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

To: Big D who wrote (6855)	9/24/1998 10:11:00 AM
From: Les H	Respond to of 13994

Clinton's Perjury And His Lawyer's Ethics By ANDREW P. NAPOLITANO The Paula Jones case is far from dead. On Oct. 20 the Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals hears oral arguments in Ms. Jones's appeal of Judge Susan Webber Wright's dismissal of the case. Meanwhile Robert Bennett, President Clinton's chief lawyer in the case, faces an overriding reality: Because his client has perpetrated a fraud upon the court, he is ethically obligated to withdraw from the case. As a young lawyer, Abraham Lincoln once left a courtroom and refused to continue a trial when he discovered that his client had lied to the court. "My hands are dirty and I've gone to wash them," the future president told the judge. Lawyers' Rules of Professional Conduct specifically require lawyers to behave in a Lincolnian fashion. They must have the ethical fortitude to wash their hands of clients who lied to the court. During Mr. Clinton's January deposition in the Jones lawsuit, Mr. Bennett steadfastly argued to Judge Wright that the president and Monica Lewinsky had no sexual contact whatsoever and that the court therefore should not allow any inquiry into the matter. Mr. Bennett did not rely on the narrow, "legally accurate" definition of "sexual relations" Mr. Clinton preferred. Instead, Mr. Bennett was refreshingly clear and forthright in asserting to the judge that Ms. Lewinsky's affidavit meant that the intern had "absolutely no sex of any kind in any manner, shape or form, with President Clinton." Mr. Clinton, who was seated with Mr. Bennett during the deposition, remained mute while his lawyer made these assertions. Mr. Clinton himself testified later that Ms. Lewinsky's affidavit was "absolutely true." In his grand jury testimony, made public on Monday, the president disingenuously attempted to distance himself from Mr. Bennett by arguing that since Mr. Bennett told Judge Wright that "there is no sex" between the president and Ms. Lewinsky--speaking in the present tense--he could only have meant either that they were not having sexual contact during the deposition or that "in January 1998" they were abstaining--but not that it never happened. Mr. Bennett knows better than to present such sophistry to a federal judge. He knows that, since he was arguing to exclude evidence of the president's sexual history from discovery by Ms. Jones's attorneys, everyone at that deposition (except Mr. Clinton) understood him to be saying Mr. Clinton and Ms. Lewinsky had never had sex. Otherwise, the argument would have been irrelevant. Mr. Bennett now knows--along with the rest of the world--that his own statements to the court were false. As the world learned through Mr. Clinton's televised admission on Aug. 17, and later through Ms. Lewinsky's testimony, her affidavit submitted in the Jones case, in which she denied having any sexual relations with the president, was false. Mr. Clinton must have lied to his own lawyer about his relationship with Ms. Lewinsky. The only other alternative is highly unlikely: that Mr. Bennett, despite his reputation for professionalism and his ethical obligations as an attorney, knowingly violated Rule 3.3 of the Arkansas Rules of Professional Conduct (RPC), which govern practice in the state's federal district courts. That ethical rule prohibits an attorney from making, or allowing to be made, a false statement of material fact or law to a judge. Given that no rational attorney would risk sacrificing his career by knowingly deceiving the court, Mr. Bennett must have been, like the rest of us, "misled" by his client Mr. Clinton. RPC 3.3 imposes a continuing burden on a lawyer to reveal to a court any material fact or law that the lawyer discovers to be false after having presented it to the court. Mr. Bennett's ethical duties to the court in the Jones lawsuit persist to this day because the Rules of Professional Conduct impose the obligation of candor to the court, which includes correcting any misstatements made to the court, so long as the case is extant. The Jones case is still extant because Ms. Jones filed a timely appeal and because Judge Wright herself has indicated that she will review Mr. Clinton's silence as well as his affirmative statements in his deposition in order to determine if they constituted fraud or were contemptuous of the court. Mr. Bennett's ethical obligations do not end there. If a lawyer learns that his client has used the lawyer's services to perpetrate a crime or a fraud, Arkansas RPC 1.16 requires the lawyer to withdraw from the case. Additionally, RPC 1.6 releases the lawyer from the obligation of maintaining client confidentiality if any information passed to the lawyer was used by the client directly or through the lawyer to perpetrate a crime or fraud. Thus, Mr. Bennett's dilemma is the following: Assuming he did not know of the president's relationship with Ms. Lewinsky at the time of Mr. Clinton's deposition in the Jones case, he now knows that the president lied under oath, which is a crime. Mr. Bennett also knows that the president lied to him and induced him to use those lies to argue to the court, which is fraud. Under the Rules of Professional Conduct, therefore, Mr. Bennett must withdraw from the case and Judge Wright may require him to reveal client confidences to the court in order to explain his withdrawal from the case. Perhaps Mr. Bennett will soon be free to testify to what many Clinton aides have discovered: There is nothing more dangerous than defending this president--especially when he doesn't tell you the truth.