Bill Clinton (Blackmail)

In February 1997, before the existence of Bill Clinton's affair with (((Monica Lewinsky))) had been publicly revealed, Clinton held a scheduled Oval Office meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu. Shortly afterward, Clinton's Secretary Betty Curry reached out to Lewinsky and invited her to an Oval Office meeting, saying Clinton had something important to tell her. At the meeting, Clinton told Lewinsky that a foreign embassy had tapped his phone and was now in possession of recordings of their conversations. Clinton didn't specify which embassy, but a meeting with Netanyahu had occurred just a month earlier, in which he hosted Netanyahu and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat for a summit at Y River, Maryland. Towards the end of the summit, at 7:00 a.m. after a long night of final negotiations, Netanyahu approached Clinton privately to demand the release of convicted spy Jonathan Pollard and implied that if Pollard wasn't freed, the tapes of Clinton and Lewinsky might find their way to the media. According to the book Clinton, Inc. by Washington Examiner editor Daniel Halper. After demanding Pollard's release, Netanyahu brought up the Lewinsky tapes unprompted and told Clinton not to worry because Israeli intelligence had gotten rid of the recordings. But the calculated reference to the tape's existence was obviously intended as an implicit threat of blackmail, and Clinton understood it as such. On the last day of the Y River meetings, Clinton initiated the process of pardoning Pollard and only backed down when CIA director, George Tenet, threatened to resign if Pollard was released.