Conventional "wisdom" seems to be that Starr's case for obstruction of justice is the weakest in his report. WRONG!!!
WSJ Today:
Why Clinton Lied
By GEORGE L. PRIEST
The debate over the appropriate punishment of President Clinton's misdeeds has focused chiefly on whether Mr. Clinton lied under oath and whether such lying is an impeachable offense given the context of a "private" sexual relationship. In Kenneth Starr's report to Congress, the first five of 11 grounds for possible impeachment consist of different episodes of lying.
But the real question of obstruction of justice is not whether the president lied, but why he lied. The question of motivation gets scant attention in the Starr report and was addressed only briefly in Mr. Clinton's grand jury testimony. As a result, the president and his defenders have been able to invoke the natural reticence that all of us feel about sex and to raise the question of whether the charge of perjury is justified at all when it concerns answers to questions that seem intrusive.
Buried in the Starr report, however, is strong evidence that the president's lies were the product not of reticence or embarrassment, but of a conscious effort to obstruct justice in the Paula Jones case. Mr. Clinton's motivation for lying becomes apparent in the sequence of events related to the sixth and seventh impeachment grounds. Just as Watergate began with a "second-rate burglary," the Lewinsky scandal began with Mr. Clinton's alleged unsuccessful 1991 propositioning of Ms. Jones.
Though it has not been emphasized, Ms. Jones's and Monica Lewinsky's experiences with Mr. Clinton are nearly exactly equivalent. In the Jones case, Mr. Clinton was sued for inviting a young government subordinate whom he hardly knew to meet him in a private room, where he encouraged her to perform oral sex on him, and asked her to keep quiet about it as she was leaving. The only real difference is that Ms. Lewinsky accepted the proposition; Ms. Jones refused.
Ms. Lewinsky is not simply another woman with whom Mr. Clinton had consensual sex--and thus irrelevant to Ms. Jones's sex harassment charge, as Mr. Clinton contends. Instead she is the perfect witness for Ms. Jones. Her testimony not only confirms the pattern and practice of Mr. Clinton's behavior, but also demonstrates unequivocally the contrasting employment prospects of complying with rather than rejecting his sexual requests.
According to the Starr report, Mr. Clinton's efforts to find Ms. Lewinsky a job intensified as discovery in the Jones case accelerated. During the summer of 1997, the president inquired about government jobs for her, leading to an offer at the United Nations that she declined. But on Dec. 5, 1997, things became more serious. Ms. Jones's attorneys faxed a potential witness list, including Ms. Lewinsky's name, to Mr. Clinton's lawyer, Robert Bennett. The president told the grand jury that he first learned that the Jones lawyers knew of Ms. Lewinsky late in the afternoon on Dec. 6. Ms. Lewinsky met with Vernon Jordan for the second time on Dec. 11; that day Mr. Jordan made three employment calls for her to New York, all unsuccessful.
Ms. Lewinsky was subpoenaed in the Jones case on Dec. 19 and met with Mr. Jordan the same day. Late that night, Mr. Jordan went to the White House to discuss the Lewinsky situation with the president. Three days later, Mr. Jordan took Ms. Lewinsky to introduce her to the lawyer he had found for her, Francis Carter. Ms. Lewinsky encouraged Mr. Carter to call Robert Bennett, with whom Mr. Carter met the next day. Mr. Bennett told Mr. Carter that other witnesses had filed motions to quash their subpoenas, and Mr. Bennett offered legal research to support such a motion. Ms. Lewinsky prepared to file a sworn affidavit claiming that she never had sex with the president, apparently in order to get dropped as a witness.
The most damaging actions occurred two weeks later. On Jan. 5, 1998, Mr. Carter gave Ms. Lewinsky a draft of the affidavit denying sexual relations. She called the president to discuss the draft the same day. On Jan. 6 she discussed the draft with Mr. Jordan. According to the Starr report, on Jan. 6 Mr. Jordan called Ms. Lewinsky three times, Mr. Carter four times and the White House twice. Ms. Lewinsky signed the false affidavit on Jan. 7 and took it to Mr. Jordan's office to show him that it had been executed. Mr. Jordan made three more calls to the White House on Jan. 7, because, as he told the grand jury, "I knew the president was concerned about the affidavit and whether it was signed or not."
