.... but the president's lawyers were never aiming at convincing anyone. They, like their fellow dream teamers in the last great case of celebrity guilt excused, were aiming at a much easier target, jury nullification. They knew that they could count on the Senate Democrats to do the corrupt thing and the Senate Republicans to do the cowardly thing, and the establishment press to bless them both.
Aides and Abettors
By Michael Kelly
Wednesday, February 10, 1999; Page A23
In a few days, President Clinton will be acquitted and the verdict among the Washington chattering class has been determined in advance: The House managers, a bunch of blunderers from really not the better schools, overreached with a weak case, which the president's brilliant superlawyers destroyed, and the Senate justly disposed of the wreckage.
Well, what began in lies should, I suppose, end in lies. But first, let us have one brief, shining moment of honesty, courtesy of West Virginia's Sen. Robert Byrd, giving vent on ABC-TV's "This Week": "He lied under oath!" Indeed he did. He also encouraged others to lie under oath and he also obstructed justice in various other ways. He would never have told the truth, if he had not been trapped by the little blue dress.
The evidence of Clinton's guilt presented to the Senate was redundantly convincing. Clinton's defense was not a brilliant refutation of this evidence. It was a cheap, shoddy and thoroughly dishonest evasion of it, a "theater of distraction and misdirection," as Rep. Henry Hyde said in his closing argument. The president's lawyers never really tried to refute the case against him as a whole but rather attempted to explain away each act of perjury and obstruction with its own isolated and tailored excuse. The whole thing was banged together from misstatements of fact, lapses of memory and tricks of semantics:
Clinton did not coach his secretary Betty Currie to give false testimony but rather to refresh his memory. . . . Clinton did not share the common understanding of the term "sexual relations." . . . If Lewinsky says Currie called her to retrieve his incriminating gifts to her, well, Currie does not recall. . . . If Lewinsky says Clinton had sexual relations with her even within the president's ex post facto definition of the term, well, it is only her word against his.
All utterly unconvincing, but the president's lawyers were never aiming at convincing anyone. They, like their fellow dream teamers in the last great case of celebrity guilt excused, were aiming at a much easier target, jury nullification. They knew that they could count on the Senate Democrats to do the corrupt thing and the Senate Republicans to do the cowardly thing, and the establishment press to bless them both.
Which is exactly what has happened. The Senate will this week deliver up a verdict that is based not on believing in Clinton's innocence but on acquiescing in his lies. And this will be hailed as right and good. Washington insiders have come a long way in a year. They used to believe the president had an obligation to tell the truth; now they believe they have an obligation to help him get away with lies.
This obligation is taken seriously, as Christopher Hitchens has discovered. Hitchens, who writes very well for Vanity Fair and who is a fearless critic of the man he calls the Father of All Lies, received a telephone call on Feb. 5 from Susan Bogart, a House Judiciary Committee investigative counsel. Bogart had heard that Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal had once told Hitchens that Lewinsky was a stalker who had victimized Clinton. If true, important. The Republican managers believed that Clinton had indeed exploited White House aides to smear Lewinsky. And they had asked Blumenthal about this just two days earlier, in a Senate trial deposition. And Blumenthal had testified that he had never spoken about Clinton's false description of Lewinsky to anyone other than his wife: "I didn't mention it to my friends. . . .
I certainly never mentioned it to a reporter." (Blumenthal's lawyer, denying that his client had spread the "stalker" story, gave explicit permission for any person "in the news media" who had something to say to the contrary to "come forward and say it.")
Bogart asked Hitchens where the truth lay. Hitchens told the truth, signed an affidavit to the truth: Over lunch one day in March, his dear friend Sid had told Hitchens and his wife Carol Blue that Lewinsky was "a stalker" and Clinton was " 'the victim' of a predatory and unstable sexually demanding young woman."
Blumenthal responded in classically Clintonian form: He didn't remember the lunch, and if he had said anything to Hitchens, this was in the category of speaking to a "friend," not "a reporter."
There you had it, a presidential aide caught out, a major Republican claim proved. And the establishment press leaped on the story -- the story of Hitchens's shocking betrayal, that is. In an exceptionally one-sided story in The Post and in equally unfair interviews on CNN and MSNBC, Hitchens was hammered. The in-crowd's verdict was clear: He had committed an unpardonable act.
But what was Hitchens supposed to have done when he received the unwelcome call to truth? Was he supposed to have lied to protect Blumenthal's lies to protect Clinton's lies? Or at least acquiesce through silence in the lies? Why, yes. And so are we all.
Michael Kelly is the editor of National Journal.
Address:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-02/10/094l-021099-idx.html |
