the very people who are involved in this — they have popped up in other settings. This is — the great story here for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president."

Clinton elaborated by decrying the tactics "and the kind of intense political agenda at work here". Bob Woodward recounts in his book The Agenda (1994) that the then-first lady recalled that when her husband was making his decision to run for the presidency in 1991, he reported receiving "a direct threat from someone in the Bush White House, warning that if he ran, the Republicans would go after him. 'We will do everything we can to destroy you personally,' she recalled that the Bush White House man had said."