International News
Electronic Telegraph
Thursday 10 September 1998
Issue 1203
Nothing can save him now
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in Washington
External Links
Jones v
Clinton -
Court TV
Online
A Guide to
the Monica
Lewinsky
Story - Coffee
Shop Times
Bill Clinton's
Skeleton
Closet
Clinton's fate in lap of Congress
THE regime is in crisis. That is the blunt assessment of
Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the elder statesman of
the Democratic Party, who has been fulminating against
Bill Clinton with the look of a willing regicide. It no
longer matters whether the President apologises yet again or has
himself flogged on the steps of the Capitol. Theatrics cannot save
him.
Last night the report of Judge Kenneth Starr was delivered to
Congress. At the absolute minimum, it will accuse the President of
committing wilful, premeditated, and repeated acts of perjury before
a US federal court, and almost certainly before a federal grand jury
as well. Under the US code, this is a felony offence that carries a
five-year prison sentence on each conviction.
The crimes were committed by Mr Clinton as President, this year,
not in the pre-history of Arkansas. They were not technical
infractions at the margin. They were systematic. Mr Moynihan has
already stated that this alone constitutes grounds for impeachment. If
it comes to a trial of Mr Clinton on the floor of the US Senate, his
vote is cast. How can the senator do otherwise? Law is the secular
religion of the United States. Anybody who thinks that the
Democrats can be seen to absolve criminal conduct of this kind by
the official in charge of the country's prosecutorial machinery has
failed to understand the essence of this scandal.
Lying under oath is the minimum. But I suspect that establishing
perjury is just a starter, a necessary building block in a broader case
of witness tampering and obstruction of justice. Mr Starr has
gathered evidence indicating that Mr Clinton has used the office of
the presidency, its powers of patronage and suasion, to obstruct a
civil lawsuit in which he was the defendant, and then compounded
the offence with a protracted cover-up. This is what will be
delivered to the House Judiciary Committee, I believe, along with a
narrative describing pathological behaviour by the President. I am
told there may be 12 criminal counts.
The rest of the material gathered by the Office of the Independent
Counsel over the past four years - the findings in the Filegate,
Travelgate, and Whitewater affairs - will probably be deposited with
the panel of three judges who appointed Mr Starr. It will be held in
reserve, available for use by the Judiciary Committee if, and when, it
needs to demonstrate patterns of abuse of power. This is not
because the evidence is exculpatory, but because prosecutors prefer
not to mix a rock-solid indictment with charges that are even
fractionally less compelling. Mr Starr, in effect, is eliminating Mr
Clinton with a single rifle shot. But it is well aimed.
Events will now move with vertiginous speed. This is not Watergate,
where the proceedings went on for months. This time, the House of
Representatives may not need to hold hearings of its own. The Starr
report, I hazard, will be more than enough. Once the members of the
Judiciary Committee have examined the text, in all its shocking and
prurient detail, they will acknowledge that the President is a
borderline sociopath who must be removed at once.
Few Democrats will get in the way of this thundering steam train.
The articles of impeachment will be sent across to the Senate for
prompt attention. If Mr Clinton cannot be induced to resign he will
face an expedited trial of impeachment. This is my seat-of-the-pants
prediction. The spectacle could begin and end much faster than the
world expects.
The civil lawsuit that Mr Clinton obstructed, of course, is the sexual
harassment and civil rights claim of Paula Jones, the Arkansas state
employee who alleges that she was summoned from her place of
work by an armed state trooper in May 1991, escorted to a room at
the Excelsior Hotel, exposed to the erect penis of the Governor, and
told to "kiss it". For what it is worth, I have always believed that
Paula Jones was telling the truth, although I can also see how Mr
Clinton might have mistaken her eager-to-please, perky, and
obliging manner for tacit encouragement.
A work colleague was there, after all, when she came back down in
a state of "embarrassment, horror, grief, shame, fright, worry, and
humiliation", according to the woman's affidavit, and immediately
recounted everything that had happened in graphic detail. Others
heard about it later that day, including her elderly mother, a devoutly
religious woman. I visited the family in Jacksonville, Arkansas, in
February 1994, three months before Mrs Jones vaulted to national
attention by filing her lawsuit. The sources then were still pristine. If
the story was a concoction by Right-wing enemies of the President,
they sure fooled me.
