Clinton–Lewinsky scandal

The Monica Lewinsky scandal was a political-sex scandal emerging from a sexual relationship between United States President Bill Clinton and a then 22-year-old White House intern, Monica Lewinsky. The news of this extra-marital affair and the resulting investigation eventually led to the impeachment hearing of Bill Clinton in 1998 by the U.S. House of Representatives and his subsequent acquittal for charges of perjury and obstruction of justice in a 21-day Senate trial.

Background

In 1996, Monica Lewinsky, a Jewish American, and a graduate of Lewis & Clark College, was hired to work as an intern at the White House during Clinton's first term. The two became engaged sexually.

As Lewinsky's relationship with the President became more distant and after she had left the White House to work at the Pentagon, Lewinsky confided details of her feelings and the President's behavior to her friend and Defense Department co-worker Linda Tripp who was secretly recording their telephone conversations. When Tripp discovered in January 1998 that Lewinsky had signed an affidavit denying the relationship in the Paula Jones case, she delivered the tapes to Kenneth Starr, the independent counsel who was investigating the president on various other matters including the Whitewater scandal, Filegate, and Travelgate.

News of the scandal first broke on January 17, 1998, on the Drudge Report website, which reported that Newsweek editors were sitting on a story by investigative reporter Michael Isikoff exposing the affair. The story broke in the mainstream press on January 21 when it hit the Washington Post. The story swirled for several days and despite swift denials from Clinton, the clamor for answers from the White House grew louder. On January 26, a visibly flustered President Clinton addressed the public in a White House press conference and issued a forceful denial:

Now, I have to go back to work on my State of the Union speech. And I worked on it until pretty late last night. But I want to say one thing to the American people. I want you to listen to me. I'm going to say this again. I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time; never. These allegations are false. And I need to go back to work for the American people.

File:Timewithbill.jpg

Monica Lewinsky pictured with Bill Clinton on the cover of TIME in February of 1998.

Pundits debated whether or not Clinton would address the allegations in his State of the Union Address. Ultimately, he chose not to, which may have helped his image with the American people through his strategy to appear more "presidential" and above the fray. First Lady Hillary Clinton publicly stood by her husband throughout the scandal. On January 27, in an appearance on NBC's The Today Show she famously said, "The great story here for anybody willing to find it, write about it and explain it is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president."

For the next several months and through the summer, pundits and the media endlessly debated whether an affair had occurred and Clinton had lied or obstructed justice, but nothing could be definitively established beyond the taped recordings because Lewinsky was unwilling to discuss the affair or testify about it. On July 28, 1998, a substantial delay after the public break of the scandal, Lewinsky received transactional immunity in exchange for grand jury testimony concerning her relationship with Clinton. She also turned over a semen-stained blue dress (which Tripp had encouraged her to save without dry cleaning) to the Starr investigators, thereby providing a smoking gun based on DNA evidence that could prove the relationship despite Clinton's official denials.

Clinton admitted in taped grand jury testimony on August 17, 1998, that he had had an "improper physical relationship" with Lewinsky. That evening he gave a nationally televised statement admitting his relationship with Lewinsky which was "not appropriate"[1].

Perjury

In his deposition for the Jones lawsuit, Clinton denied having "sexual relations" with Lewinsky . Based on the evidence provided by Tripp, a blue dress with Clinton's semen, Starr concluded that this sworn testimony was false and perjurious.

During the deposition, Clinton was asked "Have you ever had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky, as that term is defined in Deposition Exhibit 1, as modified by the Court." The judge ordered that Clinton be given an opportunity to review the agreed definition. Afterwards, based on the definition created by the Independent Counsel's Office, Clinton answered "I have never had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky." Clinton later stated that he believed the agreed-upon definition of sexual relations excluded his receiving oral sex.

With the adducement of further evidence in the case President Clinton was held in contempt of court by judge Susan Webber Wright[2]. His license to practice law was suspended in Arkansas and later by the United States Supreme Court [3]. He was also fined $90,000 [4]. His fine was paid for by a legal fund raised for his legal expenses.

Impeachment Hearing

Main article: Impeachment Hearing of Bill Clinton

The impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton in 1999, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist presiding. The House managers are seated beside the quarter-circular tables on the left and the president's personal counsel on the right, much in the fashion of President Andrew Johnson's trial.

Under the United States Constitution, the House of Representatives issues Articles of Impeachment, which the Senate must then consider as a panel of judges. Impeachment is a means of bringing criminal charges aganist officials from high office. The Constitution provides for impeachment in cases of "Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors." Most Republicans, who held majorities in both houses of Congress at the time, and some Democrats said that Bill Clinton's suspected offenses qualified as impeachable offenses.

