With the last blizzard of Independent Counsel Kenneth’s Starr evidence before the public, Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, is preparing to assure Democrats that his panel will try to wrap up impeachment proceedings against President Clinton by Christmas.
Sources close to Hyde confirmed the Christmas target as his Republican majority on the 37-member committee moved toward approval of a formal impeachment inquiry, or investigation, into Starr’s allegations that Clinton committed 11 impeachable offenses in the Monica Lewinsky case.
Democrats want an even speedier conclusion to the proceedings, hoping that it can be finished before Thanksgiving. Republican sources said the chairman, who usually shuns the spotlight, planned to discuss impeachment Sunday on television talk shows.
The panel was expected to take up the inquiry resolution Monday, kicking off what both sides predict will be a bitter, partisan battle over the length and scope of the likely investigation and whether Starr has made a good case for impeaching the president.
A vote is possible Monday, but aides predicted it will happen Tuesday. The full House is expected to take up the matter by the end of the week.
Democrats believe the case against Clinton is weak and largely based on sex, but Hyde’s chief investigator, veteran Chicago attorney David Schippers, planned to use his opening statement on Monday for an hourlong presentation outlining the GOP’s case justifying a formal inquiry.
Schippers is expected to highlight perjury allegations against the president, discarding or giving low priority to some of Starr’s allegations, a committee source said, as he focuses on the “meaning of the oath of office, as well as the judicial oath to tell the truth and how the oath that we take before we testify is sacred to the rule of law.”
The investigator was prepared to go through each of the allegations against Clinton, including those relating to witness tampering, abuse of power and obstruction of justice in connection with the president’s efforts to cover up his affair with Lewinsky, and to tell the panel whether he agrees with Starr’s conclusions on each count.
Violation of the “rule of law,” the concept that all citizens are expected to obey the law, is Hyde’s operative phrase for determining whether his committee should go forward with a formal impeachment inquiry, while Democrats declare that the chairman and his party will ram through an investigation with no definition of what constitutes an impeachable offense. The full House is expected to approve the resolution Friday.
But Democrats and the White House complain that the process is unfair to the president and that Republicans are bent on a partisan impeachment. They will offer an alternative resolution seeking to confine the inquiry to the Lewinsky case and calling for a completion date by Thanksgiving.
If the committee can’t reach a conclusion on whether articles of impeachment can be approved by Thanksgiving, Democrats want the House to consider censure of the president, with a possible fine, for his behavior with Lewinsky, now a former White House intern.
Hyde frequently has said that he wants an expeditious and uncluttered investigation confined, if possible, to the Lewinsky matter. But he has refused to set deadlines or rule out that his committee will take up evidence of presidential wrongdoing in other cases, such as the Whitewater land-development case, if it is submitted to him.
Hyde has promised a fair, bipartisan inquiry, but Democrats said that so far they are disappointed. Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), commenting on Hyde’s conduct of the investigation, said: “I’m really disappointed. We’ve wasted a lot of valuable time. All we’ve done is release information to the public. . . . The committee has not even begun to consider the charges.”
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The Judiciary Committee source said Republicans “have every indication that this will be a nasty, partisan brawl. It is obvious most Democrats are contemptuous of any review (of the evidence) now.”
The White House weighed in on the legal debate Friday by issuing a memorandum on the standards of impeachment written by a team of lawyers from the counsel’s office and the president’s private lawyers. The White House argues that Congress should not move forward with an impeachment inquiry without first defining an impeachable offense.
“If the rule of law means anything, it means that legal rules and standards are ascertainable in advance of their application to evidence,” the memo said.
The White House memo also echoes the view of many committee Democrats that the president’s conduct alleged in Starr’s referral does not add up to impeachable offenses and fails to meet the Constitution’s standard of treason, bribery or “other high crimes and misdemeanors.”
The president’s lawyers argued that impeachment should be used only for grave and serious crimes against the system of government and redress public, not private, wrongs. They said the Republican majority, “unable to justify its actions under the Constitution,” will instead “launch its own Starr-like, open-ended, expensive, intrusive and wasteful inquiry for no stated reason at all.”
Republican members of the Judiciary Committee counter that perjury is, in effect, an attack against the state and the rule of law and therefore undermines the system of government. They claim that Clinton’s cover-up of the affair pulled in public resources and caused other members of the government to repeat his lie about the affair.
By launching an inquiry, the committee is not deciding the case against the president, the Judiciary Committee aide said, adding that “a lower threshold for impeachment is permitted for an inquiry.”
In the last batch of Starr’s evidence released Friday, 4,600 pages of grand jury testimony, transcripts of Linda Tripp’s tapes of Lewinsky and other evidence added new texture and context to the affair but did not change the basic story that the independent counsel outlined in his initial report to Congress.
The material was highlighted by taped talks between Lewinsky and Tripp, salacious gossip from Secret Service agents and former interns, and other testimony.
In sworn grand jury testimony, in raw and unsubstantiated FBI interviews and in transcripts of the now-famous recorded conversations between Lewinsky and Tripp, a jumbled plot line rather than a tight narrative emerges about Lewinsky’s affair with the president and efforts to conceal it.
The documents released Friday bolstered the manipulative image of Tripp, the former White House and Pentagon co-worker of Lewinsky who secretly recorded her conversations with the trusting younger woman and informed prosecutors of Lewinsky’s affair with the president.
