THE ROAD TO IMPEACHMENT
By WILLIAM KRISTOL
PRESIDENT Clinton is doomed.
I know, I know. His approval rating is sky-high. The
American people don't want to hear about his sex
life. Ken Starr has a tin ear for politics.
All more or less true. But all, ultimately, more or
less irrelevant. A year from now, Clinton will be
gone. Or at least he'll be thoroughly disgraced,
hanging on, hoping that impeachment is just too
daunting a task for Congress to tackle in the last
two years of his term.
Wishful thinking? Sure. A lot of thinking is. But if
the wish here is father to the thought, it's a wish, I
believe, grounded in reality. Indeed, the assertion
that Clinton's cover-up will fail is based on the
assumption that reality does matter; that, on an
issue of this magnitude, truth does trump spin; that
our public life has not been entirely taken over by
the blowers of smoke and the manipulators of
mirrors; that facts are, after all, stubborn things.
F OR the following facts are, it seems to me, plain
- and will become, over the next few months, even
more evidently and irrefutably so:
President Clinton accepted sexual favors in the
Oval Office from a 21-year-old intern.
President Clinton lied about it under oath, and to
the American people.
President Clinton urged others to lie about it under
oath and to obstruct justice.
And President Clinton has supervised an effort to
conceal all of this from view - to stonewall, to
deceive, and to threaten and intimidate potential
truth-tellers.
But he won't get away with it. Here's how justice
will be done and the truth will out.
While Republicans have lost their nerve, and the
American people are a bit confused, Kenneth Starr
is doing his duty. Once Inspector Clouseau, the
pitiful bumbler from the Pink Panther movies, Starr
has become Inspector Javert, the fierce
law-enforcer of Hugo's Les Misrables. And it's
worth recalling that, despite his (presumably) low
approval ratings, Inspector Javert never gave up
and did, after a fashion, get his man. Starr is not
giving up. That's the meaning of his recent
announcement that he will forgo the deanships he
was to fill at Pepperdine University and stick with
an investigation whose end, he said, is "not in
sight."
T HE end may not be in sight, but Starr's course is
pretty clear. He will move on three fronts at once.
He will litigate Clinton's ludicrous claims to
executive privilege and Secret Service privilege,
and he will ultimately win. The Secret Service
testimony in particular will be helpful to his case of
perjury and subornation of perjury against Clinton.
But Starr won't wait on this litigation to press
ahead on two other fronts: reporting what he has
discovered to Congress, and indicting a few key
figures who have not told the truth. The trial or
trials that follow will uncover yet more information,
allowing for an even fuller detailing of Clinton's
impeachable offenses.
This means that, in the next couple of months, we
should see a criminal indictment of Monica
Lewinsky (and perhaps others, like Bruce Lindsey)
for perjury and subornation of perjury. This
indictment will be a "speaking indictment" - a
document that thoroughly lays out the charges
against Lewinsky (and possibly others), along with
the evidence on which those charges are based.
Clinton may well be named an unindicted
co-conspirator in such a document.
But even if he is not, the public will get for the first
time a clear and comprehensive narrative of the
case, an account that ties together and places in
context all the suggestive snippets we've seen so
far - the talking points, the meetings, the gifts, the
job offers - in a way that makes clear how
systematic and purposeful the president's efforts
to obstruct justice have been.
This "speaking indictment" could be accompanied
by a simultaneous report from Starr to Congress,
in fulfillment of his duty under Section 595c of the
Independent Counsel Act to refer "sufficient and
credible evidence" of possible impeachable
offenses by the president to Congress.
Whether or not Starr formally submits a report to
Congress at this stage, he will make clear that he
expects more evidence to come from the
forthcoming trial or trials (and from testimony after
Clinton's privilege claims have been overcome).
Starr will therefore suggest that the House hold off
on any immediate impeachment hearings, pending
the development of further evidence - while putting
Congress and the country on notice that he
believes the possibility of impeachment needs to
be taken seriously.
After indictments come this summer, things could
move fairly quickly. Federal law requires a trial
within 70 days of an indictment. Even with various
delaying motions, a trial within several months is
likely. In addition, Starr may bring the case, not in
D.C., but in Virginia, where a grand jury has also
been impaneled and where the most striking
attempt to suborn perjury may well have taken
place - on January 13 at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in
Pentagon City, when Linda Tripp was wired.
Virginia has a speedier docket for federal trials
than Washington. So we should have, before the
end of the year, an open trial in federal court of a
conspiracy to obstruct justice, in which Bill Clinton
plays a central role - or a situation in which Monica
Lewinsky has turned state's evidence and helped
Starr compile a comprehensive, and damning,
report to Congress.
C LINTON will be sorely tempted to use an
indictment of Lewinsky as an excuse to claim that
Starr is out of control and to fire him. For Clinton
will know better than anyone else how vulnerable
he really is. Therefore, the smearing of Starr and
his colleagues will undoubtedly intensify over the
next months. But Clinton probably won't risk firing
Starr before November 1998; and even if he does,
the relevant panel of federal judges will
presumably appoint one of Starr's deputies to
succeed him. The better alternative for Clinton
might be to encourage the use of all possible
means to delay a trial until after Election Day 1998
and then pardon Lewinsky, et al. - explaining to the
nation that this was his only recourse in the face of
an out-of-control prosecutor.
But whether we have criminal convictions, a
pardon, or simply a complete report to Congress
by Starr, it's pretty clear that by the end of this year
the American people will have a more certain,
more confident understanding of the president's
offenses. And the ball will be in the court of what
presumably will still be a Republican-controlled
House of Representatives.
In late January 1999, the GOP will have to respond
to Clinton's State of the Union address. The
response will be delivered not by Trent Lott, as it
was this year, but by someone like Henry Hyde.
And unlike Lott's response, in which the Senate
majority leader refused even to mention the
scandals - thereby legitimizing the Clinton line that
the scandals are not a matter of real import, but
rather a distraction from "the people's business" -
next year's response will insist that Congress
faces no more important business than that of
holding the president to account. And then the
impeachment hearings will begin.
W HAT of the public? So far, the American people
have chosen to avert their gaze, not wanting to
confront the implications of the sordid goings-on in
Clinton's White House. But the trials and reports
and hearings will change all that. And when they
are forced to face the facts; when it becomes
respectable to be indignant about lying and
stonewalling, and, yes, about sexual
outrageousness; when people notice that the
president has no acceptable explanation of what
happened and hasn't even bothered to attempt
one, then the American people will desert Clinton.
Indeed, they will turn on him. Americans' "wobbly
moralism," in the words of Andrew Ferguson, will
at last find its legs and reassert itself. Exploitative
and adulterous sex; lying; obstruction of justice -
Americans will reject them all, and the president
who embodies them.
That is Clinton's fate.
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