Lorrie, here's an article you might enjoy. :-)
Presidential Perjury
For Bill Clinton, telling some portion of the truth is a strategy to be adopted after all others have been exhausted. On August 7th, after being interrogated by Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr in the White House map room regarding his liaison with intern Monica Lewinsky, Mr. Clinton admitted in a national television address that "I did have a relationship with Ms. Lewinsky that was not proper.... [I]t was wrong. It constituted a critical lapse in judgment and a personal failure on my part for which I am solely and completely responsible
However, with the forensic nimbleness one should expect from a liar of singular resourcefulness, Mr. Clinton spun a web of self-absolution in which he demanded forgiveness from the American public without so much as offering an apology. Although he expressed "regret" for "mislead[ing] people, including my wife," the words "I am sorry" or their equivalent were never spoken during the four-minute address. Thus his speech was meant to depict his lies, evasions, and obstructions as a regrettable necessity in his efforts to "protect" himself and his family "from the embarrassment of my own conduct," and to keep at bay what he regarded as "a politically inspired lawsuit" (namely, the Paula Jones sexual harassment suit) which had become part of "an independent counsel investigation" about which he had "real and serious concerns."
"Now this matter is between me, the two people I love most — my wife and our daughter, and our God," continued Mr. Clinton in his familiar burlesque of piety. "I must put it right, and I am prepared to do whatever it takes to do so." Were Bill Clinton an honorable man, the obvious penance would be to resign, but his self-defined terms of contrition fall well short of this threshold: "I take my responsibility for my part in all of this; that is all I can do. Now it is time — in fact, it is past time — to move on."
Mr. Clinton sought desperately to dismiss his admitted misconduct as a private matter, defiantly insisting — to the approval of television mogul Harry Thomason, who was on hand in the Map Room to direct the presidential address — that "even Presidents have private lives." He invited the public to pity him for submitting to "questions no American citizen would ever want to answer" during his grand jury testimony. In this fashion Mr. Clinton invited the public to see him as a helpless citizen tormented by a predatory prosecutor, rather than a pathological liar and incurable coward who unflinchingly lied to the public and exploited the powers of his office to impede a legitimate criminal investigation.
Truth or Consequences
Painfully aware of the implications of the claim, Mr. Clinton told the public that his denial of a sexual relationship with Lewinsky during the January deposition in the Paula Jones case was "legally accurate." During that testimony, the operative definition of "sexual relationship" involved contact with certain body parts "of any person with an intent to arouse or gratify the sexual desire of any person." In response to a question in which that definition was explicitly applied, Mr. Clinton answered: "I have never had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky. I've never had an affair with her."
However, in his August 17th grand jury testimony, Mr. Clinton "made the painful admission that he had inappropriate contact with Ms. Lewinsky," according to his lawyer, David Kendall. And Kendall pointed out that in his answers to "a very few highly intrusive questions with respect to the specifics of this contact, in order to preserve personal privacy and institutional dignity, he gave candid, but not detailed answers."
That is, Mr. Clinton tried to evade questions in which his earlier perjury would be exposed. Invoking the Fifth Amendment being a political impossibility, Bill Clinton simply asserted yet another spurious form of presidential privilege — perhaps to be called the "institutional dignity privilege" — and refused to answer the crucial questions.
Of course, the institutional dignity of the Presidency was compromised the moment that Bill Clinton was inaugurated, and his continued occupancy of the office may destroy whatever residual dignity remains. At the time of this writing it is not clear what role the August 17th grand jury testimony will play in Kenneth Starr's forthcoming report to the Congress, but it's entirely possible that Starr has sufficient evidence to begin impeachment proceedings on the basis of presidential perjury.
As Representative Martin Meehan (D-MA) points out, Starr had set "a trap for perjury" in the Lewinsky case by striking a deal with the young intern to secure her testimony before a federal criminal grand jury, before which Bill Clinton would be compelled, under threat of criminal sanctions, to tell the truth. "That's where people have gotten into trouble," remarked Meehan, who sits on the House Judiciary Committee, where any impeachment proceeding would begin. "It's not so much what the original problem was; it's going into a federal grand jury and then not telling the truth. People are indicted every day of the week for that."
Federal officials have also been impeached for perjury. For example, Walter L. Nixon, a U.S. District Judge in Mississippi who was convicted of perjury for lying to a grand jury, was impeached by the House in October 1989 by a 417-0 vote. Representative Don Edwards (D-CA), a liberal congressman who avidly pursued Judge Nixon's impeachment, insisted to his colleagues that "lying to a grand jury in testimony under oath is particularly serious" when it is done by a judge, who has "the awesome responsibility of swearing witnesses, judging credibility, and finding the truth in cases that come before him." Of course, the same is true of perjury by a President, who has the unique constitutional responsibility to see that the laws are faithfully executed.
