Donald Trump joins other big name politicans that have gotten into legal or political trouble from sexual situations…..
The Vanity Fair piece by Jennifer Palmieri
Starting with a 1998 appearance before the Ken Starr grand jury as a junior White House staffer testifying about President Bill Clinton’s relationship with my intern Monica Lewinsky, my career has been punctuated by collisions with the law involving men, sex, and power. Following Ken Starr, it was the Obama Justice Department’s case against my former boss then Senator John Edwards involving payments in an extramarital affair that brought me hours of interviews with the FBI, an appearance before a second grand jury, and my first (and hopefully only) testimony in a criminal trial as part of the 2012 Edwards prosecution. I was also Hillary Clinton’s communications director in the 2016 presidential campaign and watched as, in the wake of the Access Hollywood tape, more than a dozen women came forward to accuse Donald Trump of sexual harassment and assault in the closing weeks before the election. (Trump has denied all accusations.) It was payments his lawyer made to adult film actor Stormy Daniels during that time that led to the indictment of Trump by the Manhattan district attorney.
Forty years ago, it was unlikely that a political aide like me would get caught up in such legal dramas; these cases almost certainly would not have been brought forward by prosecutors. But my career, which began in the early 1990s, aligned with the dawn of a new age of accountability. A politician’s personal indiscretions, once considered off-limits to press and political foes alike, became fair game. Initially dubbed the “politics of personal destruction” during the Clinton presidency, this era morphed into a new reckoning in which politicians found their sexual misconduct exposed them to significant legal peril as political opponents, prosecutors—and, most recently, women they allegedly violated—pursued cases against them. The last three decades have shown that asking politicians about sex is an easy way to catch them in a lie—either in public or under oath. Given the number of laws governing politicians’ behavior, lying about women is a surefire way to get yourself into legal hot water….
*’Johnson = Penis