Mrs Jones's original purpose was to shame him in the public, not to
sue him in court. "What's right is right," she told me. "It's got to get
out, people have got to know what he did to me."
She has now succeeded beyond her expectations, for she never
imagined that her case would draw Mr Clinton into a series of
actions that would lead to forfeiture of office. Nor did the President's
lawyers, of course, or else they would have insisted that he settle the
lawsuit with a simple admission of wrongdoing. An apology was all
she was wanted, at first.
Mr Clinton's partisans now know that they misjudged Paula Jones,
and they misjudged the law. The Supreme Court stunned them with
a 9:0 ruling that the President, not being a monarch, could not claim
immunity from civil suits.
Once Mrs Jones had the power of subpoena, with the broad
"discovery" permitted under US civil law, Mr Clinton was in trouble.
Her lawyers could start to twist open the sexual can of worms. Most
of their efforts were foiled, but not all. They learned that a White
House volunteer, Kathleen Willey, had been assaulted by the
President in the vicinity of the Oval Office when she went to see him
about a job. That was bad enough, but not as bad as the measures
that were apparently taken behind the scenes to dissuade her from
testifying.
Mr Clinton thought that he could scupper the case with impunity.
The Jones legal team pleaded with the judge, alleging that there had
been systematic campaign to obstruct justice, suborn perjury, and
tamper witnesses, but she was a former pupil of Mr Clinton at the
Arkansas law school. As for the chief official of the US Justice
Department in Little Rock, US Attorney Paula Casey, she too was a
former pupil of Bill Clinton, and a volunteer in his 1992 campaign.
Mrs Jones's team had nowhere to turn. President Clinton could
mock the law, or so he thought.
What the White House did not know was that one of Mr Clinton's
junior concubines, Monica Lewinsky, had been telling a colleague at
the Defence Department how she had earned her "presidential
kneepads" for services rendered. The details are by now well
known: the oral sex on Sundays, before the President set out for
church, with a Bible in one hand, and the caressing fingers of his wife
in the other; the masturbation with a cigar, while Yasser Arafat was
waiting outside in the Rose Garden; Monica's anguished complaint
that she was banished so unfairly to the Pentagon while the "others"
were allowed to stay at the White House, close to the "Big He".
Worse, they did not know that her ramblings were being taped by
her friend Linda Tripp, nor that the tapes contained passages in
which Miss Lewinsky can be heard discussing strategies to obstruct
the Jones lawsuit. Worse yet, they did not know that the information
had been passed on in great detail to the plaintiff's lawyers.
On Jan 17, 1998, Mr Clinton walked straight into the trap. Sitting
directly across the table from Mrs Jones, he lied his way through the
deposition for hour after hour until he was knee-deep in perjury.
He must have imagined that Mr Starr was precluded from interfering
in the case. If so, it was a disastrous miscalculation. Mr Starr is
obliged by the Independent Counsel Statute to pursue all credible
evidence of wrong-doing by the President that is brought to his
attention - so long as he has authorisation from the attorney-general
to expand his inquiry. The bar of evidence is set high, but evidence
on the Tripp tapes was all too credible.
The Jones lawsuit was now being policed by a high-powered
criminal prosecution with a staff of FBI investigators. All of a
sudden, perjury could be exposed. Miss Lewinsky's semen-stained
dress could be tested for DNA residue by the FBI crime labs - and
as the saying goes: if the dress was a mess, Mr Clinton had to
confess.
But he could not bring himself to confess properly, protesting that his
testimony in the Jones deposition was "legally accurate". She had sex
with him, but he did not have sex with her. The convolution has
made him the laughing stock of the world. It has also forced Mr
Starr to enumerate a series of specific sexual acts in his report in
order to pin down the charge of perjury. The descriptions were of
such a nature that only female lawyers and court reporters were
allowed in the room to hear Ms Lewinsky's final pornographic
testimony.
It has to be said: Mr Clinton asked for it.
