Clinton Impeachment Trial(英)

r for Newsweek, Michael Isikoff, when he approached her to ask about Willey's encounter with Clinton that the better story involved a White House intern, who she left unnamed. Tripp, partly for her own self-defense and partly out of a desire to damage the President's reputation, began secretly taping (in violation of the state law of her home state of Maryland) her own conversations with Lewinsky with a $100 recorder she picked up from a nearby Radio Shack.

　　During one of her taped conversations with Lewinsky in November 1997, Tripp learned that her friend had in her closet a blue dress that still bore the semen stain from a sexual encounter with the President some nine months earlier. Tripp excitedly called Michael Isikoff with the remarkable news, and urged that the reporter have the dress DNA tested. Isikoff pointed out an obvious problem: even if Newsweek could somehow obtain the dress, the test would be meaningless without a sample of Clinton's DNA——and how could the magazine get that? Tripp, however, continued to take an active interest in preserving the semen evidence, urging Lewinsky not to have the dress dry cleaned——as she had planned——for a family occasion because it might be useful for her own "protection" and, besides, the dress made her look "really fat."

　　In early January 1998, at the encouragement of Luciane Goldberg and backers of the Jones lawsuit (who, by this time, had been filled in by Tripp on details of the Lewinsky matter), Tripp contacted Kenneth Starr's Office of Independent Counsel. Tripp told Starr's staff all she knew about the Lewinsky-Clinton scandal and presented them with a collection of damaging tapes of her private conversations with Lewinsky.

　　The Starr Investigation

　　By late 1997, despite the several year long "Whitewater" investigation costing tens of millions of dollars, Kenneth Starr's Office of Independent Counsel (OIC) failed to produce the necessary "substantial and credible" evidence of an impeachable offense that would justify referring the matter to Congress for further action. It seemed only a matter o

f weeks before the OIC would be forced to close its far-reaching effort to identify wrongdoing by the President.

　　At the same time, Judge Wright appeared ready to dismiss Paula Jones's sexual harassment suit after testimony in her deposition proved inconsistent with her initial pleadings. (For example, in her pleadings Jones claimed that the incident at the Excelsior Hotel took place after 2:30, but in her deposition she placed the encounter in the morning after evidence made clear that the Governor had returned to his mansion after the luncheon at the hotel.) The judge also seemed angered and frustrated by leaks of salacious details in the press, in obvious defiance of her gag order, and that presented a second justification for dismissal. The President's camp had every reason to be confident that the case would never go to trial——if they could prevent any new bombshells about Clinton's sexual activities with subordinates.

　　In January 1998, it all blew up. According to the Starr Report eventually submitted to Congress, that month the OIC "received information that Monica Lewinsky was attempting to influence the testimony of one of the witnesses in the Jones investigation [Tripp], and that Ms. Lewinsky herself was prepared to provide false information under oath in that lawsuit." The Report added that "Ms. Lewinsky had spoken to the President……about being subpoenaed to testify in the Jones suit." Based on these representations, and a "sting tape" of a conversation between Tripp and Lewinsky, the OIC sought and obtained permission from Attorney General Reno to expand his investigation to encompass the Lewinsky affair. (In seeking permission from Reno, the OIC neglected to mention its prior contacts with lawyers for Paula Jones, including Starr's own previous discussions with Jones's lawyers on the immunity issue that reached the Supreme Court. Had the OIC disclosed these contacts, a conflict concern might have either resulted in their request being turned down, or a new independent counsel appointed.)

　　On January 16, the day before the President would be deposed in the Jones case, authorization for the expanded investigation came from Janet Reno. That afternoon, acting in concert with Linda Tripp who had invited Lewinsky to the food court of the Pentagon City Mall for lunch, FBI agents acting for the OIC seized Lewinsky and escorted her to room 1012 in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, where OIC lawyers would——for the next eleven hours——press her to cooperate in their investigation by agreeing to wear a wire and secretly record her conversations with President Clinton. Despite warnings her that she could face up to 27 years in prison for perjury and obstruction of justice (in fact, two years would be a far more likely punishment), Lewinsky refused. Her decision might well have saved the Clinton presidency.

