Lt Col Buzz Patterson

BILL CLINTON LOST THE ‘NUCLEAR CODES!’

By popular request!

Tonight’s “Buzz’s Bedtime Story” retells the unimaginable time when Bill Clinton actually LOST the “nuclear codes” at a time he was focused on Monica Lewinsky. This is a good one!

1) When I first arrived in the Clinton White House in the spring of 1996, I got busy immersing myself in my new experience, learning my job carrying the “nuclear football,” meeting the staff, and getting to know the Secret Service guys and girls.

The first thing I immediately noticed only a few days into my duty was that there was a young female intern who had unusual access to the Oval Office. She was actually assigned to the Old Executive Office building and not the West Wing.

But her security access badge matched mine, as the carrier of the nuke football, and I needed access to the president at all times. I asked one of my agent buddies who she was. He said, “Oh, don’t go there. That’s a close friend of the president.”

That “close friend” was Monica Lewinsky. Coming from the Air Force, where they definitely frowned on that sort of stuff, my antennae went up.

Over the next several months, I saw a lot of Monica. Not as much as Bill did, of course, but a lot. One lazy Saturday afternoon, Clinton asked me to come to the Oval and place a phone call to the president of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak. During the weekends,the military aide would work with the NSC to place calls to other leaders of state.

I sat at Betty Curry’s desk in the outer Oval and placed the call. It took a while to hook the call up with the Egyptian military aide. When I finally got Mr. Mubarak on the phone, I walked into the Oval to inform the president. As I did, I walked in on Bill and Monica actually hanging out. I knew what was going on, the staff knew what was going on, and, yes, Hillary knew what was going on. The rest of the world didn’t.

While this affair was ongoing, Paula Jones was simultaneously suing Clinton for sexual harassment years earlier in Little Rock. I attended the Jones deposition with Clinton in D.C. and, for the first time, the lawyers for Jones raised the name Monica Lewinsky in their questioning. I knew the history and my Air Force eyebrows raised. Ultimately, as a result of that deposition, Clinton agreed to a payment of $850K to Jones to make her go away.

For the first time, in addition to Jones, Clinton immediately knew he had another problem with Monica. A few weeks later, the Drudge Report would shock the world with the news about Monica and the national media immediately picked up on it. For the second time in less than a month, Bill had a huge bimbo problem.

Part Two below…