British readers might be forgiven for supposing that every American
president is allocated his own special prosecutor on the day of
inauguration. In fact, there is an elaborate choreography behind the
appointment of an independent counsel. Suspicion of a crime is not
enough. For a scandal to get traction there must be a barrage of
allegations by the media, and a backstage campaign by the staff of
the key congressional committees on Capitol Hill. Working together,
these two forces are deadly. But Mr Clinton had little to fear in
1992. When he arrived in Washington, both pincers were safely in
the hands of the Democratic establishment.
It took corruption of an unusual kind to induce a Democratic
Congress and a Democratic media to drum up a prosecutor for the
Clintons a year later in January 1994. It is worth examining how this
began, because even well-informed observers of the American
scene seem to think that it was the Republicans who dictated the
agenda.
We forget now, but Mr Clinton ran for president as a moral
reformer. "For too long, those who play by the rules and keep the
faith have gotten the shaft. And those who cut corners and cut deals
have been rewarded," he thundered at the 1992 Democratic
Convention.
The media did not crack up laughing, as they would now. They
knew that Mr Clinton was a draft dodger, a seducer, and obviously
a liar. But on matters of financial probity they were strangely willing
to accord him the high ground. The reason, I believe, was Hillary
Clinton with her air of menacing righteousness.
It was only later that America would learn how Mrs Clinton made
$100,000 in cattle futures trading in 1978, at the very moment when
her husband was securing his grip on the Governor's Mansion in
Little Rock. When the story broke she claimed responsibility for the
trades, attributing her insights to close reading of the Wall St Journal.
Later it was established that her account was passive. She played no
role whatsoever. Most brokers who have analysed these
transactions conclude that it was a straight bribe by one of
Arkansas's leading industrial conglomerates, laundered through
futures trading.
But in 1993 she was still being iconised as "St Hillary", the moral
conscience of the Clinton presidency. Trouble had been brewing for
some time, however. A mid-level investigator for the Resolution
Trust Corporation was closing in on a defrauded building society in
Arkansas called Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan. The owner,
Jim McDougal, had looted the institution, saddling the US taxpayer
with $60 million of debts.
This would have been a routine case, except that McDougal was a
partner of Bill and Hillary Clinton in a property venture called the
Whitewater Development Corporation. It was a sweetheart deal.
McDougal and his wife, Susan, absorbed the losses. The Clintons
enjoyed the gains. There was also a tangling of accounts between
Madison and Whitewater. Hillary Clinton was paid a
$2,000-a-month retainer by Madison, for legal work that may or
may not have been performed. When auditors recommended closing
down the Madison, Governor Clinton's administration kept it open.
You get the picture.
The Madison-Whitewater affair was a running sore. The Clintons
were even named as possible "beneficiaries" in a criminal referral to
the Justice Department. But what gave it a menacing twist was the
discovery of a dead body in a park outside Washington on July 20,
1993.
The victim was Vincent Foster, Deputy White House Counsel,
former law partner of Hillary Clinton, and core member of the
"Arkansas Group" in Washington. A .38 calibre revolver was
wedged in his right hand. Ergo suicide, according to the US Park
Police. There was no apparent motive. Soon enough, it emerged that
Foster had been handling the private financial affairs of the Clintons
at the White House: setting up a blind trust; preparing tax returns;
and dealing with the Whitewater "can of worms". It was claimed that
Mr Foster and Hillary Clinton were long-time lovers - an allegation
that has since been confirmed to me by a member of the Foster
family.
Suspicion grew. Mr Foster's strange death hinted at a nexus of
activities in Arkansas that could not withstand scrutiny. It was this
intuition - there were still few facts - that spawned the "Whitewater
Rafter" movement, or the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, as Hillary
Clinton calls it. The "rafters" began to exchange messages on the
Internet. The influence of this samizdat network should not be
underestimated. The "rafters" planted doubts about the probity of the
Clintons in the minds of millions of Americans.
Quite separately, a group of disenchanted Arkansas State Troopers
approached the American Spectator magazine in the late summer of
1993 with the most squalid and detailed allegations ever made
against a president. I had been warned in advance by Bob Tyrrell,
the magazine's editor, that nobody would be able to view Mr Clinton
the same way again after reading the narrative. Even so, I was
astounded when the story exploded just in time to spoil Christmas at
the White House. Life at the Governor's Mansion was a scene from
bedlam. The troopers continued to serve as pimps, procurers, and
sexual accomplices, until the day he left Little Rock.
