‘FBI played dirty to nail Clinton’

Washington, Dec. 19: A former director of the Secret Service said on Friday that the FBI engaged in an “abuse of power” by trying to pressure him to “give us the president” during the investigation of President Bill Clinton’s interactions with Monica Lewinsky a decade ago.

Mr Lewis C. Merletti, who headed the former president’s protective detail and later became the agency’s director, said in an interview that the FBI grilled him just days before Mr Clinton left office in a last-ditch effort to prove that his agents had covered up and even facilitated extramarital flings.

Mr Merletti said the FBI alleged that he and Mr Clinton had concocted a deal in “exchange for Merletti’s stonewalling questions about Ms Lewinsky, Mr Clinton would not only appoint him director of the Secret Service but would provide him women for “sexual encounters.” They said to me, “You’re the last person who can give us the president, and you’re going to give him to us,” he recalled, and said of the FBI, “They became involved in a political game.”

The accusation surfaced in a new book on the long battle between Mr Clinton and Kenneth Starr, the counsel who probed the Lewinsky affair.