The latest mountain of supporting material also included the transcripts of grand jury testimony from key players in the investigation who have otherwise remained largely silent about their roles, including the president’s personal secretary Betty Currie, his confidant Vernon Jordan and a host of other White House aides.
Taken together, their stories show that many people in the White House, from the Secret Service to top White House staff, seemed to know there was something unusual about the president’s relationship with Lewinsky.
Memos were written with thinly veiled suggestions, agents openly referred to Lewinsky as Clinton’s mistress, and other interns said that she left the White House under a “cloud” and that they heard she was “sleeping with Clinton.” Lewinsky said she knew she was referred to as a “stalker” and a “clutch.”
Much of the material released Friday bordered on the banal, from the innocuous musings of Tripp and Lewinsky to the testimony of senior adviser Sidney Blumenthal, who told the grand jury at one point that the president called to ask him the name of cartoon character Porky Pig’s wife to solve a crossword puzzle.
Notable by its absence was evidence not contained in the materials released Friday, including the transcript of testimony from Kathleen Willey, a former White House aide who claimed she was the recipient of an unwanted sexual advance by the president, and that of Nathan Landow, a Maryland Democrat who talked to Willey about her story. Starr’s grand jury is continuing to hear evidence, and it was unclear why their testimony was not given over to Congress.
Although the mound of transcripts was considered critical to the investigation, the Tripp-Lewinsky tapes, now laid out in 322 pages of transcripts, formed the legal basis for Starr’s inquiry and Clinton’s travail.
In the recordings, the women discuss Lewinsky’s attempts last autumn to enlist the president and his friends in her efforts to find a job in New York. Lewinsky had hoped to get a job at the U.S. delegation to the United Nations, which she later decided against, and then at several companies. Vernon Jordan, a prominent Washington lawyer and Clinton confidant, helped Lewinsky gain entree to major New York businesses, including Revlon and American Express.
Jordan’s influence, however, proves less than helpful when Lewinsky is brushed off by one potential employer, doesn’t hear from another and goes without contact with Jordan’s office for a frustrating two weeks.
Much of the chatter between the women focuses on Lewinsky’s affair with Clinton and her inability to let go. She recalls how she fell in love with the president, his late-night phone calls, how they engaged in phone sex and his failure, later on in their 16-month affair, to call when he had the opportunity.
Tripp comforts and at times cajoles Lewinsky and repeatedly reminds her that she would never betray her trust. That pledge erodes quickly, however, after Lewinsky receives a subpoena to testify in a sexual-harassment lawsuit brought against Clinton by former Arkansas state employee Paula Jones.
The last of the taped transcripts released Friday is a lengthy Jan. 13 face-to-face meeting between Tripp and Lewinsky at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Pentagon City, just across the Potomac River from Washington. This time, FBI agents working for Starr had rigged Tripp with a concealed microphone. The women discussed the Jones case and a sworn affidavit that Lewinsky had agreed to sign in which she denied having had a sexual relationship with Clinton.
“It’s for the country,” Lewinsky said after discussing how to shape her testimony in the Jones case. “Every president, every (expletive deleted) president we have ever had, has always had lovers because the pressure of the job is too much.”
At another point, Lewinsky tells Tripp that she would refuse to sign an affidavit denying a relationship with Clinton until the president’s people had secured a job for her, a statement that she later recanted unequivocally under oath.
Currie’s role, the documents indicate, remains central to several aspects of Starr’s investigation and Congress’ consideration of impeachment. The president’s secretary clearly appears aware of at least some personal relationship between Lewinsky and Clinton, but at the same time she befriends the young woman and tries to help her at several important junctures.
In her testimony, Currie acknowledges that Lewinsky’s relationship with the president was unlike any other intern’s, but she professes that she never wanted to know any details.
Starr’s report to Congress suggests that Clinton tried to shape Currie’s recollection of the relationship by saying the day after his deposition in the Jones case, referring to Lewinsky, “We were never alone, right?”
Though vague on recollections of her talks with the president, Currie counters that, while Clinton might have wanted her to agree with him, his statements also were factually accurate in that Currie generally was nearby when Clinton and Lewinsky were together.
Currie also says it was she, not the president, who contacted Jordan to try to help Lewinsky get a job in New York. “I was doing it on my own,” Currie said.
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In his testimony before the grand jury, Jordan said that “Betty Currie called to say: `Would you help Ms. Lewinsky?’ “
Starr’s prosecutors also pressed Currie on the issue of why she went to Lewinsky’s home to retrieve gifts that Clinton had given Lewinsky, items that would likely have been subject to subpoena from Jones’ lawyers.
Currie says Lewinsky asked her to hold the gifts and notes that she could not remember Clinton mentioning the gifts to her. Currie says Lewinsky’s request seemed simple and straightforward and she was happy to accommodate her.
Jordan, whose possible involvement was cited by Starr’s investigators as a principal reason for investigating the president’s private conduct, acknowledges helping Lewinsky get jobs but notes that his assistance began before she had been subpoenaed as a witness in the Jones case.
During several grand jury appearances, Jordan was courtly but also deftly deflected his interrogators’ assertions that he and Clinton had sought a job for Lewinsky as a way to keep her quiet.
Jordan tells the grand jury that he asked Lewinsky explicitly whether she had a sexual relationship with Clinton and that the former White House intern said no. Prosecutors then tried to pin Jordan down on what he meant by “sexual relationship” and whether it included oral sex.
“Relationships are relationships, period,” he replied. “Did they hold hands? Did they kiss? Did they dance? . . . I didn’t get into that because that’s not for me to define.”