by Peter Baker
Were prisoners of the House and the Rules Committee, Hyde explained to Ruff as the lawyers sought insight into how the Starr report would be handled. Indicating Conyers, Hyde said, Were going to work like Siamese twins if we can. He added, Im going to judge these things the way Id like to be judged.
Ruff asked for time to read the documents before they were made public so they could properly respond. Kendall pointed out that the president was being put in an extremely difficult position.
But Hyde made clear they would get no advance look: Only by burglary will you get the report sooner than its going to be released.
Just give us an hour, Ruff pleaded.
Hyde softened. Well see if we can do that.
Around ten oclock that night, some thirty hours after the reports surprise arrival, Gingrich got together for a late dinner with some of his closest advisers at Bullfeathers, a bar and restaurant near the Capitol with indifferent food and blaring televisions where lawmakers congregated after hours. Over hamburgers and beer, Gingrich asked how they thought the Starr report would play.
Do you have any idea what the countrys going to learn tomorrow? asked Bob Walker, a former Republican congressman from Pennsylvania and probably Gingrichs best friend in Washington.
I havent read a word of it, Gingrich replied. And no one else has either.
Walker was stunned. How could they release this to the world the next morning without reading it first? Someone should have reviewed it. Gingrich disagreed. Not reviewing it would ensure the integrity of the process, he said. That way, members would not be out there commenting on evidence before the public saw it. And besides, Gingrich added, if Starr included something they did not like, they would not be responsible.
I stayed up all night working on this thing, Clinton said. It was hard for me, but I got down in words how I feel.
It was the next morning, Friday, September 11, and the president was standing in the Oval Office holding on to a few slips of paper containing his thoughts on his situation. He did not bother to show them to Doug Sosnik, his close aide, but instead tucked them in his pocket to pull out in a few min utes at a prayer breakfast being held in the East Room. Sosnik knew better than to ask. By this point, he and the other political aides had given up on their internal campaign to convince Clinton to apologize again more effusively. This was a problem they could not fix, they had decided; no amount of speechwriting spin would make Clinton seem genuine if he was not. Only he could come around to true remorse.
Clinton headed over to the prayer breakfast, where he greeted many of the 106 religious leaders who had gathered. The Bill Clinton who got up at the lectern in front of the broad yellow curtains came across as a different man from the embattled politician who lashed out on national television three weeks earlier. His tone was subdued, his voice soft and low, his eyes moist and drooping from exhaustion.
As you might imagine, I have been on quite a journey these last few weeks to get to the end of this, to the rock-bottom truth of where I am and where we all are, he told the dead-silent audience. I agree with those who have said that in my first statement after I testified I was not contrite enough. I dont think there is a fancy way to say that I have sinned. It is important to me that everybody who has been hurt know that the sorrow I feel is genuinefirst and most important, my family. Also my friends, my staff, my cabinet, Monica Lewinsky and her family, and the American people. I have asked all for their forgiveness. For the first time, he was publicly admitting he was wrong in his speech following the grand jury appearance, that what had happened was his own fault. And despite his mischaracterization, for the first time he was publicly offering an apology of sorts to Lewinsky.
Still, he made clear he was not surrendering in the political fight to come: I will instruct my lawyers to mount a vigorous defense, using all available appropriate arguments. But legal language must not obscure the fact that I have done wrong.
In fact, his lawyers were already hard at work constructing that vigorous defense. Clinton was not the only one who had worked late into the night. Kendalls partner, Nicole Seligman, had still not gone home since showing up at the office the morning before as she labored over a response to the Starr report that they had not yet seen. A prebuttal, the Clinton team was calling it, and they planned to release it before the Starr report was even available. The lawyers had been leery of responding to allegations they had not yet read, but in the end the one benefit of newspaper disclosures about Starrs investigation was that the Clinton team had a pretty thorough road map of where the prosecutors were going. Paul Begala and deputy White House counsel Cheryl Mills were dispatched from the West Wing to camp out at the Williams & Connolly office to help write and edit the seventy-eight-page document. To keep it from getting bogged down in legalese, Begala and deputy press secre tary Joe Lockhart wrote an introduction that summed up the presidents defense in more politically palatable language.
At the Capitol, the House convened at 9 A.M. to consider releasing the report and engaged in an often-emotional discourse. The Republicans argued that it was critical to put the report out promptly to give the public its own opportunity to judge, but many of the Democrats passionately begged for the president to have an advance look, and some flatly objected to producing a report that none of them had read. The three hours of debate were nothing more than mutual venting, however. Immediate release was a foregone conclusionindeed, House staffers had spent the previous twenty-four hours preparing for the logistical challenges of posting it on the Internet and printing thousands of copies. The vote in the end was bipartisan, 36363, with only the most diehard Clinton Democrats opposing release.
