Justice delayed - Clinton found guilty:
April 19, 1999
What's Wrong With Wright
By Jonathan Turley, a professor at George Washington University Law School.
The long-awaited opinion arrived in Washington last week with the feel of an ammunition drop at a long-abandoned battlefield. Judge Susan Webber Wright found President Clinton guilty of some of the same charges brought by the House managers in the Clinton impeachment trial but never conclusively established in a judicial ruling.
For constitutional scholars scrounging among the debris, it was a movable feast. A federal judge was holding a president in contempt of court: an historic moment. The opinion was loaded with barbed language and findings of willful misconduct. Yet the most intriguing line may be the most innocuous: "It was during the President's televised address that the Court first learned the President may be in contempt of court."
This one line could prove the most controversial part of Judge Wright's opinion and the issue upon which her own role in the crisis will be judged. It isn't the content but the date of Judge Wright's decision that is troubling.
Judge Wright makes clear that the date of the opinion was no judicial snafu of poor timing or indecision. Judge Wright noted that Mr. Clinton's contempt was obvious and hardly required "extended analysis." Yet she decided to withhold judgment as the impeachment battle unfolded and finally ended with acquittal. At the very moment in history where an independent court ruling was most needed, she decided to remain silent.
The reference to the president's speech gives a specific date upon which his possible contempt was apparent to the court: Aug. 17, 1998. That was the evening of the president's televised message. It was also before any referral by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr to the House for impeachment.
For more than six months, Congress would debate the president's conduct in the Jones deposition and his claims of technical compliance with the truth. If the president's intentional false testimony was clear and didn't require "extended analysis," why then did Judge Wright take an extended period to issue her conclusions? Judge Wright explained that "the Court determined that it should defer to Congress and its constitutional duties prior to this Court addressing the President's conduct in this civil case." The purpose of this deference is unclear; the court was not assisting Congress but withholding material information from it.
Federal courts have a constitutional duty to rule on legal questions without concern for the political consequences. Exercising judgment as to the best time to release an opinion can be the most political act of all for a federal court. This may be why courts have historically shown "deference to Congress" by ruling on legal matters related to impeachment without delay--leaving the merits of impeachment to Congress to decide with a complete record.
Judge Wright was correct about one thing: a timely ruling would have had an effect on the impeachment process. In showing intentional and willful acts by the president, she relied on many of the same exchanges and transcripts presented by the House managers--and contested by White House counsel--during the Senate trial. At some points, the opinion is indistinguishable from portions of the prosecution's argument. If Judge Wright had resolved these questions before the trial, some of the president's arguments to Congress couldn't have been plausibly maintained and the core issues placed in sharper relief for the public.
Mr. Clinton testified before the grand jury that his deposition in the Jones case was technically true and that he did not lie in his answers before Judge Wright. This became a common refrain in the White House defense in the impeachment trial. The White House actually used a videotape of Judge Wright to suggest that she also found the definitions of sexual relations ambiguous and unclear. Mr. Clinton insisted in his case before Congress that, while he was not helpful, he was lawful in his testimony, never obstructed the proceedings, and complied with his technical obligations as a witness. The president's lawyers further emphasized, with considerable success, that Judge Wright had found that the information in the deposition wasn't material or relevant to the case due to her subsequent dismissal of the action.
Judge Wright makes fast work of these arguments in her contempt decision, finding that
- the president's deposition testimony "was intentionally false";
- his statement to the court that the Lewinsky affidavit was "absolutely true" was in fact "misleading and not true";
- "the President's sworn statements in this civil lawsuit [were a] willful refusal to obey this Court's discovery Orders";
- the president chose to "employ deceptions and falsehoods in an attempt to obstruct the judicial process"; and that
- "the Court did not rule that evidence of the Lewinsky matter was irrelevant or immaterial" and the President withheld information "deemed by this Court to be relevant to plaintiffs' lawsuit."
If this opinion had been issued in August or indeed at any time in 1998, it might not have changed the outcome of the Senate trial but it would have materially advanced the debate. The White House suggestion that this was simply a clever manipulation of words by the president would have been replaced with the finding that this was a simple act of contempt for both the federal court and federal law. The suggestion that the question of falsity could be only answered by "getting into the President's mind" would have been answered by a court expressing little such difficulty.
Judge Wright's decision to delay her ruling had precisely the effect that she wanted to avoid: she became involved in the crisis through an act of omission or, perhaps more aptly, an act of acquiescence. By remaining mute for months, Judge Wright allowed the president to plausibly maintain arguments of technical legality despite her conclusion that the violations were easily established.
If Judge Wright had ruled on the contempt issues in 1998, the court would have left the significance of the ruling to Congress to resolve in the impeachment context. Instead, the court allowed Congress to speculate on a legal judgment that should have been part of the record for its political judgment. Issued long after its greatest relevance had passed, her contempt finding against President Clinton will remain a curious example of how justice delayed is justice denied. Read in the aftermath of the trial, the opinion's outrage appears strikingly ironic: more of a requiem than a ruling.
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