The former president, who is about to take a more visible role in his wife’s presidential campaign, told the tale again in a broadcast over the weekend, in which he described getting a menacing phone call from inside the George H.W. Bush White House.

It was 1991, as the then-Arkansas governor was mulling whether to challenge a popular incumbent president, he said.

The caller said, “‘We’ve looked at the field. You’re the only one who can win,’” Bill Clinton recalled in an interview with Fareed Zakaria on CNN. “‘The press has to have someone every election. We’re going to give them you. You better not run.’”

Except that the man whom Clinton claims was on the other end of the line insists nothing of the kind ever happened.