What does Paula Jones have to do with Clinton's impeachment?
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'I mean, this is not what a deposition is for, Your Honor. He can ask the President, What did he do? He can ask him specifically in certain instances what he did, and isn't that what this deposition is for? It is not to sort of lay a trap for him.'
I wonder if there is no former district attorney, now Senator; no former attorney general, now Senator; no former U.S. attorney, now Senator; former officer of the court, now Senator, who is not deeply disturbed by a so-called independent counsel grilling a sitting President of the United States of America about his personal sex life, based on information from illegal phone recordings?
Is there no one finding a countervailing proportionality in this case when confronted by our own congressionally created Javert who is not just pursuing a crime but who is at the center of creating the crime which we are deliberating on now?
Think about it. When Mr. Starr was appointed, when we authorized an independent counsel, when the grand jury was convened, the crime on trial before us now had not even been committed, let alone contemplated.
I wonder also if there is no one even concerned about Linda Tripp--who new gives definition to the meaning of friendship--working with Paula Jones' attorneys even as she was in the guidance and control of Mr. Starr as a Federal witness. Some of you may want to turn away from these facts. Secondly, the House managers never even acknowledged them in their presentations. I raise them, my colleagues, not for ideological or political purposes, but fundamental fairness demands that we balance all of the forces at play in this case.
Now, much has also been made in this trial of the rights of Paula Jones and her civil rights case--that we must protect Paula Jones' rights against the President of the United States.
My fellow colleagues--please let us have the decency to call this case what it was. This was no ordinary civil rights case. It was an assault on the Presidency and on the President personally, and the average American's understanding of that is one of the principal reasons our fellow citizens figured this case out long ago.
But there is more to it than that:
Mr. Starr became involved in the Paula Jones suit before he became independent counsel.
He had contacts with Paula Jones' attorneys before his jurisidction was expanded.
He wired Linda Tripp before his jurisdiction was expanded.
Many sources documented that without any expansion of jurisdiction, in 1997, he had FBI agents interrogating Arkansas State troopers, asking about Governor Clinton's private life--especially inquiring into Paula Jones.
After Paula Jones filed her suit in 1994, announcing it at a conservative political convention, and with new counsel affiliated with the Rutherford Institute, her spokesperson said, 'I will never deny that when I first heard about this case, I said, 'OK, good. We're gonna get that little slime ball.'
She later said: 'Unless Clinton wants to be terribly embarrassed, he'd better cough up what Paula needs. Anybody that comes out and testifies against Paula better have the past of a Mother Teresa, because our investigators will investigate their morality.'
Even Steve Jones, Paula Jones' husband, was part of an operation to poison the President's public reputation by divulging the secrets of his personal life--threatening even to employ subpoena power to depose, under oath, every State trooper in Arkansas who may have worked for the Governor. Steve Jones pledged that: 'We're going to get names; we're going to get dates; we're going to do the job that the press wouldn't do. We're going to go after Clinton's medical records, the raw documents, not just opinions from doctors. . .we're going to find out everything.'
Into all of this came Ken Starr, and the police power of our Nation.
This was not a civil rights suit in the context most of us would recognize. Indeed, there existed an extended and secret Jones legal team of outside lawyers--including George Conway and Jerome Marcus, experts on sexual harassment and Presidential immunity, who ghostwrote almost every substantive argument leveled by Paula Jones' lawyers; Ken Starr's friend Theodore Olson, and Robert Bork, the former Supreme Court nominee, who together advised the Jones team; Richard Porter, a law partner of Ken Starr and former Bush-Quayle opposition research guru, who also wrote briefs for the Jones team; and the conservative pundit and longtime Clinton opponent Ann Coulter, who worked on Paula Jones' response to President Clinton's motion for a dismissal. The connections between this crack--and covert--legal team, and Ken Starr's staff and his witnesses--including Paul Rosenzweig, Jackie Bennett, and Linda Tripp--as well as familiar figures including Lucianne Goldberg, add up to something far more than a twisted and disturbing game of six degrees of separation.
I do not suggest that this was the right wing conspiracy bandied about on the talk shows. But I ask you--are we not able to acknowledge that this was a legal and political war of personal destruction--not just a civil rights case?
And we cannot simply dismiss the fact that all of this turmoil--these entire proceedings--arise out of this deeply conflicted, highly partisan, ideologically driven, political civil rights case with incredible tentacles into and out of the office of the independent counsel.
Moreover, I remind my colleagues, Mr. Starr is supposed to be independent counsel--not independent prosecutor. He was and is supposed to represent all of the Congress and nowhere do I remember voting for him to make a referral of impeachment--a report of facts, yes--a referral of impeachment, no.
Now there is a rejoinder to all of this. Nothing wipes away what the President did or failed to do.
So, some of you may say, So what? The President lied. The President obstructed justice. No one made him behave as he did. And yes, you're right. The President behaved without common sense, without courage, and without honor, but we are required to measure the totality of this case. We must measure how political this may have been; whether process was absurd; whether the totality of what the President did meets the constitutional threshold set by the Founding Fathers.
We must decide whether the removal of the President is proportional to the offense and we must remember that proportionality, fairness, rule of law--they must be applied not just to convict, but also to defend--to balance the equities.
I was here during Iran-contra and I remember the extraordinary care Senator Rudman, Senator Inouye, and Senator Sarbanes exerted to avoid partisanship and maintain proportionality. I wish I did not conclude that their example frankly is in stark contrast to the experience we are now living.
The House managers often spoke to us of principle and duty. And equally frequently we were challenged to stand up for the rule of law.
Well, we all believe in rule of law. But we also believe in the law being applied fairly, evenly--that the rule of law is not something to cite when it serves your purposes, only to be shunted aside when it encumbers.
But where was the managers' duty to their colleagues in the House--in the committee--on the floor; where was the same self-conscious sense of pain for what they were going through, when they denied a bipartisan process for impeachment; where was their commitment to rule of law in denying the President's attorneys access to the exculpatory evidence which due process affords any citizen?
Rule of law is a process in a democratic institution, and there is a duty to honor process.
I believe the Senate has distinguished itself in that effort and I want to express my deep respect for the strongly held views of all my colleagues. Reasonable people can differ and we do, but we can still come together in an affirmation of the strength of our Constitution.
Chairman Hyde says 'let right be done'--I hope it will be. Right requires we be proportional as to all aspects of this case. I hope that what we do here will apply the law in a way that gives confidence to all our citizens, that everyone can look at the final result of our deliberations and say justice was done. And we have called an end to the process by which we savage each other, and are beginning to heal our country. |
