A CROOKED PRESIDENT

...Anything less, as Arthur Schlesinger once understood, will be “a cop-out and a betrayal of Congress’s constitutional responsibility...

...the matter, they insisted, was being handled exclusively by the Justice and Treasury departments—in the long-term interest of the presidency as an institution...

...In his 1973 book The Imperial Presidency...

...Bennett also made plain that he—Bill Clinton’s private lawyer—had conferred with the government on how it would reply...

...Abuse of power through the manipulation of executive-branch agencies, in the president’s name, for his purely personal benefit in civil litigation...

...Wait, it gets better...

...What is “unique in the history of the presidency” about this scandal, he writes, is the “long list of potential criminal charges” it involves...

...First, on the question of “leaks...

...The hypocrisy is really too much to stomach...

...Obstruction of justice by the president’s friends and aides...

...Illegal dissemination, by the president’s agents, of court-protected discovery evidence...

...What more he claimed about this encounter can be inferred from contemporaneous press reports and from an emergency protective-order motion Jones’s attorneys filed on November 3, 1997...

...During the final months of 1997, lawyers for Clinton and his co-defendant, Danny Ferguson, pursued an aggressive discovery strategy designed to produce evidence damaging to Paula Jones’s reputation...

...And Mr...

...And the suspicion grows that for Arthur Schlesinger and others of his class and type, no president is impeachable unless he is first proved guilty of membership in the Republican party...

...Bristow is a man of uncommon crudeness...

...And the current president, Bill Clinton himself, proclaimed total ignorance of the issue...

...Did she say there was anything she noticed about his d— other than that it was crooked...

...I mean, did it have a—did she describe which way it was crooked...

...Over the course of his deposition, according to the partial transcript included in Judge Wright’s October 26 release, Kirkland claimed, at minimum, to have had a sexual encounter with Jones in 1987...

...And we have never much cared that his crimes are “about sex...

...In March of this year, after an account of the president’s own Jones deposition was published in the Washington Post and Clinton spokesmen began ostentatiously protesting “leaks,” Judge Wright entered a confidentiality order governing all discovery proceedings in the case...

...A couple of examples will suffice...

...When the existence of this legally threadbare claim first came to light, this past spring, the privilege was thought to have been invented in response to inquiries by the Starr grand jury...

...When the House and Senate return to Washington from their current recess, no matter what happens in this week’s election, they must impeach Bill Clinton and remove him from office...

...That afternoon, at a Little Rock law firm and in the presence of Paula Jones, they took testimony from one Dennis Kirkland, an extremely shady character expelled from college for cocaine use and later convicted of forgery...

...Nearly all the dirt-digging was performed by presidential lawyer Bob Bennett and his private investigators...

...Because it now turns out that the Secret Service claim predated the Starr grand jury by several months and had originally been cobbled together for use in the Jones litigation...

...District Judge Susan Webber Wright began to make public the documentary record of Jones v. Clinton, the epic litigation her court has supervised for more than four years...

...All he knew about the “protectivefunction privilege,” he suggested, was what he read in the newspaper...

...What is the nation to do when confronted with such a frontal challenge to its laws—by its leader...

...he asked Paula Jones’s sister, Lydia Cathey, at a session on October 14, 1997...

...Every attorney did so report...

...Bennett, the clerk went on, “anticipates that the Justice Department will file a motion to quash...

...Bennett states,” according to the clerk’s minutes of an in camera hearing that day, “that the plaintiff has served subpoenas on the Secret Service and the security detail at the White House...

...David Tell, for the Editors...

...They can be cleanly dealt with, Schlesinger explains, through the mild and “obvious solution” of a “resolution of censure...

...Which is exactly what the Justice Department proceeded to do, requesting that Judge Wright recognize a “protective-function privilege...

...Did it have a Uturn in it...

...Almost immediately following Kirkland’s testimony, national reporters began receiving telephone tips, naming Kirkland, about allegations that Paula Jones had once “performed specific sex acts upon five men together in the cab of a Chevrolet van...

...He and they, in an irrational and oddly ahistorical open letter, announce that reverence for “the presidency” must be our paramount concern in the current impeachment inquiry—and warn that the Oval Office will be “permanently disfigured and diminished” if Clinton is convicted for many of the same felonies Schlesinger once so eloquently charged to Nixon...

