“You’re really gonna write about the Danney Williams thing again?” Steve Denari asks when I reach him by phone. “I hope you put it to bed.” The “Danney Williams thing” is the musty allegation that Bill Clinton fathered an illegitimate black son. Naturally, it’s bubbled up into this year’s election cycle. The Daily Mail went there. InfoWars went there. The Drudge Report went there, too. The chairman of Utah’s Republican Party went there, live on CNN. It’s a reasonable guess that Steve Bannon, the CEO of Donald Trump’s campaign, would like to go there for Wednesday night’s presidential debate. The rumor has bounced around since Clinton’s first run for president. In The War Room, a 1993 documentary about Clinton’s campaign team, a scene shows George Stephanopoulos fielding a phone call from Denari, then a Ross Perot campaign official apparently in possession of a fat dossier on Clinton’s supposed love child. With the rumor back in the news, I thought I’d track down Denari to find out how he’d gotten his hands on that dossier, and what he did with it after he hung up with Stephanopoulos.
I found him at the bottom of this press release announcing “a new convertible debt/equity fund” concentrating on the medical marijuana sector—known as the “Amerijuana Fund”—that Denari had apparently tried to launch in 2014. After some cagey text messaging (he said he was recovering from a surgery that made it hard to talk), he eventually agreed to get on the phone with me. He was reluctant to dredge up ancient history but willing to answer my questions if it meant setting the record straight.
AdvertisementDenari says he was the Chicago campaign manager for Perot in 1992, doing lots of regional media on behalf of the candidate. The love child dossier had arrived anonymously at the desk of the Illinois state director for the Perot campaign, who passed it along to Denari with the thought that he might mention it on air. It was the day before the election. Denari was scheduled to go on Bruce DuMont’s live national radio show that night.