As part of the impeachment inquiry, House Judiciary Committee chairman Henry Hyde sent a list of 81 questions to Clinton on November 5, 1998. Formal impeachment hearings began on November 19. After receiving Clinton's answers, the Judiciary Committee commended four articles of impeachment to the full House. In summary, they were the following:

• Article I: Perjury before grand jury on August 17, 1998
• Article II: Perjury in Paula Jones case on December 23, 1997 and January 17, 1998
• Article III: Obstruction of justice related to Paula Jones case
• Article IV: Abuse of high office

Article I was approved by a vote of 228-206. Article II was rejected by a vote of 205-229. Article III was approved by a vote of 221-212. Article IV was rejected by a vote of 148-285. On December 19, the House of Representatives forwarded articles I and III of impeachment (perjury and obstruction of justice) to the Senate. The two articles that were passed made Clinton the first president to be impeached since Andrew Johnson in 1868 (President Richard Nixon had resigned under the threat of impeachment in 1974). - - The charges quickly passed through the House and this speed allowed the so-called "lame duck" Republican and Democratic congressmen to participate. By the time the charges reached the Senate, the charges had been updated, and this allowed the Prosecution in the Senate impeachment proceedings to read into the record lurid details from the Lewinsky testimony. - The Senate trial began on January 7, 1999. The prosecution relied on two basic forms of argument: "The President must have been thinking about topic X at the time that he testifies that he was thinking about topic Y" and simply lying about the order and facts of events thus committing perjury.

During what amounted to a "discovery phase" of the trial, several issues of fact were resolved and on Friday, February 12, 1999, the Senate rejected both of the articles of impeachment. The perjury charges were rejected with 55 not-guilty votes and 45 guilty votes, and on the obstruction of justice charges the vote was 50-50. Per Art.I §3 cl.6 of the Constitution, a two-thirds majority of those Senators present was required for a conviction on either charge. The vote fell largely along party lines. For the perjury vote, 10 Republicans joined all 45 Democrats in voting not-guilty. On the obstruction of justice charge, 5 Republicans joined all 45 Democrats in voting not-guilty. One Republican, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, voted "not proven" on both articles, citing Scottish law to support his view that Clinton had not received a fair trial. However, his votes were recorded as "not guilty."

Contrary to a popular public misconception, Clinton was successfully impeached (that is, the House did successfully send him to be tried by the Senate). He was not, however, successfully convicted of any of the charges (which is why he was not removed from office), nor was he given any penalty (beyond the censure of the House of Representatives).

The perjury allegations provoked the Arkansas Supreme Court to suspend Clinton's law license in April 2000. Clinton agreed to the 5-year suspension and to pay a $25,000 fine on January 19, 2001. The following October, the U.S. Supreme Court once again suspended Clinton's law license and gave him 40 days to convince them that he should not be disbarred permanently. Clinton surrendered his law license in response to these actions. Clinton has since made a living as an author and speaker.

Impeachment quotations

"Because of politics, the House majority party has impeached the president because they could do it, because they had the power to do it and without making an effective case for it." (Joe Lockhart)

"I will have no part in the creation of a constitutional double-standard to benefit the President. He is not above the law. If an ordinary citizen committed these crimes, he would go to jail." (Bill Frist)

"I must say I am not surprised that the report asks for President Clinton's impeachment. I know Kenneth Starr and the man that I know wrote the conclusion on day one and spent the next five years filling it in.” (Susan McDougal)

"We have not spent long hours poring through the evidence, sacrificed time with our families, and subjected ourselves to intense political criticism to further a political vendetta. We have done so because of our love for this country and respect for the office of the presidency, regardless of who may hold it. We have done so because of our devotion to the rule of law and our fear that if the president does not suffer the legal and constitutional consequences of his actions, the impact of allowing the president to stand above the law will be felt for generations to come. (James Sensenbrenner)

"If you convict and remove President Clinton on the basis of these allegations, no president of the United States will ever be safe from impeachment again, ... And it will happen. And people will look back at us and they will say we should have stopped it then before it was too late. Don't let this happen to our country ... Do not throw our politics into the darkness of endless recrimination." (Gregory Craig)

"Traditionally, after an airing of the facts and a vote by the Senate, either a president is removed or he is vindicated. In this case, it seems neither of those results may be realized. " (Christopher Cannon)

External links

• Washington Post story from Jan. 21, 1998
• Text of articles of impeachment voted on by the House of Representatives
• The Starr Report
• a BBC in-depth archived report from 1998
• Investigating The president: The Trial