WASHINGTON–Presidential friend Vernon Jordan was questioned for nearly three hours in the U.S. Capitol’s secure intelligence briefing room Tuesday as senators contemplated their next move in the impeachment trial.
As with Monica Lewinsky’s private testimony a day earlier, White House lawyers asked virtually no questions, a sign that little if anything of significance was elicited from Jordan, a seasoned Washington attorney.
Asked about the testimony from Jordan and Lewinsky, House Judiciary Chairman Henry Hyde (R-Ill.) said he didn’t know “how new” information from the testimony would appear.
But, he said, “We have got some amplification. We have strengthened some points. And I am generally pleased with them.”
Rep. Asa Hutchinson (R-Ark.), who questioned Jordan, afterward refused to discuss the testimony, citing Senate rules requiring that results be kept confidential unless senators vote to release the testimony.
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“The deposition was conducted with professionalism from all sides, and I am satisfied that we covered the areas that we needed to cover today,” Hutchinson said.
But as senators began to review videotapes of the testimony by Lewinsky, the central figure in the sex-and-perjury scandal, several confirmed earlier reports that she provided prosecutors with no new information.
A few Republicans said that, as a result, they would oppose calling her to the Senate floor to deliver testimony.
“Based on what my staff told me, there is nothing new. If there in fact is nothing new, I would not expect her to be called,” said Sen. Robert Bennett (R-Utah).
Sen. Peter Fitzgerald (R-Ill.) said Lewinsky, a one-time White House intern who was being interviewed on the scandal for the 23rd time, testified with the well-practiced air of “a professional witness. I’m a lawyer, and she knew in her own head all the lawyers’ tricks. She’s testified so many times, I guess.”
House managers, the prosecutors, said they would continue to press for witnesses testifying on the Senate floor. Senate Republicans, meanwhile, spent the day maneuvering over the next stage, a plan to offer “findings of fact” after closing arguments of the impeachment trial. A vote would come immediately before a vote on conviction.
While a two-thirds vote is required to convict on articles of impeachment, the findings of fact offer a procedural device that would allow a declaration of wrongdoing by a simple 51-vote majority.
The device would offer Republicans a way of simultaneously rebuking the president and lending political legitimacy to the House’s unpopular vote to impeach Clinton.
Democrats, also eager to show their disapproval of Clinton’s actions, prefer a censure of the president separate from the impeachment process.
A group of Republican senators was continuing to craft a resolution on the findings and planned to present one Wednesday.
Senate Republican Conference Chairman Connie Mack of Florida said the GOP is faced with a choice between “specific” findings of misdeeds and a “more general” resolution that might command some Democratic support.
An aide to Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.), who earlier had indicated he would consider voting in favor of such a resolution, said Lieberman had rebuffed a Republican overture on such findings several days ago because the proposal essentially found Clinton guilty of breaking the law.
Whatever action the Senate eventually takes, a New York Times/CBS opinion poll being released Wednesday indicates that the body’s image has been damaged–as has the House’s–by its handing of the impeachment matter.
Fifty-six percent of those polled disapprove of the way the Senate is handling the trial, while 37 percent approve. Only three weeks ago, in a poll by CBS News, 41 percent disapproved of how the Senate was handling the trial while 46 percent registered their approval.
Even among self-identified conservative Republicans in the new poll, nearly a third said they did not approve of how the Senate was conducting the trial.
The House team on Wednesday will question its final witness, White House aide Sidney Blumenthal, about cover stories that Clinton related to Blumenthal
in denying his affair with Lewinsky.
The impeachment articles cite these cover stories as evidence of obstruction of justice because Clinton knew Blumenthal would be testifying before a grand jury.
Next, the House managers likely will turn their attention toward trying to persuade the Senate to allow them to bring Lewinsky, Jordan and Blumenthal to the floor, and to allow them to depose other figures in the scandal.
White House spokesman Joe Lockhart, traveling with Clinton in Boston, reiterated the position that the Senate should “move quickly” to end the impeachment trial.
“We don’t believe that there’s any need for witnesses on the Senate floor,” Lockhart said. “We don’t believe that the videotape needs to be dumped out into the public.
“Senators have the right and the ability to view this and make a decision on how this impacts their view of the case, and we believe that what the Senate should do is move quickly to end it,” Lockhart said.
Jordan likely was a difficult witness for the House team. He remains loyal to Clinton and hostile toward the House prosecutors. An experienced lawyer, Jordan was expected to frame his answers in ways that hurt Clinton as little as possible.
Hutchinson wanted to pin down Jordan on certain specific areas regarding his effort to find Lewinsky a job on Clinton’s behalf, which the House managers believe was in exchange for Lewinsky lying under oath.
Clinton’s lawyers maintain that the job hunt was a simple favor for Lewinsky, and had nothing to do with the false affidavit she ultimately filed in the Paula Jones case.
The search yielded a job offer from United Nations Ambassador Bill Richardson before Lewinsky was even a witness, the lawyers note.
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In response, the House managers have tried to show an incriminating connection between the signing of the affidavit, in which Lewinsky denied her affair with Clinton, and an “intensification” of the job hunt.
Hutchinson was especially interested in clarifying inconsistencies between Jordan and Lewinsky in their grand jury testimony. Jordan said he knew nothing of the affair until January 1998, for example, while Lewinsky said she gave him the message, at least implicitly, much earlier.
After Jordan was questioned by House managers Tuesday, the only question White House lawyers asked Jordan was if he had anything to add. Jordan launched into a long retelling of the Horatio Alger story of his modest beginnings to become a Washington power broker, according to a Republican Judiciary source.
Lewinsky also said she discussed being subpoenaed in the Jones case with Jordan during a meeting on Dec. 22, 1997; Jordan said they did not. Most explosively, Lewinsky said Jordan instructed her to destroy evidence of the affair, something he has denied.
Hutchinson, in appealing to the Senate last month to let him question Jordan, spoke of “three dynamite issues combining together”– the affair, the subpoena, and the job search. They told a story, Hutchinson said, of a president willing to illegally buy off a witness to avoid the legal and political peril of having his adultery exposed.
“Mr. Jordan has never been asked sufficiently about these areas,” Hutchinson said.