Here's What Really Happened.
The impeaching members of the House
called it perjury, "He lied under oath," is what you
heard over and over. Actually, more correctly put, Bill Clinton
tried to keep his sexual "improprieties" secret. (Henry
Hyde and Robert Livingston did the same, to mention just two.)
Linda Tripp, chasing after revenge on Clinton for two years,
latched onto Monica's story, and at the urging of a literary
agent, Lucianne Goldberg, taped the conversations and told Paula
Jones' lawyers about the tapes. At the deposition of the President
at the Jones case, they sprung the trap. He denied "sexual
relations with that woman," and the definition of "sexual
relations" in that question and answer session was, as all
observers have stated, "so obscure,"
that no jury could convict Clinton in his tightly defined matrix
of denial. (Remember, he was trying to keep it a secret.) The
Article of Impeachment that addressed this specific accusation
of perjury was defeated, so even the House zealots wouldn't touch
it, it was clearly transparent. Then, Starr called the President
before the Grand Jury and, again, asked him about these statements
in the Jones deposition. The President reverted to his former
responses. Starr then charged that the President's statements
were false, the criteria of evidence being quite different, in
a grand jury. Double jeopardy in a looser legal venue designed
to give law enforcement a wider discretion in investigation.
Put another way, the answers which he gave the first time and
were NOT considered perjurious, were accepted as perjurious by
the same people the second time he gave them. And, remember the
Jones case was thrown out. No other American would have had to
go through that second round. Mr. Starr knew that for political
reasons Clinton would not take the Fifth as all other citizens
would have done, and as is their right to do, and after four
years of nothing, Starr concocted a sword, with no substance,
that because of the hatred that the House leadership had for
Clinton, appeared to impale the President. As Paul Stevens of
the (London) Financial Times wrote (as reported in The New York
Times): "This was not about the sacred Constitution of the
United States. It wasn't even honest politics. The impeachment
of Bill Clinton was personal. It was an act of vengeance."
In the end, he will be acquitted (one way or the other) and those
who have perpetrated this upon America will pay the same price
as Gingrich, Livingston and all those who lost their seats in
the last election. In the end, the people are just. That thought
has to be worrying some in Congress today. |