Public Actions
White House advisers and Clinton defenders in the media have tirelessly insisted that any affair between the President and Monica Lewinsky is publicly inconsequential, a private matter between Mr. and Mrs. Clinton. Of course, a White House affair between Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky would have taken place on public time, between a taxpayer-compensated employee of the federal government and his unpaid subordinate, in an office maintained in the name of "The People" at taxpayer expense — meaning that it would hardly be a "private" matter by any rational definition.
However, a more consequential consideration is the fact that in his efforts to obstruct an investigation into his own private misconduct, Bill Clinton has committed abuses of power, invented novel claims of presidential privilege, and may be responsible for harassment and intimidation directed at Kathleen Willey and Linda Tripp. During the Clinton era, an increasingly imperial Presidency has been occupied by an individual possessed of entirely untutored appetites and negligible moral discipline, and the resulting precedents, if left unchallenged, will amount to a complete repudiation of the rule of law.
It caused little stir on August 12th when the President appointed David Carpenter, the former chief of the President's Secret Service detail, to preside over the State Department's office of diplomatic security in the wake of the recent terrorist attacks in Kenya and Tanzania. Carpenter, who headed up the presidential protection detail in 1994 and 1995, was among the officials who might have been subpoenaed by Kenneth Starr. The appointment was made during the Senate's summer recess, meaning that Carpenter is conveniently out of the picture until the next Congress convenes in January. Carpenter's new post carries the rank of Assistant Secretary of State and director of the Office of Foreign Missions. His appointment is strongly reminiscent of Mr. Clinton's appointment of former Arkansas State Trooper official Buddy Young to a cushy post in the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Young had headed up then-Governor Clinton's protective detail, which included Troopers who were used to procure willing women for assignations.
The presidential favors bestowed upon Carpenter and Young stand in remarkable contrast to the treatment of Linda Tripp, whose cooperation with Kenneth Starr's investigation precipitated the Lewinsky investigation. On the May 26th edition of CNN's Larry King Live, Tripp's lawyer, Anthony Zaccagini, explained that Tripp had taken up residence in an FBI "safe house" because of "threats made against her life." As the March 23rd issue of Newsweek noted, an oblique death threat was issued by none other than Bill Clinton himself by way of Monica Lewinsky. In one conversation, Newsweek reported, "Lewinsky warned … that both Linda and her children were 'in danger' if she didn't testify the right way about the [Kathleen] Willey episode."
Once again, Tripp's account is part of a larger pattern. Gennifer Flowers claims that she resorted to taping her conversations with then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton "because some very scary things were going on. I was getting threats on the telephone.... I had some saying I was going to get beaten up. I had some saying I was going to be killed." Kathleen Willey reported that subsequent to her disclosures on the CBS program 60 Minutes earlier this year her property was vandalized. Shortly thereafter, a stranger accosted her, mentioned the names of her children, and said, "I hope you're getting the message."
Just as shocking as the gangland-style tactics used against potentially troublesome witnesses is Kenneth Starr's willingness to allow the President "to testify before a federal grand jury under terms and procedures not allowed the average citizen," pointed out Representative Bob Barr (R-GA) in a July 29th column in Investor's Business Daily. Mr. Clinton, unlike other federal grand jury witnesses, was allowed the luxury of testifying from his home via scrambled closed-circuit television, with his defense counsel at his side. "This particular witness already will have fully debriefed earlier witnesses, such as Secret Service agents, his personal secretary, and his close friends and aides — all of whom are deeply loyal and beholden to him," observed Barr. Thus, with the help of his staff and legal counsel, Mr. Clinton was able "to carefully craft his testimony in order to ensure his words are consistent with past statements."
Noted Barr, "If any other American were summoned before a grand jury, he would drop everything and make himself available. Otherwise, he'd face contempt charges. If this President is given special dispensation, a terrible and debilitating legal precedent will be set. And Americans will be justified in concluding that their President is indeed above the law."
More Serious Crimes
Fifty years to the day before Mr. Clinton's August 17th testimony, Alger Hiss was compelled to make a grudging, overdue admission that he had known Whittaker Chambers in the communist underground. With this admission, Hiss' delicately woven tapestry of lies began to unravel, leading eventually to his imprisonment on perjury charges — although, as a Soviet espionage asset, Hiss had committed capital crimes.
Lost amid the furor over the Lewinsky affair is the fact that Bill Clinton stands credibly accused of crimes every bit as grave as those committed by Alger Hiss — specifically, consciously undermining America's national security in exchange for illegal campaign donations from Red China. The disclosure by campaign donor Johnny Chung that he had funneled $110,000 from the Red Chinese military into Bill Clinton's campaign fund established a money trail running from the highest echelons of the Chinese Politburo directly into the Oval Office.
If Bill Clinton, like Alger Hiss, is brought down on a perjury charge rather than held accountable for high treason, a paradoxical precedent will be set: Personal misconduct by a President will be regarded as a graver crime than the prostitution of his office in the service of a foreign power.
— William Norman Grigg
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