PERJURY'S VICTIMS
PERJURY’S VICTIMS At his first grand-jury appearance in February, White House aide Sidney Blumenthal invoked executive privilege to avoid recounting what he claimed was his one and only...
...After Hazel-Atlas was resolved in the district court, a perjury by one witness for the winning party was revealed...
...Had Paula Jones been granted an opportunity, over the ordinary course of her lawsuit, to prove that the president’s Lewinsky testimony was a lie, that fact alone might have been enough to secure her victory...
...Yes, we know: Such breathtaking Clintonite mendacity about Monica Lewinsky has long since become “old news...
...It is a wrong against the institutions set up to protect and safeguard the public, institutions in which fraud cannot complacently be tolerated consistently with the good order of society...
...The apparent specificity with which the president had related this spooky private confrontation with the young lady, for example...
...And Paula Jones had a right, approved by a federal court, to pursue a civil damage claim against Bill Clinton for what he did to her one day in May 1991 at Little Rock’s Excelsior Hotel...
...Yeah, Sid, his memory...
...So they all lied, the smart folks say...
...In particular, they sought to prevent or delay Jones’s attorneys from securing sworn responses by Clinton to “pattern of behavior” questions about his extramarital liaisons...
...some of you may or may not remember my bylines...
...district judge Susan Webber Wright, the president had been unable distinctly to remember a single instance in which he and Lewinsky were ever alone together...
...At his second grand-jury appearance, June 4, the frivolous privilege claim having recently been abandoned by the president’s lawyers, Blumenthal did finally describe what the president had told him about Lewinsky during a half-hour meeting January 21...
...he seems to have recognized this trap for what it was...
...There is, first of all, the small matter of Paula Corbin Jones...
...Bennett and his private detectives continued to engage in such thuggery for months on end, long after they had publicly promised not to...
...But in America you do not lose your rights for such stuff...
...And then Blumenthal left the room...
...And Judge Wright subsequently dismissed the Jones case as a whole...
...And after I worked at the Post, I had a series of distinguished magazine jobs...
...false affidavits, including one from Monica Lewinsky...
...Instead, she backed into it, playing with exquisite precision on a salient aspect of the Blumenthal personality: He is a shameless braggart like you almost can’t imagine...
...True, she is a poorly educated woman with big hair, bad teeth, and a surgically altered nose...
...Okay, then, Mr...
...And the rest of us have been victimized, too...
...She had already established her predicate: that Sidney Blumenthal had known the president of the United States for “10 years” and remained “very friendly” with him...
...what about it...
...Circuit Court of Appeals reinstate her case...
...It was a piece of patent-law litigation, but it had uncanny parallels to today’s Jones/Lewinsky controversy...
...I’m going to consult my counsel on that, okay...
...Or, for that matter, remember what that intern actually did do to him...
...So when Sid Blumenthal arrived for a third grand-jury session on June 25, associate independent counsel Karin Immergut announced that she intended to revisit his Lewinsky-as-stalker exchange with Clinton...
...Much was peculiar about the substance of Blumenthal’s June 4 testimony...
...Paula Jones, then, was clearly a victim of the president’s perjuries...
...The authority of our federal courts unilaterally to reverse their own judgments in any case later demonstrated to have been infected by fraud is derived from a 1944 Supreme Court case, Hazel-Atlas v. Hartford...
...Paula Jones’s rights may yet be vindicated by Judge Susan Webber Wright, should the Eighth U.S...
...The president had rebuffed her...
...And she was now prepared to ask her real question...
...If the president is unable at any given moment to call up the identity of an animated sow, in other words, it should be no surprise that he cannot, from one day to the next, remember having been blackmailed by a psychotic office intern...
...Surely it cannot be that preservation of the integrity of the judicial process must always wait upon the diligence of litigants...
...How well do you know Bill Clinton...
...It is a basic principle of legal evidence that a court may take one party’s falsehood or other fraud during litigation as a dispositive indication that the miscreant’s entire argument lacks truth and merit...
