Impeachable Corruption of Justice Proven
by Bruce Fein
Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr's 455 page impeachment report to the House of
Representatives brimming with more than 1,600 footnotes is virtual proof beyond a reasonable
doubt that President William President Clinton orchestrated an attempt to corrupt justice in the
Jones v. Clinton sexual harassment lawsuit and in a federal grand jury investigation of himself by
lying under oath, tampering with witnesses, and otherwise attempting to sabotage the truth-finding
function of the federal judiciary and investigating grand juries. That behavior betrayed President
Clinton's unique constitutional obligation to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, not
circumvented. That unflagging duty is emphatically not a matter between the President, his God,
and his family, but affects every citizen in the United States whose liberties pivot on the rule of law
and confidence in the integrity of the judicial system and law enforcement.
These understandings are neither novel nor belatedly contrived to attack the presidency of Mr.
Clinton. As Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson underscored in Youngstown Sheet and Tube
Co, v. Sawyer (1952), "With all its defects, delays and inconveniences, men have discovered no
technique for long preserving free government except that the Executive be under the law...." And
presidential attempts to corrupt justice by lying under oath in a pending court or grand jury
proceeding and otherwise conducting a symphony of untruths or evasions of the law are frontal
attacks on the rule of law and the president's corresponding constitutional duties. In a case
concerning deceit before a Senate Committee, the Supreme Court lectured in United States v.
Norris (1937): "Perjury is an obstruction of justice; its perpetration well may affect the dearest
concerns of the parties before a tribunal." The High Court reiterated in Air Freight System, Inc. v.
N.L.R.B. (1994) that in any formal proceeding, judicial, administrative or otherwise, "False
testimony...is intolerable. We must neither reward nor condone such a ‘flagrant affront' to the
truth-seeking function of adversary proceedings." The Clinton administration comprehends these
cherished axioms, as indicated by its recent criminal prosecution of Barbara Battalino for lying
about oral sex with a former medical patient in a civil suit and by the pending indictment of former
HUD secretary Henry Cisneros for lying about a pay-off to a former mistress during an FBI
background investigation.
Mr. Starr's volumes of incriminating evidence have not been seriously challenged by either the
President or his attorneys. They have been unable to point to a single factual assertion that they
can demonstrate is false. Clinton's defense is generally confined to insisting that an attempt to
corrupt justice in a civil suit and grand jury investigation are not impeachable and concern solely
private conduct (not a president's duty to faithfully execute the laws) if the sinister conduct
emanates from marital infidelity. If the latter is implicated, his lawyers tacitly argue, then the Article
2, section 3 law enforcement obligation of the president disappears faster than the Cheshire cat.
That torture of the Constitution suggests that presidential murders to conceal private assignations
at the White House would not be impeachable offenses!
The Starr report unfortunately could not have been written in the refined style of Flaubert's
Madame Bovary
in lieu of the crassness of Hustler Magazine in order to disprove Mr. Clinton's tortured and
Pickwickian manipulation of language to deny a sexual relationship or affair with Monica
Lewinsky. Literary coarseness, however, is no defense to an impeachable attempt to corrupt
justice. In numbing and occasionally tedious detail, the Starr report through the testimony of
Monica Lewinsky, Betty Currie, Vernon Jordan, and several other supporting actors and
actresses (including secret service officers) convincingly proves that Mr. Clinton plotted to corrupt
justice by:
*lying under oath in the Jones lawsuit by denying a sexual affair, sexual relationship, or sexual
relations with Monica Lewinsky;
*lying under oath to a grand jury as recently as August 17, 1998 about his sexual relationship with
Ms. Lewinsky, repeating the same naked lie to the American people that evening in a televised
address, and persisting in the same deceit to this day;
*lying under oath in the Jones litigation about private trysts with Ms. Lewinsky and the scores of
gifts exchanged between the two;
*lying under oath in the Jones case about his discussions with Ms. Lewinksy concerning her
possible testimony that might have threatened disclosure of their affair;
*obstructing the search for truth in the Jones case by collaborating with Ms. Lewinsky to conceal
their relationship by hiding gifts subpoenaed by Ms. Jones' attorneys;
*obstructing the search for the truth in the Jones case by mutual understanding with Ms. Lewinsky
to conceal their authentic relationship from the judicial process by scheming to lie under oath, by
preparing a false affidavit signed by Ms. Lewinsky and employing that deceit in seeking to block
questions during Mr. Clinton's deposition, and by Mr. Clinton's lying under oath about
the Lewinsky relationship when that latter chicanery failed;
*obstructing the search for truth by exceptional assistance in obtaining a job for Ms. Lewinsky in
New York during a period when her honesty in the Jones case could have been politically and
legally crippling;
*lying under oath in his Jones deposition about discussions with Vernon Jordan concerning Ms.
Lewinsky's involvement as a potential witness in the case;
*attempting corruptly to influence the potential testimony of his personal secretary, Betty Currie, in
the days after his January 17, 1998 deposition to avoid discrepancies with his deceptions;
*deceiving and frustrating the grand jury investigation of himself by evading testimony for seven
months and lying to senior White House staff with knowledge that they would echo the lies in their
grand jury appearances; and
*aiming to stymie a potential impeachment or other congressional inquiry into his conduct by lying
to the public and Congress in January 1988 about his relationship with Ms. Lewinsky; reneging on
his promise to cooperate fully with the grand jury investigation by sneering at six invitations to
testify voluntarily; insincerely invoking executive privilege; lying to the grand jury on August 17,
1998; and, lying again to the American people and Congress in a nationwide televised statement
that evening.
