What Paula Jones wants
BARNES, FRED
What Paula Jones Wants by Fred Barnes ~r et's be straight about the whack the Supreme I Court took at President Clinton in the Paula Jones case. it was a big one. Normally the court has a bias in...
...Given the schedule outlined by Judge Susan Wright, the case should come to trial no later than next spring, unless sidetracked again by Clinton...
...A settlement of Jones's suit, which charges Clinton lured her to a hotel room in Little Rock in 1991, exposed himself, and sought oral sex, is logical...
...Agreeing to her "truthfulness" would be the hard part for Clinton...
...First, the president must apologize, Cammarata says...
...Though he polled for Clinton extensively last year and in 1995 and still conducts national surveys twice a month, Penn said he doesn't recall whether he's ever asked a question about Paula Jones or her allegations...
...Cammarata says Clinton's lawyers had approved the statement, but Jones's hadn't...
...Nonetheless, Penn said Clinton's popularity won't dip because the public will see the case as "diverting Washington from its central mission...
...Dick Morris says the constitutional argument that a president can't be sued while in office was concocted to sidetrack the case until Clinton was safely reelected...
...If it had been granted, the delay would have put the case off until the court's next term, beginning in October, according to Cammarata...
...The Supreme Court ruling gives Jones considerable leverage in pursuing the case, and her lawyers vow to use it to the hilt...
...The statement under consideration then, Cammarata says, had Clinton saying he didn't remember meeting Jones but wasn't challenging her assertion about what may have happened in 1991...
...Now, they insist Jones requires more than that...
...It wasn't enough then and it isn't now," he says...
...Certainly Clinton won't want to take the stand or even be deposed as a defendant in a sexual-harassment case...
...This goes beyond the settlement that lawyers for Clinton and Jones discussed just before she filed suit in 1994...
...At their press conference following the May 27 ruling, Jones's lawyers left the impression that she only wants the president to acknowledge she did nothing wrong or improper when they met in the hotel room...
...I never thought it had any legal merit...
...And of course by 9-0 it had no legal merit...
...He was Clinton's chief political strategist in 1995 and 1996...
...This is a line of inquiry that Clinton certainly doesn't relish...
...President Nixon got three in his unsuccessful effort to block publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971...
...This was basically a trumped-up argument that Bennett threw together at the last minute to get this thing until after the election," Morris said on the Fox News Channel...
...Fred Barnes is executive editor of'The Weekly Standard...
...It also made clear that she hadn't acted in a sexual or improper manner and noted Clinton's regret that untrue comments had been made about Jones...
...Nixon got five votes in 1982 to ward off a lawsuit by Ernest Fitzgerald, a Defense Department official fired for revealing cost overruns on the C5A transport plane...
...But the point was, we weren't going to let this thing be adjudicated in August, October, November, near the election...
...President Truman got three justices to go along in 1952 with his bid to nationalize the steel industry...
...Clinton says only that the case is in Bennett's hands...
...Clinton nearly succeeded in delaying the case even longer, says Joseph Cammarata, one of Jones's lawyers...
...The president's side asked for a 30-day delay in filing its brief with the supreme Court, saying it needed to add two constitutional experts to Clinton's legal team...
...Morris should know...
...Clinton got zero votes...
...So now what...
...For its part, the White House doesn't want to talk about Paula Jones at all...
...If [Clinton] wants to shut down the case, he's got to give me what my client wants," Cammarata says...
...Normally the court has a bias in favor of executive power...
...still, Clinton may have gotten all that he and his attorney, Robert Bennett, had hoped for...
...At least some justices are willing to side with the White House in almost every circumstance...
...For one thing, Cammarata is pressuring reporters to pepper Clinton with questions on whether he went to the hotel room, was alone with Jones, and made advances...
...President Roosevelt got six votes in 1944 when the court upheld his right to intern Japanese-Americans...
...But reaching a settlement may not be easy...
...Even Mark Penn, the president's pollster, is muzzled...
...Jones's attorneys opposed the postponement, and the justices agreed...
...For another, he intends to try to substantiate "a pattern of conduct where then-governor Clinton has used state troopers, at state expense, for his own personal enjoyment and, in particular, for the procurement of women...
...Only Nixon did this poorly and that was when he tried to block prosecutors from obtaining White House tapes in the Watergate criminal case in 1974...
...A procedural matter will not in any way affect the president's standing or image," he said...
...The court decision...
...In effect, he would be endorsing her account of events at the hotel and admitting he made a crude sexual advance...
...But he didn't sound too sure...
...And that must be accompanied by "a statement that will underscore or affirm her truthfulness with respect to this incident and the fact that she did nothing wrong...
Vol. 2 • June 1997 • No. 38
