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Politics : Bill Clinton Scandal - SANITY CHECK -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: melinda abplanalp who wrote (17798)	12/9/1998 12:07:00 AM
From: Les H	Respond to of 67261

CLINTON'S NEWEST PERJURIES By DICK MORRIS IN his answers to the written queries posed to him by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry Hyde, President Clinton compounded perjury with more perjury. In question 71, Hyde asked the president about his Jan. 21 conversation with me about how to handle the Lewinsky affair. Clinton said that he remembers our discussion of the results of the poll but ''does not recall'' saying ''well, we just have to win, don't we?'' Baloney. I've known Bill Clinton for more than 20 years and there is no way on earth that he would forget telling me that. Those lines represented his deliberate strategic observation after a 15-minute discussion of the survey and its findings. I could tell that the moment that he said it, he wished he hadn't. The very next day, he phoned me to remind me, ''I have told you that the charges against me aren't true, haven't I?'' It was an obvious attempt to blur the bold strategy he had hinted at the night before. More times than I can count, the president and I have had conversations which have led to similarly dramatic conclusions, and I have found that he remembers them in great detail - decades later. To imagine that he forgot this statement in a mere 10 months begs credibility. I continue to think that, in his own screwed-up way, Bill Clinton believes he did not perjure himself when he denied having sex with Monica Lewinsky. Like a man who had deluded himself into thinking that he was Napoleon, Clinton had convinced himself that oral sex wasn't sex. That much was evident when he told me, earlier on the day of Jan. 21, ''I didn't do what they said I did, but I did do something and I may have done so much that I can't prove my innocence.'' Since he decided that he couldn't tell the truth - even though he believed that he had not lied in the Jones deposition - he was now grimly determined to hunker down, to lie to America on TV, and ''to win,'' whatever it would take. Clinton's answers to the questions about Betsey Wright, his chief of staff in Arkansas, and about private investigators Terry Lenzner and Jack Palladino - two key members of what I've been calling the White House Secret Police - are equally incomplete and inaccurate. Concerning Betsey Wright, Clinton blandly explained that she served him in Arkansas when he was governor, that she served on his campaign staff and that he has consulted her, from time to time, about matters that may have taken place while he was governor about which she might have special knowledge. The fact is that Betsey coordinated the 1993 attempt to muzzle the state troopers who sought to publicize their allegations that they ferried Clinton to assignations with women and that he used them as ''middlemen'' in meeting and procuring female companions. Clinton was also misleading the Hyde Committee when he told it that Jack Palladino worked in the 1992 campaign. The fact is that, according to her own statements, Betsey Wright hired Palladino in 1993 to consult with her on how to quiet the troopers during the first year of the Clinton presidency. Palladino may also have been hired to investigate members of the White House Travel Office staff, presumably to get material to tarnish their reputations. When Palladino was asked about any work he did on investigating the Travel Office, he refused to answer, citing client privilege. He would not have claimed such a privilege if he had not worked on the Travel Office scandal. If the Clinton people hired him, as seems likely, the president's answer again looks perjurious. *Asked about Terry Lenzner, the other secret policeman, the president failed to mention that Lenzner was engaged to dig up dirt on Monica Lewinsky - a fact which Lenzer acknowledged to The Washington Post. WITH his evasive, incomplete and insultingly false answers to the questions posed by the Hyde panel, the president has managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. The impeachment inquiry seemed dead after the election; now, one month later, the president's arrogance and denial have put it back on track. Where will it all end? It will not and should not lead to his removal from office. But he ought to be censured and fined. And the fine should be large - proportionate to the $4.5 million Starr had to spend investigating his Lewinsky lies. But more important than the amount is how Clinton is to be allowed to pay the fine. He must not be able to hold fund-raisers. Rather, the fine should be a levy against his retirement pension and the federal allocation for expenses that former presidents receive. If the Republicans try to remove Clinton from office, they will earn the animosity of the nation. It might well be the final nail in the coffin that takes away their House majority in 2000, as surely as Ford's pardon of Nixon in 1974 cost him re-election. But if they fine Clinton severely and censure him strongly, the GOP will win points for fairness, moderation and justice. Even the most rapid supporters of the Republican right will accept a verdict that leaves Clinton under a financial and moral cloud for the remainder of his life.