Clinton Should Resign Before Being Indicted

If the law that applies to the rest of us reaches as far as the White House, the first couple faces indictments.

There are four serious charges. Three have to do with Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Rose law firm billing records. In a sworn statement, Mrs. Clinton denied doing the legal work on Madison Savings & Loan sham real estate transactions that the billing records show. If the billing records are correct, she would seem to have a perjury problem.

On the other hand, if the records lie, then Mrs. Clinton would seem to have committed the same fraud on her former firm as did her law partner, former Associate Atty. Gen. Webster Hubbell, who is in prison for billing for work that he didn’t do.

The suspicious discovery of the long missing billing records in the White House two years after they were subpoenaed hangs another problem around the first couple’s neck: obstruction of justice. Obviously, someone had the documents. Otherwise they could not have been left on a table in the White House library, where an aide found them. It is hard to believe that anyone important enough to have had the documents could have been unaware that they were under subpoena.

A fourth charge, witness tampering, emerges from a note written by Mark Gearan, former White House communications director. The note appears to say that the White House sent emissaries to Little Rock to make sure that Beverly Bassett Schaffer, former Arkansas securities commissioner, got the story right about Mrs. Clinton’s involvement or lack thereof in a plan to save Madison Savings & Loan, which was owned by the Clintons’ Whitewater partners.

It was many months ago that a former British Cabinet member told me that the British government more or less takes for granted that the Clintons are crooks and that this opinion also is held by many in Europe. If a grand jury comes to the same conclusion, Americans are in for a big shock.

President Clinton’s side of the problem carries as well the weight of Paula Corbin Jones’ sexual harassment suit, which has been given a green light to move forward, and a subpoena to testify in the trial of his former business partners.

No American, no matter how partisan, can take any satisfaction from the spectacle that the Clintons have made of the presidency. There is irony in watching laws enacted by liberals eat up the last liberal president. There’s more irony in the fact that the Clintons would have escaped the scrutiny that has trapped them in lies if President Bush had not lied himself and broken his “read my lips--no new taxes” pledge, thus elevating the Clintons to the Oval Office. There is still more irony in the fact that Mrs. Clinton was one of the young Democratic lawyers on President Nixon’s trail when he was having his own problems with the truth.

But whereas irony abounds, pleasure does not. Conservatives don’t like to see the presidency brought low, no matter who occupies the office. And liberals are sorely embarrassed that the “decade of greed” had higher morals than what succeeded it.

The Clintons’ problems are troubling the self-esteem of the media, which clearly lack the stomach for the insistent coverage that a Republican president would be getting. Republicans themselves are so demoralized by the first couple’s plight that they would drop the matter if only it could be done without establishing the principle that the president is above the law.

Someone should be working on a deal in which bygones will be bygones if the Clintons will step down. Bill can pardon Hillary, and Al Gore can pardon Bill. A friendly power, if one still exists, can pay off Jones.

That would save the country and the Clintons a lot of stress and strain, and it would give the Democrats time to come up with a credible candidate and campaign by the fall.

Columnists can promise not to jeer, and we can all pretend it never happened. Congress can own up to the fact that politics without lies is impossible and quietly take off the books some of the laws that make life so intolerable for those who aspire to the political stage. After all, morals in Hollywood aren’t all that great either.