Porter pointed to “tell-tale” signals within the purported dialogue as confirming his version of the account, singling out the use of the word “crap” in the account. Clinton wrote that Porter broke off a policy conversation with “Cut the crap, Governor,” before the alleged threat.

“That’s not the way I talk,” Porter said in June, “and anybody who’s been around me knows that’s not the way I talk.”

Porter also rejected the possibility that anyone in George H. W. Bush’s administration would make such a call, stating that discussions of character attacks on Clinton never took place during any of the meetings he attended or was aware of during his time at the White House.

“That was not President Bush’s style or that of those who worked for him,” Porter said in June.

“It gives me no particular pleasure to set the historical record straight,” he read this morning from a prepared statement. “I do so for two reasons. First, historians and scholars of the presidency deserve to base their judgments and assessments on facts. Bill Clinton was not propelled, as he claims, into running for president in 1992 in part because he was courageous in responding to threats he received from me or from anyone else. Second, our political system needs more trust and less cynicism...Fabricating stories does not contribute to building the trust that is so needed.”

Clinton’s allegations initially surfaced during his first term in office, when Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward learned of the account.

According to the June 23, 2004 edition of the White House Bulletin, provided by Porter to The Crimson, Woodward stated that he did not think Clinton’s assertion about Porter making the threat was credible enough to be included in his 1994 book The Agenda, which he was then working on.

“[It] sounds like someone from ‘The Sopranos,’” Woodward told the Bulletin. “It’s an apocryphal story.”

And while Porter agreed that is all Clinton’s version of the events amounts to, he was not quite so quick to dismiss its effects.

“I think he diminishes the office of the president, which I treasure, when he repeatedly lies,” said Porter this morning. “And I think he ought to be ashamed of himself.”

Porter teaches the popular course Government 1540: “The American Presidency.”

Clinton accused Porter of deviating from his initial account of what had transpired, claiming that his version had evolved from a difference over details to a flat-out denial.

“When they first asked Roger Porter about it, he didn’t say it didn’t happen,” Clinton said this morning. “He just said, ‘It didn’t happen that way.’”

But according to Porter, who was first confronted with the charges by Woodward, his story has remained the same over the course of a decade.

“He’s lying,” Porter said this morning. “I have never changed my account of this one whit.”