Moment of Truth
MOMENT OF TRUTH In marathon sessions all day Tuesday and Wednesday morning of last week, the House Judiciary Committee allowed the White House to summon 14 uninterrupted expert witnesses in a final...
...Currie was never a formal witness in the Jones litigation, and Clinton could not have known, at the time he lectured her about such falsehoods, that there would ever be a grand jury inquiry at which she would be called to testify...
...But for anyone knowledgeable about the law and familiar with the evidentiary record of the Lewinsky investigation, this alternative theory is a devastating failure—a tissue of evasions and dishonesty...
...Except that no such accusation is lodged against him...
...For what the Clinton White House said last week on its own behalf inadvertently indicts and convicts the president as nothing else has all year long...
...The news in question "mentioned Currie's name" and also had "something about Linda Tripp doing something...
...So long as he can retrospectively reinterpret the questions he was asked in such a fashion as to make his answers literally—if narrowly—true, then he is innocent of any lie...
...Lewinsky about potential testimony...
...As he obstructed justice in the second of his infamous "We were never alone, right...
...With his body language and tone of voice, if not his argument, Lowell clearly intended to indicate that the whole controversy was patently absurd...
...The submission purports to address, directly and comprehensively, every single charge now leveled against the president...
...The Drudge bulletin at issue did not mention Lewinsky's name...
...Yes, there is...
...The news was "bad...
...admonitions to her...
...In this and other evidence, White House counsel Charles F.C...
...Since Kenneth Starr's impeachment referral first arrived on Capitol Hill, the White House has hardly let a day go by without citing the Founding Fathers on the limited circumstances in which a president may constitutionally be removed from office...
...Summing up the rebuttal testimony Thursday morning, the Judiciary Democrats' investigative counsel, Abbe Lowell, rolled his eyes and rubbed his mouth in mock exasperation and astonishment...
...In her first interview with the FBI, on January 24, Currie reported that the president had called her at home one recent evening, "possibly after midnight," to ask whether she'd seen the latest news about Lewinsky...
...David Tell, for the Editors...
...The Judiciary majority was not impressed, and as their work drew to a close, chairman Henry Hyde and his colleagues prepared to approve an impeachment resolution for consideration by the full House this week...
...And screw the facts, as well...
...On December 28, 1997, Clinton and Lewinsky met for the final time, dis- cussed the cover story she would maintain in response to her Paula Jones subpoena, and then shared a "passionate" kiss in an Oval Office doorway—while the president kept his eyes open, over her shoulder, to ensure they could not be seen...
...It seems that standard has now been met, as even the president agrees...
...MOMENT OF TRUTH In marathon sessions all day Tuesday and Wednesday morning of last week, the House Judiciary Committee allowed the White House to summon 14 uninterrupted expert witnesses in a final defense of the president...
...Prof...
...And what "very little evidence that actually exists" points at best to "insignificant offenses...
...The president, in other words, obstructed justice...
...And as a matter of fact, it is altogether beside the point...
...Few of these witnesses said anything even remotely notable...
...Currie hung up the phone and went back to sleep...
...And the time for endless sifting of the available facts has suddenly disappeared...
...But mere "cover" is no longer necessary...
...Congress's impeachment power, Alexander Hamilton wrote, arises only "from the abuse or violation of some public trust" by the chief executive...
...The committee's current deliberations, he proudly announced, were pointless, even ille-gitimate—because a House impeachment report produced in an expired session of Congress (as this session is about to become) is technically invalid for trial by a succeeding Congress's Senate...
...And if he has dishonored the presidency, then the presidency must be taken away from him...
...But in their eagerness to knock down their straw-man version of this perjury, the president's attorneys, apparently without realizing it, confess something much, much worse...
...It did not mention Currie's name...
...Enough—and plenty more...
...Late Tuesday evening, hours after it had been distributed to the news media, Clinton's public and private counsel delivered a nearly 200-page document to the Judiciary Committee...
...the White House nowhere even attempts to prove otherwise...
...Under questioning on January 17, according to the latest White House revisionism, the president freely admitted that he had knowledge of Lewinsky's subpoena "by the time of the deposition...
...The White House says it bluntly: Any witness who can explain away his past remarks this way, as Bill Clinton is always able to, "cannot commit perjury...
