Excerpts : THE BUDGET

President Clinton: Sen. Dole and Speaker Gingrich and I made an agreement last night that we would get the government back up today and we would begin this afternoon intensive personal discussions about how to reach a balanced budget agreement, consistent with the principles that we laid out in the last continuing resolution. . . .

And what happened was what has happened too frequently, I think, in the last year: The most extreme element of the Republican Party in the House basically said that they didn’t want to open the government again until there was an agreement signed into law. They basically said unless I accept their Medicare and Medicaid cuts and their huge tax cuts and their tax increases on working families and their cuts in education and the environment, they want to let the government shut down, which is, of course, in large measure what their objective for America is anyway.

They want to destroy the ability of the federal government to address the problems facing America to move the country forward, to move the country together. And that’s where we are. I think Sen. Dole is very frustrated by it. I think, in fairness, I think the Speaker intended to keep his word when he left here yesterday. But the tail is wagging the dog in Congress.

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Q: Are you saying then that the Speaker, himself, is not in control?

A: Well, I’m saying that I believe that when he left here he intended to support a continuing resolution to reopen the government today and to start these budget talks this afternoon and within the framework that we agreed on. And I think we were all prepared to proceed in good faith. . . .

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Q: Well, now you’ve said you’ve given them probably three times more concessions than they’ve given. Is there anything else that you’re likely to give them now?

A: . . . I have never thought it was a good thing to work with a gun at your head. And they can shut the government down from now until the end of the year if they want to--all next year. It’s not going to have any impact on my decision-making.

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Q: Now, James Carville, who’s been one of your advisors, has suggested it wouldn’t be a bad idea politically if that happened and you carried this right through and made it an issue in the November campaign next year. Is that possible?

A: That may be, but it would--that may be, but it’s not the best thing for the country. . . . If we treated this as a matter of arithmetic and how we could get a budget that would be fully credible in the financial markets as a mathematical problem, it could be done; it could be done in a matter of a few hours with people of goodwill. And then we defer the other agenda, the agenda of this element that is shutting down the government down today to the ’96 elections.

WHITEWATER

Clinton: I want to deal with three issues here. No. 1, what was Watergate about? It was about abuse of the CIA, illegal wiretaps, criminal conduct in the White House. There has not been a single, solitary soul accuse me or my wife of doing anything illegal not only in the White House, [but] in the presidential campaign, or in the governor’s office. Now, that is the difference.

This is the first time we have ever had in the history of the republic a special inquiry dealing in some ephemeral way with something the president may or may not have done that may or may not have happened, that didn’t even include not only the administration, but the campaign. Fact No. 1.

Fact No. 2, I’m dying to give these notes up. These people won’t take yes for an answer. I mean, I have asked my lawyers, can’t I just go out here in the Rose Garden and call the press corps and throw--and get somebody to give me these notes, whatever they say, and just throw them out there? I am dying to give these notes up. I never wanted to keep these notes. I have given 35,000 pages of documents up. Everybody has testified.

The lawyers came to me and said to me, you have to think about this not only for yourself, but for the future. You do not wish to be, surely, the first president of the United States in the history of the country who was asked to give up the lawyer-client privilege. . . .

By the way, none of it would do anything but exonerate me. But I believe--I don’t believe any President--nobody even thought of asking President Nixon to waive his lawyer-client privilege. This is the first time anyone has ever even suggested that that was an appropriate thing to do--in the history of the Republic.

. . . The third point is, I find it amazing that it is--and I don’t want to get into this, but I must say I find it astonishing that it doesn’t seem to be newsworthy that a law firm clearly and openly previously hostile to my interests was contracted with and spent $4 million looking into this whole thing for the RTC and has concluded that there is no basis, not for a criminal, even for a civil, action against either the president or the first lady because we told the truth that we invested in a real estate deal and lost $40,000, in which we were passive investors; we told the truth that we had nothing to do with any S&L; that went bankrupt; we had no loans, we had no relationship with it; that there was no reason to believe, no evidence--not a shred of evidence that we had done anything whatever wrong. That was, after all, supposed to be the basis of this elaborate edifice that has now consumed almost $25 million in tax money. . . .

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Q: Mr. President, this could be the first time in American history that a first lady has been investigated for obstruction of justice. I’m wondering what you think personally about that situation and whether it’s taken a toll on Mrs. Clinton.

A: I don’t--she was laughing about it this morning.

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Q: How so? What did she say?