　　The next day, lawyers for Paula Jones, having been fully briefed on the details of the Lewinsky affair, threw a series of questions at the President during his deposition that left him surprised and, at times, flustered. Clinton, however, generally stuck to his script and continued to deny the existence of a sexual relationship with Lewinsky. In fact, the President went so far as to deny ever even being "alone" with Lewinsky.

　　Back in his Oval Office on the following day, Clinton discussed the Lewinsky affair with Betty Currie in a manner that strongly suggested an attempt to influence her future statements about her boss's relationship with the young intern. He told his personal secretary, "We were never really alone," "You could see and hear everything," and "Monica came on to me, and I never touched her, right?" Clinton would later spin the discussion as an attempt to refresh his recollection about his relationship with Lewinsky——a wildly implausible explanation, given that some of the questions he asked Currie she was in no position to answer.

　　The American public first learned

of allegations of a Clinton affair with Lewinsky on January 21, 1998. The President stuck with his "deny-it-all" strategy, at one point memorably wagging his finger in a televised interview and insisting, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky." Several of Clinton's aides (including Sidney Blumenthal, who was later deposed in the Senate trial) assured by the President that his relationship with Lewinsky was non-sexual, appeared in various venues to denounce Starr's investigations as "a puritanical witch hunt" and to call into question Lewinsky's credibility.

　　The denials from the White House continued into summer, when the President became aware of that his semen stain remained on the blue dress that Monica Lewinsky wore into the Oval Office on a February day in 1997, and that Lewinsky had signed an immunity agreement with the Office of Independent Counsel. In the meantime, Starr's office had interviewed Secret Service agents, friends of Lewinsky, examined hundreds of emails and White House telephone records, and listened to dozens of hours of taped conversations between Tripp and Lewinsky.

　　On August 17, 1998, the President faced a federal grand jury called to consider whether he committed perjury, or otherwise obstructed justice, in the Paula Jones case. Clinton maintained that while he was being as unhelpful as possible to Jones's lawyers in his earlier deposition, he had not actually lied. He insisted on his right to adopt a very narrow (and very odd) definition of "alone," and stated that oral sex was not, in his opinion, "sexual relations" within the meaning of that term as adopted in the Jones case. He conceded that fondling Lewinsky would be "sexual relations" and so, implicitly, denied the former intern's allegation that he had fondled her breast and genitalia on several occasions. He explained his discussion with Currie as an innocent attempt to check his recollection of facts against hers, and denied that Vernon Jordan's job hunting efforts were in any way tied to Lewinsky's decision to file an affidavit falsely denying a sexual relationship with the President. The night, when his exhausting deposition was over, Clinton appeared on national television from the Map Room of the White House to admit, "I did have a relationship with Miss Lewinsky that not appropriate"——and to lash out at Kenneth Starr for invading his private life. "It is time to stop the pursuit of personal destruction," the President said, "and get on with our national life."

　　The House Votes to Impeach

　　In the days following his grand jury testimony, calls for impeachment mounted. In the House, Republican Majority Whip Tom De Lay called his aides back to Washington from their summer vacations to announce that it would be his mission to drive Bill Clinton from office. "This is going to be the most important thing I do in my political career," he told them, " and I want all of you to dedicate yourselves to it or leave." De Lay arranged a conference call that included most of the House Republican leadership to urge impeachment. Although Speaker Newt Gingrich initially opposed the idea, by the time the call was over, he had come around to believing the cause was right.

　　In the days following Clinton's admission that he had lied to the American public about the Lewinsky affair, many Congressional expressed their disappointment with the President. Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy scolded Clinton: "Bill, you're a fool! You're a damn, damn, damn fool!" California Senator Dianne Feinstein announced that her "trust in his credibility has been badly shattered." New York Senator Patrick Moynihan warned that "we can be our own worst enemies if we do not hew to our best standards." In late A

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