As soon as the gavel rapped the House session to a close just at noon, House Clerk Robin H. Carle formally took possession of the report beneath the Cannon House Office Building across the street from the Capitol and began the process of providing it to members and the public at large. Sergeant at Arms Wilson Livingood cut the plastic tape on two boxes, pulled out a pair of large black binders, then resealed the boxes. Ninety minutes later, Hyde arrived in the hearing room used by the Judiciary Committee and signed for his copy. This is a very sober moment, he said. We are at the beginning of a long climb up a steep mountain. Nobody looks forward to it.
Hydes lofty rhetoric quickly became lost in a flood of seamy sex. All around the Capitol and beyond, lawmakers, aides, reporters, and curious citizens crowded around computer terminals to pull down pages from congressional Web sites, the first major real-time national Internet experience in the new information age. Within a half hour after Hyde had his copy in hand, the television networks were broadcasting the first patchy details, correspondents literally reading aloud as they went, not having taken even a moment to review first before going on the air. On CNN, viewers watched Candy Crowley leaf through the report, picking out phrases that few would ever have imagined hearing about their leader. According to Ms. Lewinsky, Crowley read at one point, the president touched her breasts and genitalia.
The 453-page report outlined eleven counts against Clintonfour alleging that he committed perjury in his January 17 deposition in the Paula Jones case, one alleging perjury in his August 17 grand jury appearance, five alleging obstruction of justice, and one asserting abuse of office. According to the report, the president had lied when he said he had no specific recollection of being alone with Lewinsky, he had lied when he said he could not remember any specific gifts he gave her just three weeks after presenting her with a half dozen Christmas presents, and he had lied when he said he did not engage in sexual relations as defined by Joness lawyers. Starr charged that Clinton orchestrated a broad campaign to illegally impede the Jones lawsuit and the subsequent criminal investigation by coaching his secretary, Betty Currie, to lie, by encouraging Lewinsky to lie in an affidavit in the Jones suit and simultaneously arranging a job for her at the Revlon cosmetics company through his friend Vernon Jordan, by helping Lewinsky to hide gifts that had been subpoenaed, and by lying to aides, knowing they would
repeat his false statements to the grand jury. And in a final count drawn from Watergate-style language, Starr maintained Clinton abused his power by making frivolous assertions of executive privilege during the independent counsels investigation, by refusing to appear before the grand jury for six months, and by lying to the American people when he said he had not had sex with that woman.
In view of the enormous trust and responsibility attendant to his high office, the President has a manifest duty to ensure that his conduct at all times complies with the law of the land, Starr wrote. In sum, perjury and acts that obstruct justice by any citizenwhether in a criminal case, a grand jury investigation, a congressional hearing, a civil trial, or civil discoveryare profoundly serious matters. When such acts are committed by the President of the United States, we believe those acts may constitute grounds for an impeachment.
The facts laid out by Starr were powerfully corroborated through White House telephone records and entry logs, contemporaneous E-mail messages and calendars, the testimony of Secret Service officers and presidential aides, and, of course, the DNA test on the infamous blue Gap dress. Lewinsky proved to have a meticulous memory for dates and events, and to the extent possible, her recollections before the grand jury or with Starrs interviewers almost invariably matched other available evidence. For example, she remembered that the second time she had met Clinton, in late 1995, he took a call from a congressman with a nickname while she performed fellatio; telephone records later showed that the president had spoken that night with Republican congressman H. L. Sonny Callahan of Alabama during the same time Lewinsky was recorded as being in the White House. Another time she recalled being admitted to the Oval Office by a tall, slender Hispanic Secret Service agent; records later showed that an agent fitting that description was on duty, and he testified that he once let in Lewinsky to deliver papers to the president. Few reading the report were left with much doubt that events had taken place essentially as Lewinsky described them. She could not simply be making all this up.
The factual analysis, however, was quickly lost amid the salacious details. A narrative part of the report describing the evolution of the Clinton-Lewinsky relationship read more like a bad Harlequin romance than a legal document and described in shockingly intimate detail each of their ten sexual encounters in the Oval Office suite, even noting when one or the other achieved orgasm. Starr felt compelled to put in detail to rebut Clintons claim that their activities were not sexual relations, a defense that rested in part on the proposition that he had never so much as fondled Lewinsky. But Starr went further still by documenting their various phone sex sessions in which they talked dirty, conversations that did not fall under any definition of sexual relations. The prosecutor went on to inform Congress and the country that Clinton and Lewinsky twice engaged in oral-anal contact and that on another occasion the president inserted a cigar into her vagina, then put it in his mouth and said, It tastes good.
The very word impeachment evoked dread images from the Watergate days, and it seemed unthinkable to many that for the second time in a generation the nation had to decide whether to evict its leader for high crimes and misdemeanors. The power to impeach a president derived from several clauses scattered in various parts of the Constitution, without a great deal of elaboration. The central element was contained in a single sentence in Article II, which states, The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors. Article I, section 2, designates the House as having the sole Power of Impeachment, and section 3 assigns the Senate the responsibility to try all Impeachments. The same section stipulates that in such a trial senators are to take an oath, the chief justice presides, and conviction requires a two-thirds vote of those present. Punishment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States. However, those convicted would still be subject to separate criminal prosecution. That was as much guidance as the framers provided to those who would have to carry out those duties in the centuries to comeno definition of high crimes and misdemeanors, no rules of evidence or standards of proof, no explicit instructions about the possibility of lesser penalties.
