Bill Clinton: This Precedent's For You
What if, just for the sake of argument, nothing more
can ever be established from the Monica Lewinsky
investigation than that she and the president
engaged in, say, a sex act-and that both of them
later, under oath in a civil proceeding, denied having
had a sexual relationship? The answer to this
question, we have been told over and over and over
again since the beginning, is simple: If that's all Ken
Starr's got, then Bill Clinton is and should be off the
hook. "You can't get a perjury conviction" on the
basis of vague responses to vague queries,
Harvard's Alan Dershowitz informed the nation, early
on in the controversy. "If he says, 'I didn't have sexual
relations with Monica Lewinsky,' and it turns out,
hypothetically-I don't believe this-but if it turns out he
had oral sex on one occasion with her, you cannot
get a perjury [prosecution]."
Other titans of legal scholarship are even more
emphatic about the president's invulnerability on this
score. Geraldo Rivera, for instance, tells his CNBC
audience that "in our research-and it's been furious
and in-depth-we've found scarce precedent for a
federal prosecution of a sex lie in a civil case."
CNN's Bill Press reports on Crossfire that "there's
never been another case in the history of this nation
where someone has been indicted for lying about
sex in a civil case." Press's guest, defense attorney
Stan Brand, offers anyone who can produce a single
example of such a prosecution "dinner for two at The
Palm."
We'll have the porterhouse steak.
Edward I. Arthur is a decorated Army veteran of the
Vietnam War. In 1990 and 1991, he received
treatment for various combat-related disorders at
the Veterans Administration Medical Center in
Boise, Idaho. In May 1991, responsibility for Arthur's
medication was assigned to a VA staff psychiatrist,
Dr. Barbara Battalino. In October 1991, according to
a recent story in Boise Weekly, Battalino resigned
her post at the hospital after her superiors became
aware that she had maintained an "intimate
relationship" with Ed Arthur. That same month, in
U.S. District Court for the District of Idaho, Arthur
filed a civil tort claim against Battalino and the VA,
alleging that he had been the victim, during this
affair, of medical malpractice.
Battalino, in response, insisted that her sexual
contact with Arthur had not begun until July 1991,
when he was no longer in her care. In particular,
Battalino denied Arthur's charge that during an office
visit on June 27, 1991, she had suddenly
acknowledged having "feelings" for him-and had
proceeded to perform an act of oral sex. At a
hearing in this case on July 14, 1995, for example,
Battalino was asked: "Did anything of a sexual
nature take place in your office on June 27, 1991?"
And she testified as follows: "No, sir."
Now, Alan Dershowitz may believe that it is legally
impossible to make a crime out of such a sworn
statement, and the rest of America's punditocracy
may believe that no prosecutor has ever so much as
tried. But Bill Clinton's Justice Department appears
to have a different view.
Toward the end of their romance, it would
subsequently turn out, Ed Arthur had-shades of
Linda Tripp-recorded more than 25 hours of
telephone conversations with Barbara Battalino. In
one of those conversations, she rebuked him for
telling someone about the office-visit encounter:
"No, the thing was that we were supposed to not
have had sex until after. . . . I can't believe you would
divulge that." And armed in part with this taped
evidence, the U.S. Department of Justice last year
conducted a grand-jury and FBI investigation of
Battalino's truthfulness.
Two months ago, on April 10, 1998, the Department
of Justice filed an official "information" in federal
district court by which attorney general Janet Reno
alleged that Barbara Battalino "did corruptly
endeavor to influence, obstruct and impede the due
administration of justice in connection with a
pending proceeding before a court of the United
States." The charge rested entirely on Battalino's
two-word courtroom denial of July 14, 1995, which
Reno concluded "was false and misleading in that
the defendant in fact had performed oral sex on
Arthur in her Boise VA office on June 27, 1991."
Four days after this document was signed and
delivered, on April 14, 1998, the Justice Department
issued a press release to announce that Battalino
had pleaded guilty to one count of obstruction of
justice and would be sentenced on July 20, 1998, at
9:30 a.m. The violation, a felony under Title 18,
Section 1503, of the United States Code, carries a
basic penalty of 10 to 16 months of incarceration.
A few weeks from now, in other words, at the behest
of the Clinton administration, a former VA hospital
physician will submit to a possible federal prison
term. "Simply" for deception about oral sex in a civil
case.
Why should exactly the same standard of justice, for
exactly the same offense, not clearly apply to Bill
Clinton himself? Why, for that matter, should
congressional Republicans now be desperately
beseeching Kenneth Starr not to send them a report
on Clinton's potentially impeachable offenses until
after the independent counsel has chased down
every last lead-and thus proved something, well,
more "serious" than just a sexual episode with
Monica Lewinsky?
As United States v. Battalino reminds us, falsely
denying such behavior under oath is a serious
crime, all by itself. You'd think Congress would feel
an urgent responsibility to resolve the question
whether the president of the United States is a
serious criminal.
weeklystandard.com
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