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Politics : Clinton's Scandals: Is this corruption the worst ever? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Who, me? who wrote (5922)	9/15/1998 10:33:00 PM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 13994

Hi Who, me?; I heard a pretty convincing argument on the radio while driving over to the polling place this afternoon. (Primaries in WA state.) It was against the argument: Impeachment is only for public crimes of the president. Since the crimes Clinton has been accused of are private, they are not impeachable. It is pretty clear that the constitution prevents the criminal indictment of the President by any body other than the senate. The reason for this is to prevent some local prosecutor from putting the Big Creep in jail, and then convicting him of a specious crime using a local jury. For instance, you probably could have got a local Wash. D.C. jury to convict Ronald Reagan of whatever you wanted. Therefore, any crimes committed by the Big Creep have to be handled by the senate. Otherwise, it would be impossible to indict a president for a private crime, like slapping the first lady around, or spanking Chelsea. I found the argument well reasoned, and thought you guys would appreciate hearing it. -- Carl

To: Who, me? who wrote (5922)	9/15/1998 11:45:00 PM
From: Les H	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 13994

Lewinsky's Journey From a Lover to a Danger By MELINDA HENNEBERGER WASHINGTON -- At some indeterminate moment in the affair between the president and Monica Lewinsky, the most powerful man in the world seems to have begun to fear his former intern and the emotional mess he had helped create. Was it the day she waited in the rain by his secretary's car, desperate to deliver a small gift? When she made a scene outside the White House after a guard let slip that Clinton was meeting with another woman? When she imagined that she might be the next Mrs. Bill Clinton? Or was it when she reached out and touched his crotch across a rope line of major donors at his 50th birthday extravaganza? A few months before their affair made news, he told her in a late-night phone fight, "If I had known what kind of person you really were, I wouldn't have gotten involved with you." The kind of person described in Kenneth Starr's narrative is a mixed-up young woman who, despite her brazen behavior, was fragile when she met Bill Clinton and deeply wounded by the experience of their affair. She was so insecure that she initially assumed she was just a replacement-worker mistress called in during the government shutdown because "maybe he had some regular girlfriend who was furloughed." The report also shows Ms. Lewinsky as worldly, smart and even cunning, a manipulator who, after Clinton broke off the affair, threatened to expose it unless he helped her get a job. That endeavor ultimately had Clinton's closest friend, Vernon Jordan, and at least a half-dozen important officials trying to mollify her and find her work. Nevertheless, she was easily deluded about a relationship she had seemed to pursue with eyes wide open. At some point, as Jordan later told the president, Ms. Lewinsky apparently became "fixated" on Clinton. And convinced, against considerable evidence to the contrary, that the president was in love with her. The report chronicles, too, how Clinton fed both her fantasies and her desperation. He even seemed to set her up for his later claim that she was "known as a stalker" by suggesting that she hang around outside his office so they could run into each other as if by accident. "His plan was that she would position herself in the hallway by the White House Theater at a certain time, and he would invite her to join him and a group of guests as they entered," the report said. On that occasion, at least, Ms. Lewinsky signaled that she perfectly understood the position Clinton was putting her in, and responded that "she did not want people to think she was lurking around the West Wing uninvited." After a time, the president began calling her only after seeing her at a fund-raiser or other public event -- so she routinely showed up for such functions, arriving hours early to ensure that she would be positioned at the front of the rope line. "Usually when I'd see him, it would kind of prompt him to call me," she told prosecutors. "So I made an effort." When it later became clear he was avoiding her, angry episodes produced similar results. Eventually he would see her, soothe her, give her some small presents. In one episode that she called a "hysterical escapade," when she had raged and waited outside the White House in the rain, she was finally allowed in, for two minutes and a quick kiss, before Clinton left for a state dinner. And after she hinted in a letter that she might expose their affair, he again agreed to see her, initially lashing out with a warning that it was illegal to threaten the president. But later in that same visit, she said, "he was the most affectionate with me he'd ever been." While Ms. Lewinsky and her family declined to speak about the way she was depicted in the report, friends have consistently portrayed the former intern as the opposite of menacing, a sweet and achingly self-deprecating young woman who trusts too easily and has genuine affection for Clinton, even now. When she began the affair, she