Bill Clinton says ‘Today’ interview wasn’t his ‘finest…

Bill Clinton has admitted his combative response to questions about his affair with Monica Lewinsky was not his ‘finest hour’.

The former U.S. President bristled in an interview with NBC’s Today on Monday when asked if should have resigned over his relationship with the White House intern.

Mr Clinton became annoyed at the implication he didn’t apologise to Ms Lewinsky at the time in 1998, which he insisted he did.

CBS Late Show host Stephen Colbert on Tuesday asked him if he would like a ‘do-over’ on his comments and if he understood why they appeared ‘tone deaf’.

‘It wasn’t my finest hour – but the important thing is, that was a very painful thing, 20 years ago, I apologized to my family, to Monica Lewinsky and her family, to the American people,’ he said.

‘I meant it then and I meant it now, and I’ve had to live with the consequences ever since.’

Mr Clinton said he ‘wasn’t surprised’ when Ms Lewinsky was brought up in interviews but ‘didn’t like this one’ because of he ‘flat-out assertion that I had never apologized’.

He said he re-watched the interview and ‘I was mad at me – not for the first time’ about his aggressive answers.

Clinton and Lewinsky are seen together in a photo taken in November 1995

President Clinton infamously wags his finger in 1998, emphatically denying having affair with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky

As the affair was 20 years ago he admitted he should have realised ‘a lot of people who don’t have a lot of memory of that’.

In another interview on his book tour for his novel The President Is Missing, written with James Patterson, he said he should have approached it as an opportunity.

‘I should have remembered that that man is young enough to be my son,’ he said of Today interviewer Craig Melvin, 39, at a TimesTalk event on Tuesday.

‘I messed up, and I own that, and no mistake by anybody else – including that young man aggressively saying I didn’t apologize – can justify the fact that I got mad.

‘I should have been saying: “I’ve got a chance to tell a whole new generation that the journey I’ve been on the past 20 years is one the country has to take, and that #MeToo is demanding we take it, and the sooner the better”.’

Clinton is now on a book tour with co-author James Patterson but got pointed questions from NBC in an interview that aired Monday morning

In another interview on his book tour for his novel The President Is Missing, written with James Patterson, he said he should have approached it as an opportunity

Renewed questioning about the Lewinsky affair began after Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand said if the affair happened today, Mr Clinton would have to resign.

Though he repeatedly said he disagreed with her comments despite the change in political climate with the MeToo movement, Mr Clinton said he supported it. 

‘I still believe this #MeToo movement is long overdue, necessary and should be supported,’ he said.

When Melvin asked him if he thought he owed Ms Lewinsky an apology, Mr Clinton replied: ‘No I do not’.  

‘I have never talked to her. But I did say publicly on more than one occasion that I was sorry. I apologized to everybody in the world,’ he said, implying that was enough.

The former president carried on a lengthy affair with Lewinsky, often trysting with her just steps from the Oval Office

Renewed questioning about the Lewinsky affair began after Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand said if the affair happened today, Mr Clinton would have to resign

He was referring to the 1998 National Prayer Breakfast, where he said he was sorry for the affair that nearly ended his political career.

Mr Clinton accused Melvin of ‘ignor[ing] gaping facts in describing this, and I bet you don’t know you don’t know them.’

If he were president today, he said later, his most famous extramarital affair wouldn’t ‘be an issue, because people would be using the facts instead of the imagined facts.’ 

‘This was litigated 20 years ago. Two-thirds of the American people sided with me.

‘You think President Kennedy should have resigned? Do you believe President Johnson should have resigned? Someone should ask you these questions because of the way you formulate the questions. I dealt with it 20 years ago, plus.

In a March essay for Vanity Fair magazine, Ms Lewinsky wrote that ‘what transpired between Bill Clinton and myself was not sexual assault, although we now recognize that it constituted a gross abuse of power’ 

The flustered former president portrayed himself, not Lewinsky, as history’s victim in the mass-media’s retelling of the 1990s saga.

‘A lot of the facts have been omitted to make the story work,’ he declared, ‘I think partly because they’re frustrated that they got all these serious allegations against the current occupant of the Oval Office and his voters don’t seem to care.’

Mr Clinton complained in the interview that he left the presidency financially ruined because of the costs associated with the legal consequences of his actions.

‘Nobody believes that I got out of that for free,’ he said. ‘I left the White House $16 million in debt.’

He’s worth about $80 million today, aided by an aggressive schedule of speaking events – many of which paid him six-figure fees for individual appearances. 

In a March essay for Vanity Fair magazine, Ms Lewinsky wrote that ‘what transpired between Bill Clinton and myself was not sexual assault, although we now recognize that it constituted a gross abuse of power’.

Bill and Monica: A look back at the 1998 Lewinsky scandal that almost felled a president

President Bill Clinton (left) nearly lost his presidency over an affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky (right)

In 1998 a news report emerged claiming that then-President Bill Clinton had had an affair with Monica Lewinsky while she was a White House intern.

At the time the trysting began in November 1995, Clinton was 49 years old and Lewinsky was 22.

Clinton would initially deny having sexual relations with Lewinsky, claiming in a January 1998 deposition that the two were never alone together in the White House.

Unknown to Clinton, however, Lewinsky had already revealed the details of the affair to her friend Linda Tripp, saying there were nine sexual encounters through March of 1997; several included oral sex and at least one involved Clinton penetrating her with a cigar.

Tripp and Lewinsky became friends at the Pentagon, where Lewinsky was transferred after White House aides became suspicious of her long visits to the Oval Office.

The Clinton-Lewinsky affair became public a day after Clinton’s sworn testimony, when Tripp gave Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr tapes of Lewinsky admitting to her relationship with the president.

Monica Lewinsky emerged from her sex scandal with PTSD from the media pressure, but later became an author and an anti-bullying advocate

Starr was tasked with unwinding the Whitewater real estate scandal, which led him to Clinton’s alleged sexual harassment of Paula Jones, a former Arkansas state employee.

Clinton continued to deny reports that he had been intimate with the brunette from Beverly Hills, even after news accounts were published.

‘I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky,’ he said in a nationally televised press conference.

He admitted months later that the accusations were accurate, but claimed that his definition of ‘sexual relations’ differed from others’.

‘I know that my public comments and my silence about this matter gave a false impression. I misled people, including even my wife,’ he said at the time. ‘I deeply regret that.’

‘Indeed I did have a relationship with Ms. Lewinsky that was not appropriate. In fact, it was wrong. It constituted a critical lapse in judgment and a personal failure on my part for which I am solely and completely responsible.’

Clinton, now 71, has since been accused of sexual harassment and assault by at least four other women, one of whom claims he raped her in an Arkansas hotel room when he was governor.

Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr investigated the Lewinsky scandal and found that Clinton had ‘misused his authority and power’ to impede investigations into it

He was impeached in 1998 on charges of lying under oath and obstruction of justice. The Senate acquitted him along party lines, with no Democrats casting ‘guilty’ votes.

At the time, Americans’ views on the impeachment proceedings were seen as a political Rorschach test.

Republicans castigated Clinton for carrying on an affair with Lewinsky and lying about it both publicly and under oath.

Democrats saw the episode as an attack on their party’s young, fresh face, waged over personal weaknesses instead of policy.

Following weeks of televised testimony, polls showed that two-thirds of Americans opposed removing Clinton from office.

But the remaining one-third had a new voice in the form of conservative media emboldened by The Drudge Report, the news aggregation website that broke the Lewinsky scandal – and accused Newsweek and other outlets of burying it for Clinton’s political benefit.