WASHINGTON — The government's case against former Housing Secretary Henry G. Cisneros showed signs of coming apart Wednesday, when the prosecution's key witness, his former mistress Linda Jones, admitted she had lied repeatedly under oath.
Under cross-examination from Brendan V. Sullivan Jr., Cisneros' lawyer, Jones calmly acknowledged lying to FBI agents who were examining Cisneros' fitness to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development and later to other agents who were investigating Cisneros' truthfulness after he had taken office.
She also admitted she lied more than once in her 1994 deposition in a civil breach-of-contract lawsuit she was pressing against Cisneros.
Jones said that most of her false statements dealt with the authenticity of secret tape-recordings she made of 88 phone conversations with Cisneros from 1990 to 1993 in an effort to keep him from reneging on what she said was his pledge to provide her $3,000 to $4,000 a month in support payments.
Defense Wants Altered Tapes Thrown Out
Although she deleted segments of some recordings and destroyed all the original tapes after rerecording them, Jones acknowledged that she passed them off as unaltered tapes in her lawsuit and later to FBI agents working on an independent counsel investigation of Cisneros.
"You were lying here generally to prosecute a claim for money against Henry Cisneros," Sullivan said of her deposition. "You were desperate for money, weren't you?"
"Yes, sir," Jones answered.
Her testimony came as U.S. District Judge Stanley Sporkin continued a hearing this week to dispose of motions before Cisneros' scheduled trial in September. Defense lawyers want Sporkin to throw out all of the "tampered" recordings that independent counsel David Barrett plans to use to help prove that Cisneros lied to FBI agents about the extent of his financial relationship with Jones.
The tapes are considered crucial to the prosecution's argument that Cisneros conspired with Jones and others to conceal his hefty payments to her after their romance broke up while he was mayor of San Antonio.
The December 1997 indictment of Cisneros charges that he misled investigators, telling them he paid Jones about $60,000 after their 1988 breakup, when he actually had paid her more than $250,000 over a period of years. Cisneros was concerned that a truthful answer might kill his nomination, officials allege.