On Jan. 8 Mr. Jordan called Ronald Perelman, CEO of Revlon; Ms. Lewinsky was interviewed and offered a job the next day, after which Mr. Jordan called Mr. Clinton's secretary, Betty Currie, and informed her: "Mission accomplished." On Jan. 17 Mr. Clinton testified in the Jones deposition, denying sex with Ms. Lewinsky; Mr. Bennett tried to cut off questioning altogether by brandishing Ms. Lewinsky's affidavit.
The significance of this sequence of events relies to some extent on circumstantial inference, but its heart is confirmed by the Jordan testimony. As the Jones case proceeds, the president is trying to mollify Ms. Lewinsky by finding her an alternative job somewhat nearer the White House. When her existence is discovered by the Jones attorneys, matters change. First, it is necessary to get her to swear to an affidavit falsely denying sexual relations with Clinton. Next, it is necessary to find her a job that she finds attractive.
These events show that the various lies told here are not about sex or personal privacy. Rather, Ms. Lewinsky is a material witness in the Jones litigation. Her affidavit falsely denying sexual relations served both to keep her from testifying in the Jones case and to allow the president to deny sex in his Jones deposition. The absence of her testimony and of the evidence concerning the efforts made to secure her a job is extremely harmful to Ms. Jones's case. It forces her lawyers to argue sexual harassment in the air, rather than by comparison with Ms. Lewinsky.
This difference may have proved fatal to Ms. Jones's case, since Judge Susan Webber Wright dismissed it on the grounds that Ms. Jones's specific job experience demonstrated insufficient harm from rebuffing Mr. Clinton. Her claims would have had to be analyzed entirely differently if the issue were not whether Ms. Jones were treated badly in some objective sense but whether the efforts to keep Ms. Lewinsky employed established differential treatment based on complying with Mr. Clinton's sexual demands. For this reason, the president's and Ms. Lewinsky's false statements alone are sufficient basis for reinstating the case on the merits and perhaps for a default judgment against Mr. Clinton.
Similarly, Mr. Clinton's tortured verbal parsing of the various definitions of sex is a central element in his effort to impair the Jones litigation. In his grand jury testimony, the president claimed that the definition of "sexual relations" in the Jones deposition excluded oral sex because it refers to stimulation by him, not to him. He claimed the definition in the Lewinsky affidavit excluded oral sex because the typical American would not immediately think of oral sex upon a reference to "sexual relations."
Mr. Clinton's definitions go far beyond word splitting. They make sense only in the context of obstruction of justice. These are the only definitions the president can adopt to avoid revealing the central fact crucial to Ms. Jones's case: oral sex with a subordinate. The president adopts two different definitions that separately forestall discussion by him and by Ms. Lewinsky of the only form of sex relevant to the case.
Our public squeamishness over sex masks the similarities between the Clinton and Nixon coverups. Watergate began with a burglary for which, even after a quarter century, no clear objective has been shown. The president conspired with aides to cover it up, first by convincing the burglars to lie in court about their associations and then by promising them future financial support. Nixon committed a crime against the state, in addition, by invoking another agency of government (the Central Intelligence Agency) to help in the coverup.
Mr. Clinton used the government in his coverup, too. He sought a job for Ms. Lewinsky at the U.N. He also instructed Secret Service officers to pretend as if Ms. Lewinsky's emotional fit upon learning he was meeting with another woman never happened. Her outburst occurred on the morning of Jan. 6, the day the president claimed to have learned in the afternoon that Ms. Lewinsky was to be a witness in the Jones case. The timing is crucial, because it is far more serious if the president told the guards to cover up the episode after he learned Ms. Lewinsky had been called as a witness.
Perjury is perjury, but motivation is essential. It is a far more serious matter if the president committed perjury out of an effort to stop the escalating damage of the Jones lawsuit, rather than out of mere embarrassment. Like Watergate, the Clinton scandal began with a low crime, not a high one. But Mr. Clinton transformed it into an impeachable offense by misleading our judicial system and both private and public litigants to keep the truth from coming out.
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