The history of the drafting of those clauses offered some clues, though at times they were subject to radically different interpretations. The framers adopted the concept of impeachment from the British model but shaped it for the American system of democracy, intending it as a tool to protect the nation from a chief executive whose egregious conduct constituted a threat to the republic. At the Constitutional Convention of 1787, the framers rejected a proposal to subject presidents to impeachment for maladministration, thus distinguishing the concept from a parliamentary system where prime minis ters can be voted out whenever they lose the confidence of legislators. Yet the meaning of high crimes and misdemeanors was left deliberately vague. In Federalist No. 65, one of the seminal writings on impeachment, Alexander Hamilton suggested they were those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust. He went on to emphasize that politics was an inherent and indeed even welcome element in the impeachment process. The prosecution of them, for this reason, will seldom fail to agitate the passions of the whole community, and to divide it into parties more or less friendly or inimical to the accused. As a result, however, he added that there will always be the greatest danger that the decision will be regulated more by the comparative strength of parties, than by the real demonstration of innocence or guilt.
In the next two centuries, impeachment was used only sparingly, leaving few precedents to guide the players in the Clinton drama. While only Andrew Johnson and Richard Nixon were seriously threatened with removal, the question came up with several other presidents as well. In 1843, John Tyler had an impeachment resolution introduced against him charging, among other things, that he had misused his veto power, but the House voted 12784 not to authorize a formal inquiry. The House ignored an attempt by one of its members in 1896 to impeach Grover Cleveland in a dispute over the issuance of government bonds. Even after losing reelection in 1932, Herbert Hoover was still confronted in his final months in office with attempts to impeach him for increasing unemployment, negotiating bad treaties, and mistreating World War I veterans, but the House voted twice to table any investigation. Nearly twenty years later, several congressmen tried to impeach Harry S Truman for seizing the steel mills and firing General Douglas MacArthur, only to have the resolutions referred to the Judiciary Committee, which promptly buried them.
Until now, Andrew Johnson was the only president ever impeached by the House and tried in the Senate. A willful, ornery man, Vice President Johnson had assumed the nations highest office after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in the waning days of the Civil War, only to battle with Congress over the pace of Reconstruction. Johnson, who drew fire for his go-easy approach to the vanquished Southern states and unwillingness to guarantee new rights for freed slaves, survived one impeachment attempt before finally pushing Radical Republicans over the edge in 1868 by firing their ally, War Secretary Edwin M. Stanton. Congressional critics filed an impeachment resolution in the House the same day, charging that he had violated the Tenure of Office Act, a clearly unconstitutional law previously passed over Johnsons veto that forbade him from removing cabinet officers without Senate consent. The next day, the Committee on Reconstruction, headed by Congressman Thaddeus Stevens, recommended approval of the resolution, and two days later the House voted 12647 to impeach Johnson. Only afterward were actual articles of impeachment drafted, adding the charge that Johnson had maligned Congress in a series of political speeches. A seven-week trial in the Senate, however, ended in acquittal by a single vote.
The Nixon case was more familiar to those involved in the Clinton situation; indeed, many of the lawyers and lawmakers had pla
yed supporting roles in the earlier drama, including Hillary Clinton. Long a polarizing figure in American politics, Nixon had faced down impeachment threats stemming from his handling of the Vietnam War as far back as 1972, but revelations of his involvement in the cover-up following the Watergate burglary finally pushed the Judiciary Committee to recommend impeachment on a bipartisan vote in 1974. Nixon resigned before the full House took up the matter, becoming the only president ever forced from office.
Aside from Johnson, the House had impeached just fourteen other federal officials in the nations historya cabinet secretary, a senator, and twelve judges. The senator was expelled rather than tried, and the other cases resulted in seven convictions and six acquittals or resignations. As Hamilton had predicted, politics infused many of those cases. The first impeachment of a judge came when President Thomas Jefferson decided to get rid of a jurist appointed by his predecessor, John Adams. The Senate voted strictly along party lines in 1804 to remove Judge John Pickering, who had been accused of drunkenness and insanity. Less than an hour after that vote, the House impeached another member of the bench, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase, but this time a number of Jeffersons fellow Republicans in the Senate balked and he was acquitted.
None of this history, however, settled the essential question: What is a high crime? Scholars and lawyers agreed that not every crime was impeachable; no one argued that a president should be removed from office for a speeding ticket or some other petty violation. Yet it was clear that high crimes were also not limited exclusively to grave abuse of office; even the most fervent proponents of this interpretation conceded that murder would be impeachable, even if it had no direct bearing on a presidents exercise of the power of his office. So where to draw the line? That was for this new generation in Washington to figure out for itself.