...All the president was trying to do with Currie, his lawyers explain, was "refresh his memory" and prepare for Lewinsky-related media questions prompted by a Sunday, January 18, Internet bulletin from the Drudge Report...
...But Bill Clinton remains popular, so his impeachment is a fortiori without "any constitutional basis...
...65, that the president of the United States has "violated the trust of the American people" and "dishonored the office which they have entrusted to him...
...That claim was perjury...
...And if he has violated a public trust, then Bill Clinton must be impeached...
...Here at last, after eleven months of agonizing delay, is the long-sought, exculpatory "alternative theory" of the case...
...Removal from office would be warranted only "if the president was extremely unpopular," Katzenbach announced, without the slightest equivocation...
...Twenty days later, at his Jones deposition on January 17, Clinton allowed the possibility, but claimed not to remember any specific private encounter he'd ever had with the young woman...
...Any essential particular, that is, but one...
...As a matter of law, this is arrant nonsense...
...Those words are quoted again—"the abuse or violation of some public trust"— in the defense brief Clinton's lawyers submitted last week to the Judiciary Committee...
...You propose to impeach the president, he told the committee's Republicans, "for acting as anyone would" under the circumstances...
...Ackerman's startling discovery sent everyone briefly scrambling for his copy of Jefferson's Manual and the Twentieth Amendment...
...In his grand jury testimony last August, Clinton insisted that he and Lewinsky only ever discussed concealment of their relationship "in a non-legal context...
...It did not mention Tripp's name...
...Clinton's lawyers similarly sidestep—and even complicate—those of his lies related to still graver charges of witness tampering...
...Ruff grudgingly conceded to the Judiciary Committee last Wednesday, there is "enough to give anyone who wishes it some intellectual cover" to vote for impeachment...
...Screw the Founders...
...The president's attorneys angrily and at great length reject an accusation that he falsely denied ever being alone with Monica Lewinsky...
...To forestall an impeachment vote by the full House of Representatives, Judiciary Committee Democrats last Wednesday night proposed an alternative resolution of "censure" against Bill Clin-ton—and in his bathetic "contrition" speech at the White House last Friday afternoon, Bill Clinton all but officially endorsed that resolution...
...When she next saw Clinton at the White House, he repeated his "We were never alone, right...
...Not so, the president's counselors respond...
...Last Tuesday, in writing, the White House conceded that this was false...
...Official debate over the Lewinsky scandal will continue, it appears, unchanged in any essential particular...
...The president had "a conversation with Ms...
...Which was patently absurd itself...
...Which could only have been a reference to the Post scoop of January 21, a scoop that did, for the first time, mention every principal by name—including Kenneth Starr...
...The evidence against Bill Clinton is "slight," he contended...
...It is his lawyers' position that the sincerity of Bill Clinton's sworn testimony in the Paula Jones litigation and before the Starr grand jury must be stipulated...
...Except that it cannot have occurred this way...
...The president "discussed with her the possibility that she would have to testify...
...Which means he committed a felony...
...Clinton was asked whether he was aware of the subpoena by the time of his last conversation with her, and that he did quite obviously and dishonestly deny...
...interchanges with his secretary, Betty Currie...
...Here again, that is not the issue...
...It turned out—oops—that Ackerman was wrong...
...For the president's own defenders have abruptly, if unwittingly, condemned him...
...She reported, instead, that the president was alarmed "that something would be in the Washington Post...
...Bruce Ackerman of Yale was visibly overcome with pleasure at his own egghead ingenuity...
...The censure proposal pronounces, in language lifted almost verbatim from Hamilton's Federalist No...
...Just so...
...When he attempted to fill his secretary's head with lies about Monica Lewinsky, Bill Clinton already knew that he and both those women were about to be drawn into a major criminal investigation...
...And Betty Currie did not tell the FBI that Clinton was concerned about the Drudge Report, in any case...
...Former Johnson administration attorney general Nicholas Katzenbach gave explicit voice to one of the nastier subtexts of the impeachment debate: the implicit contention of the president's defenders that our government is no longer republican in form, even under the severest of tests, but has become a pure, plebiscitary democracy instead...
Vol. 4 • December 1998 • No. 14