President Clinton was the producer, director, and leading actor in this enterprise to corrupt justice
and to defile his official, constitutional, and public obligation to faithfully execute the laws. The
portentous Goya-like portrait of Mr. Clinton's betrayal of his official oath is tacitly conceded by
the President's defenders except for marginal coloring on the landscape.
One of their thin arguments is a "Humpty Dumpty" defense–namely, that when President Clinton
uses the words "sexual relations," they mean just what he chooses them to mean–neither more nor
less. Thus, even when he is specifically instructed by a federal judge that the phrase covers any
"contact with the genitalia , anus, groin, breast, inner thigh, or buttocks of any person with the
intent to arouse or gratify the sexual desire of any person," President Clinton is still entitled to
confine the phrase to customary sexual intercourse in answering questions under oath without
alerting his interrogators of his semantical acrobatics. Ms. Lewinsky testified in painful detail under
oath that on 10 occasions her assignations with Mr. Clinton involved sexual acts that fell squarely
within the court-devised definition for answering questions during the President's January 17,
1998 deposition in the Paula Jones suit. Her testimony was corroborated by documentary, secret
service, and related circumstantial evidence as to the times and places of the debaucheries. Mr.
Clinton under oath denied those ten sexual White House trysts, an indisputable falsehood. His
lawyers' palsied defense is that their client (a confessed liar about the Lewinsky affair) might have
been unaware of his lying. In other words, a President who routinely mixes truths with falsehoods
cannot be guilty of impeachable misconduct in uttering lies under oath because his mental
capability for apprehending his mendacity has been lost!
A companion defense advanced by Mr. Clinton's lawyers suggests that Ms. Lewinsky's
testimony vindicates the President because she agreed the President never expressly instructed her
to lie under oath. Misleadingly neglected are the mountains of Lewinsky's sworn elaboration
proving that President Clinton unambiguously conveyed the same message through alternative
communicative devices.
The centerpiece of Mr. Clinton's rebuttal to the Starr report is that his omnibus maneuverings to
corrupt justice are unimpeachable because technical legal defenses might be available in criminal
trials for perjury, witness tampering, or obstructing justice. Impeachment, however, does not
require proof of crimes, but only offenses against society and the nation's bedrock institutions and
customs like the rule of law and honesty under oath by the President consistent with his
constitutional duty to vindicate, not circumvent, justice.
Mr. Clinton's attempt to corrupt justice in many respects mirrors Article I of the three
impeachment articles voted by the House Judiciary Committee against President Richard Nixon in
1974. Paragraph 1 charged Nixon with making and causing to be made false statements to
lawfully authorized investigative officers, which finds a parallel in Mr. Clinton's lying to the grand
jury and orchestrating sister lies by senior White House staff members. Paragraph 2 accused
Nixon of withholding relevant and material evidence from law enforcement officers, similar to Mr.
Clinton's scheming with Ms. Lewinsky to evade a subpoena for his gifts to her. Paragraph 3
reproached Nixon for condoning false statements given to law enforcement officers, like Mr.
Clinton's condonation of Ms. Lewinsky's false affidavit in the Jones case. Paragraph 8 indicted
Nixon for, "Making false or misleading public statements to the purpose of deceiving the people of
the United States into believing that a thorough and complete investigation had been conducted
with respect to allegations of misconduct on the part of personnel of the executive branch of the
United States and personnel of the Committee for the Reelection of the President, and that there
was no involvement of such personnel in such misconduct." President Clinton's false public
statements that he never lied under oath nor had a sexual relationship with Ms. Lewinsky and that
the nation should thus drop all further investigation of Monicagate and leave it to himself, his God,
and his family are virtual carbon copies of Nixon's public lying about the Watergate cover-up
investigation. Paragraph 9 assailed Nixon for endeavoring to cause prospective defendants to
expect favored treatment in return to their silence or false testimony similar to the extraordinary
job search initiatives of Mr. Clinton on behalf of Ms. Lewinsky to deter her honesty about their
relationship in the Jones litigation. In sum, the evidence in the Starr report demonstrating Mr.
Clinton's attempt to corrupt justice substantially overlaps with the types of evidence found by the
House Judiciary Committee in 1974 to justify the impeachment of President Nixon for violating
"his constitutional oath faithfully to execute the office of the President of the United States and, to
the best of his ability preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in
violation of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed...."
Alexander Hamilton in Federalist 65 explained that the touchstone of an impeachable offense was
"injury" done immediately to "society itself." If President Clinton remains in office despite his
attempt to corrupt justice through lies, deceit, and otherwise, the rule of law–the cornerstone of
our magnificent constitutional order–will be grievously threatened. Any perjury prosecution of
private citizens would be problematic. Defense counsel would insist to the jury that his client
should not be imprisoned simply for bettering the instruction of the President of the United States.
Truth and honesty as the expected standard for public discourse in solemn settings would be
compromised. The nation's moral textbook for youths would not be George Washington and the
cherry tree and Honest Abe, but Bill and Monica. White House tours would descend into
voyeurism off limits to children.
Mr. Clinton's impeachment travails are not about sex, they are about the constitutional creed that
we are a government of laws, not of men, that every man's a king, but no one wears a crown.
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