...Which carnal activity, during the period of Blumenthal’s testimony, the president and his aides were still denying had ever happened...
...His memory...
...PERJURY’S VICTIMS At his first grand-jury appearance in February, White House aide Sidney Blumenthal invoked executive privilege to avoid recounting what he claimed was his one and only conversation with President Clinton about Monica Lewinsky...
...So first he stalled a bit...
...She had demanded sex from the president...
...How good do you think his memory is...
...And “I’ve been a playwright, screen writer...
...Seventeen minutes later, after doping out a strategy with his lawyer in the hallway, Blumenthal reentered the room, was reminded of his oath as a witness, and told the grand jury that the president’s memory really wasn’t very reliable at all, “like a lot of us who are around the age of 50...
...The nation’s rights more generally—our right not to have a president who personally assaults the rule of law— can only be vindicated by Congress, through Bill Clinton’s impeachment, conviction, and removal from office...
...And before that, I knew him from my work as “a journalist for 30 years...
...David Tell, for the Editors...
...And “I’ve written a number of books, three of which”—here it comes—“were New York Times Notable Books of the Year...
...And I first met the president when I worked at the Washington Post...
...But writing for the Hazel-Atlas majority, Justice Hugo Black was unimpressed by such arguments...
...Angry, she had then threatened to embarrass Clinton with disclosures of their nonexistent “affair...
...It was a right the president and his lieutenants spent most of 1997 successfully stealing from her...
...and, finally, false deposition testimony— outright perjury—from the president himself...
...Blumenthal, you are intimately familiar with Bill Clinton...
...It was a purely victimless crime, we are assured—because it only concerned purely consensual sex...
...Except that it was not a victimless crime at all, and it certainly concerned more than consensual sex...
...Immergut asked Blumenthal...
...The perjury involved a matter “peripheral” to the case’s underlying claim, and the losing party’s lawyers had failed at the district level to elicit the truth of that matter—by asking the perjurer “imprecise questions,” much as Bill Clinton’s defenders now suggest that Paula Jones’s attorneys “blew it” during the president’s January 17 deposition...
...The public welfare demands that the agencies of public justice be not so impotent that they must always be mute and helpless victims of deception and fraud...
...Blumenthal reported, in considerable detail, that Clinton had reported, in considerable detail, that Lewinsky—not to put too fine a point on it—was a nut...
...Blumenthal may be shameless, but he isn’t stupid...
...Tampering with the administration of justice in the manner indisputably shown here involves far more than an injury to a single litigant,” Black insisted...
...But she did not say why—Immergut is nobody’s fool—and she did not begin her line of questioning directly...
...When, in the spring of last year, the Supreme Court decided that the Jones litigation could proceed apace, presidential attorney Robert Bennett immediately attempted to intimidate the plaintiff into dropping her suit...
...And, and, and . . . Blumenthal was still getting warmed up when Immergut gently cut him off, “just for the purpose of time...
...Judge Wright excluded the Lewinsky matter from consideration— for fear of interfering with the Starr investigation...
...How good do I think his memory is...
...what about even that...
...Oh, I am now one of the president’s senior-most advisers, Sid replied...
...How, on January 21, could Clinton have so vividly remembered such an encounter when, just four days earlier, on penalty of perjury during a deposition before U.S...
...Why, just that past week, Sid offered as a for instance, Clinton had been having trouble with a crossword puzzle and had called him on the phone—the president on line one—for help with the name of Porky Pig’s wife...
...But character assassination failed to bring Jones to heel, so the president’s men next fought a furious battle to impede her search for evidence...
...So that lie in Bill Clinton’s mouth was a flatout felony...
...But she did not get such an opportunity...
...And I go to the Renaissance Weekend important- people’s events...
...He procured statements from at least two men who claimed to have had sex with Jones— She’s no angel, get it?—and made at least one of those men available to reporters...
...And when this tactic, too, proved unavailing, Clinton and his lawyers simply answered Jones’s questions with falsehoods: false replies to formal “interrogatories...
Vol. 4 • November 1998 • No. 8