was apparently so needy she was willing to crawl around on bathroom floors for a man who took telephone calls during their liaisons and did not get around to having an extended conversation with her until after they had had sex a half-dozen times. The president apparently understood the inherent imbalance of power between them and realized that Ms. Lewinsky was emotionally frail. Marcia Lewis, Ms. Lewinsky's mother, told the grand jury that the president had once told her daughter that he knew she "had been hurt a lot by different men and that he would be her friend or he would help her, not hurt her." But it did not turn out that way. Anyone who can wince at the memory of some waiting-in-the-rain moment will probably view Starr's extended and surpassingly unsexy account of Ms. Lewinsky's anguished come-ons as mostly sad and terribly human. Yet in the prosecutor's report, Ms. Lewinsky also comes off as bold and savvy enough to credibly play chicken with the president of the United States after their affair ended. She relentlessly pressured Clinton to get her a job, first seeking a U.N. post and then sneering at it, even after Ambassador Bill Richardson himself met with her. She presented the president with a wish list of her ideal job -- one "I don't want to have to work for" -- and suggested Jordan as the perfect person to help her because he was outside the government. Ms. Lewinsky seemed like a woman with a plan from the beginning. She told prosecutors that she and the president had been making meaningful eye-contact at official White House functions for some time before their first real meeting. In that encounter, at a birthday party in the White House in November 1995, she seems to have won him over simply by flashing the straps of her thong underwear. It is hard to imagine how this gesture might have flowed naturally from even the most flirtatious conversation. But if it raised any questions in the president's mind about Ms. Lewinsky's stability or discretion, he ignored the warning. In the early days of their affair, she seemed quite realistic about the content of the relationship. After several sexual encounters, she assumed he had forgotten her name when he called her 'Kiddo' in the hall. Clinton broke off their affair after only a few months, but soon began calling again. And when she followed his suggestion that she hang around to run into him, others in the West Wing noticed. After a Secret Service agent eventually reported her, she was transferred to the Pentagon in April 1996. When she tearfully told the president, he promised to bring her back if he won re-election. She didn't see him again that year. While she waited, more or less patiently, she kept a calendar with a countdown until Election Day -- which came and went with no word from Clinton. Still, she did not give up hope, and early the next year she quoted from Romeo and Juliet in a Valentine's Day greeting to him in The Washington Post's personals that apparently prompted him to renew the relationship. In May, he broke off with her yet again, and at that point, she began repeatedly calling the president's secretary, Betty Currie, often in tears, because she couldn't reach Clinton. She also wrote him a number of letters; about 50 drafts were found in her apartment when she consented to a search. And she continued to shower the president with gifts, about 30 in all. Clinton told the grand jury, "I felt that it was a right thing to do" to respond by giving her presents in return. He also testified: "After I terminated the improper contact with her, she wanted to come in more than she did. She got angry when she didn't get in sometimes. I knew that might make her more likely to speak, and I still did it because I had to limit the contact." But sometimes he gave in, as he did in July 1997 after she wrote an angry letter threatening to tell her parents about their relationship. In fact, she had already told her mother, along with 10 other people, and had played the president's phone messages for several of them. The day after her threat, she said, he was sweeter than ever before, stroking her hair and telling her she was beautiful and smart, and that he only wished he had more time for her. She asked if he might have more time for her in a few years, when he would be out of office, and again he obliquely encouraged her, saying, "I don't know -- I might be alone in three years." "Then I said something about us sort of being together," Ms. Lewinsky said. "I think I kind of said, 'Oh, I think we'd be a good team,' or something like that." He responded to this talk of forever by asking, "What about when I'm 75 and have to pee 25 times a day?" And yet when she walked away that day, "I just knew he was in love with me." When it finally became obvious to her that their relationship was over, she stayed in the president's life as a supplicant, asking for a job, emotional support and an apology for his messing up her life. The last time he agreed to see her was after she had been placed on the witness list in the Paula Jones sexual harassment suit, and he kissed her passionately, "intimately," she said, just like old times, and gave her some Christmas presents. Later that afternoon, Mrs. Currie stopped by her apartment to retrieve them. She was glad to turn them over, she said, as "a little bit of an assurance to the president that everything was OK."