A: We just had a laugh about it on the way out. I think--what I think about this is that a lot of this is politics. We have--but what we determined we would do from the beginning is just cooperate. . . . And we’re just in an era, and apparently, this is part of the price of being President. I hope to goodness nobody else has to go through it, ever. But the country is well served by--I wish everybody in this country had a character as strong as hers and a sense of honesty and integrity as deep as hers; we’d be in better shape.

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Q: Mr. President, do you really want to leave us with the impression that the first lady laughs about this obstruction-of-justice accusation?

A: No, she didn’t laugh about that. . . . She was laughing about the fact that there had been almost no publicity about the fact that we had had a $4-million investigation that said that we told the truth about all the underlying basic things that gave rise to all this other edifice and all these charges and cross-charges. No, she doesn’t think it’s funny when people accuse her of doing something she didn’t do. That’s not funny. But sometimes you have to just laugh and go on. We, literally--until this note issue came up there has been no discussion of this in my household, no discussion of this in this office. I will not permit it to be brought up. I will not deal with it unless somebody tells me I have to deal with it. It is the only way I can be President.

B-2 BOMBER PROGRAM

Q: Historically, your administration and you have opposed additional funding for B-2. There’s more funding now in the appropriation. Are you still opposed to that, or are you reconsidering that?

A: Well, I signed this appropriations bill and I think it was the right decision to do. You know I have mixed feelings about the B-2. I think it’s a good plane, but I don’t think we need as many as the Congress wants to build. And I think if we are going to have limited funds we should do things that we know we need for our long-term planning, like the C-17, another thing that’s of real importance to California that I have supported consistently since 1991, that I really believe in. But I signed the bill; there’s going to be more B-2s built.

RUSSIA

Q: Mr. President, in Russia a lot of the people who believe most deeply in a partnership with the United States just got drubbed in the parliamentary elections. Does the rise of the Communists in the Duma cause you to think about changing any of our financial policies, any of our other policies there? And have you thought about what you would have to do to deal with a Communist if he’s elected to succeed Boris Yeltsin as President?

A: Well, first, I don’t think we should change our policies. I think if you look at the rise of people who are in the Communist parties or the people who were in those parallel parties, say, in Central Europe--Poland, for example, where they just had a presidential election--most of these people are not in any way, shape or form saying they want to go back to a communist political or economic system. Most of them are saying that the price of going to a market economy as rapidly as their countries have gone has been too much dislocation and that they either want to slow it down or reshape it some. And this was a very predictable impulse once this whole process started, and . . . I think it’s a predictable development that we can well manage within our relationship.

CHINA

Q: Do you still think that the Chinese leaders are dictators? And what action are you going to take as a result of the imprisonment, the sentence and imprisonment of Wei Jingsheng?

A: Well, I think they made a big mistake there. And we’ve said that to them privately, and we said it publicly. And I still believe that I made the right decision to divorce the human rights dialogue from the trade issue with China, just as we do with other countries. I think that if we just concluded it wouldn’t work with smaller countries, it certainly won’t work with China.

MIDDLE EAST

Clinton: I believe, sadly, that the assassination of Prime Minister Rabin has perhaps given new possibility to the Israel-Syria negotiations, not because of anything specific, but because of the atmosphere it has provoked in Israel and the change in attitude I think it has provoked in Syria. That is, I think President Assad and the Syrians can see just how great the risks Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin were making for peace. And there is some evidence that in the aftermath of the assassination that there is a slightly more solid majority of Israelis wanting the peace process to continue, at least in general terms. So I think the atmospherics are better. And based on the secretary’s last trip, I would say we have a chance now to complete this process in the fairly near term, but I don’t want to raise hopes.

WELFARE

Q: It seems that the House and Senate have reached agreement on a welfare reform bill. And I’m wondering if you expect to veto that bill. And if so . . . whether you would sign anything that ends the entitlement status of welfare and turns it into block grants, or is that a nonnegotiable question?

A: . . . The last version I saw of that bill, I don’t believe I could approve it. It’s my understanding as late as last evening that there may still be some other changes in the bill. . . . I don’t want to sign a bill that is going to punish children or punish women who are on welfare because they never had an education and because many of them. almost half of them, have been violently abused and have to put their lives back together. That’s what I’m trying to work through.

. . . My bottom line is going to be, we must keep the guarantee of Medicaid coverage. I don’t favor a block grant for that. It would be a bad mistake, and it would be a really bad mistake for places like Los Angeles County. And we must have adequate child care and we must have--the states have to keep contributing, and then if there’s a real problem with the economy, they’ve got to be able to draw on a fund so that they can still support the people that need it. And we’re just working on the details. I hope that I won’t get a bill that I have to veto and then send back and work through again.