The case of Stormy Daniels echoes past scandals

Almost 30 years ago, in May 1994, a former Arkansas state clerk, Paula Jones, filed a sexual-harassment suit against President Bill Clinton. She said that in 1991, as governor of Arkansas, he lured her to a hotel room in Little Rock, pushed down his trousers and urged her to perform a sex act, but she rebuffed him.

Mr Clinton denied the story, and his lawyers said he was immune to civil litigation while in office. A federal judge eventually threw out Ms Jones’s claim, but not before the Supreme Court rejected Mr Clinton’s argument about immunity, finding—hilariously—that the suit would be a minimal distraction. In fact, information was secretly passing between the investigation by Ken Starr, the independent counsel in the ever-branching inquiry known as Whitewater, and Ms Jones’s lawyers.