The US media reduced the story to a few sniffy allusions to "marital
infidelity", usually followed by the stock comment that Americans
already knew that the President was not a saint. But inside the
Washington Beltway, "Troopergate" struck home.
This would matter a great deal. In late 1993 there was a steady drip
of fresh allegations about Whitewater, but not enough on their own
to trigger an outside investigation of the President. It was the sense
that the Clintons were dubious, and that made the difference.
Senator Moynihan called for a special prosecutor. He was joined by
seven Democratic senators. The dam burst.
In the end, everybody has their epiphany with Bill Clinton, when they
suddenly see into the soul of the man. For the "grunts" who served in
Vietnam it came early, in the 1992 campaign, when Clinton insisted
he had never received a draft notice, only to be confronted by the
proof.
For the Christian Right it came when Gennifer Flowers produced
tapes on which Clinton could be heard, quite clearly, telling her to
deny their 12-year sexual affair, and moreover telling her to lie under
oath in a court proceeding.
For me, the moment came on April 19, 1993, when FBI forces
using tanks and CS gas precipitated the deaths of 80 civilians, at the
Branch Davidian community in Waco. One can argue about the
character of the Davidians, but this was the worst tragedy of its kind
on US soil since the death of 200 Sioux Indians at Wounded Knee
in 1890. Yet Mr Clinton appeared on television and glibly deflected
all responsibility. "I do not think the United States government is
responsible for the fact that a bunch of fanatics decided to kill
themselves," he said.
So much for due process, constitutional rights, and the proper use of
coercive power. I knew then that this man was not just a swine, he
was potentially evil.
On my first visits to Arkansas, I could smell that something was
wrong. The place reminded me of Central America, a sort of
anglophone Guatemala, where a corrupt and violent political
machine operated behind the scenes. People dissembled in
interviews, instinctively. The deeper I looked, the clearer it became
that the Dixie Mafia had a foothold in official Arkansas, and that
intimidation was part of the culture.
Dissident members of the Arkansas State Police provided me with
stacks of confidential reports showing that one of Mr Clinton's
biggest financial backers during his assent to power - Dan Lasater -
had been under investigation for international drug-trafficking.
Lasater eventually went to prison, along with Mr Clinton's younger
brother, Roger, a cocaine dealer in the Lasater network.
One of my first stories was on Sally Perdue, a former Miss
Arkansas who claimed to have had an affair with Mr Clinton in
1983. A thug had visited her and offered her the prospect of a
high-paying federal job in exchange for silence. If she refused, he
warned, "we know you go jogging, and we can't guarantee what will
happen to your pretty little legs".
I befriended the family of Jerry Parks, the former chief of security for
Clinton-Gore campaign headquarters in Arkansas. Parks was killed
in a targeted assassination in Little Rock in September 1993. The
case has not been solved. His widow, Jane, suspected that it was a
political hit by forces linked to the Democratic Party machine. She
confided that her husband had worked secretly for the Governor's
Mansion for 10 years, conducting surveillance of Mr Clinton's
enemies and even fetching large sums of cash during the campaign
seasons. On one occasion, she said, her husband's Lincoln was
packed so full with $100 bills she could not close the boot.
Like others in the Clinton circle of the Eighties, she was a witness to
his drug use. On occasions he would snort cocaine with young girls,
some of them clearly just teenagers . . . And on it went, worse and
worse allegations, from more and more people, and always the same
pattern of intimidation and cover-up.
Mr Starr dipped his toe in these waters and pulled it out again
quickly. It was all too much, and mostly impossible to prove beyond
a reasonable doubt. This is immensely disappointing to those who
want to see Mr Clinton brought to book for all his sins. But the
authorities never managed to convict Al Capone for the St
Valentine's Day massacre. In the end, the most violent American
gangster of the 20th century went to prison for fiddling taxes.
Prosecutors take what they can get.
When Mr Clinton is forced from office, I suspect it will set off an
avalanche of revelations. The American media will be merciless now
they know they have been fooled. We will discover more skeletons
from this presidency and - at long last, perhaps - we will find out
what really happened in the Clintons' Arkansas.
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