...It tracked down and interviewed all the witnesses—and arranged for them to be deposed...

...What Judge Wright has unsealed so far—fewer than 1,700 pages—is but a single drop of water in the great ocean of paper the case has washed up...

...All of them, that is, except Bob Bennett, who acknowledged having given transcript copies of the president’s deposition to various people not “of record” in the litigation: Clinton attorneys David Kendall and Mickey Kantor, for example, and the White House counsel’s office...

...No, “in the end,” our two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning professor sadly concludes, only “the decisive engine of impeachment” is appropriate...

...The president of the United States is a deliberate and unrepentant perjurer—a man who has thus demonstrated bottomless contempt for the rule of law...

...I would argue that what the country needs today is a little serious disrespect for the office...

...Nor should we be satisfied with watered-down, “slap-on-the-wrist” alternatives...

...Further such releases are promised...

...Perjury by the president...

...Bennett also acknowledged having discussed Paula Jones’s deposition with these same people...

...Discussing Richard Nixon...

...All of them assured the judge that the material had been narrowly and strictly guarded...

...This, surely, was another lie...

...Excessive “respect for the office” should not deter us from pursuing justice this way...

...Who might have issued these disgusting and dubious hints—in violation of court-enforced secrecy rules...

...Bob Bennett figures, too, in a second major Jones/Lewinsky pseudo-mystery clarified by Judge Wright’s latest document release: the circumstances by which the Secret Service came to assert a novel “protective-function” privilege against testimony concerning the president...

...The Clinton camp catalogued all the rumors...

...Censuring the president for the crimes in question is “not enough,” since “the continuation of a lawbreaker as chief magistrate would be a strange way to exemplify law and order at home or to demonstrate American probity abroad...

...Here at THE WEEKLY STANDARD, we no longer much care what party Bill Clinton belongs to...

...The ruling obliged every attorney involved to file a sworn affidavit with the court reporting how he had handled discovery evidence— and with whom he had shared it...

...On December 23, 1997, Paula Jones’s attorneys served subpoenas on four Secret Service officials...

...Thus, Harvard’s Arthur Schlesinger Jr...

...But at those formal depositions, it seems, for the sake of appearances, the actual questioning was conducted— with the prompting of scribbled notes passed his way from a silent Bennett—by Danny Ferguson’s attorney, Bill Bristow...

...Judge Wright seems to have learned about these subpoenas on December 30 from Bob Bennett, who was then intensively preparing the president for his forthcoming Jones deposition...

...All of which, now proved beyond doubt, means that the president himself has “conspired against the basic processes of democracy...

...We no longer need rely exclusively on common sense for our answer...

...Nowadays, of course, Schlesinger makes headlines for ignoring his own past arguments and leading an ad-hoc coalition of nearly 500 American historians in exactly the opposite direction...

...Read straight through, however, even this initial disclosure leaves an indelible impression of presidential perfidy...

...Even before the various investigations were concluded,” it appeared likely that the president and his allies “had engaged in a multitude of indictable activities”: among others, “in perjury, in subornation of perjury, in obstruction of justice, in destruction of evidence, in tampering with witnesses, in misprision of felony”— and in “conspiracy to involve government agencies” in a subsequent cover-up...

...Such transgressions, this distinguished scholar continues, must not be “forgiven and forgotten for the sake of the presidency,” but rather “exposed and punished for the sake of the presidency...

...And—this part is particularly relevant to the Kirkland deposition—to have “provided,” “shown,” or “disclosed” to unidentified “other counsel to the president” certain further, unspecified “discovery materials that are under seal in this case...

...We turn here for guidance to one of America’s most renowned historians...

...Simply because they are “about sex,” apparently, this president’s crimes do not qualify as momentous public business...

...The president, in other words, through his lawyers and other representatives and confederates, is almost certainly guilty of the very leaks he has made such a show of decrying...

...The White House, for its part, denied all participation in the “protective-function” argument...

...They could be about a lemon meringue pie, and the nation’s problem would remain just as severe...

...The Bennett/Bristow team appears to have reached its apogee of vulgarity and nastiness nine days after the Cathey proceeding, on October 23, 1997...