Tapes of Clinton’s Testimony Used in Closing Arguments

The House Judiciary Committee moved Thursday into the final and most dramatic stage of its impeachment inquiry after hearing daylong, passionate closing arguments from lawyers who played video clips of President Clinton’s own words to push their respective cases for impeachment or a lesser penalty of censure.

The historic debate by the highly partisan panel over whether Clinton should become the third president in the nation’s history to face impeachment got underway after three weeks of testimony from constitutional and legal experts, the independent counsel and White House defenders and, at last, the panel’s own attorneys.

“His conduct represents a great insult to our constitutional system,” concluded Rep. Bill McCollum (R-Fla.), a leading proponent of impeachment.

Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), however, urged his colleagues to censure Clinton just as the House punished Frank during his own sex scandal a decade ago.

“I would tell you that having been reprimanded by this House of Representatives, where I’m so proud to serve, was no triviality,” Frank said. “It is something that, when people write about me, they still write about. It is not something that’s a matter of pride.”

The chief impeachment counsel for the Republicans argued that the accusations of presidential perjury, obstruction of justice and abuse of power outlined in the committee’s four newly drafted articles of impeachment warrant Clinton’s ouster.

“If you don’t impeach . . . ,” warned David Schippers, “then no House of Representatives will ever be able to impeach again. The bar will be so high that only a convicted felon or a traitor will need to be concerned.”

But the chief investigative counsel for the Democrats, hoping that his words would reach the full House, where a vote on impeachment is still too close to call, stressed that there is no critical constitutional crisis created by Clinton’s scandalous sexual affair with former White House intern Monica S. Lewinsky.

“The impeachment process is like that fire extinguisher behind the glass door with a big sign that reads: ‘Break Only in Case of Emergency,’ ” said Abbe Lowell. “We are asking you not to break that glass unless there is no other choice.”

The lawyers from both parties consumed much of the day pressing their arguments. They souped up video sound bites from Clinton’s taped appearances in a deposition in the Paula Corbin Jones sexual harassment case and before the grand jury investigating his relationship with Lewinsky, played audio recordings from the tapes secretly recorded by Linda Tripp of her conversations with Lewinsky and flashed head-high charts and graphs.

They evoked the nation’s Founding Fathers, recalling great presidents from bygone eras and in hushed tones offered their own interpretations of the Constitution’s vague meaning of the word “impeachment.”

Panel Members Take Up Articles

Then, starting in late afternoon and continuing into the evening and night, the 37 committee members settled into the rocky task of hashing out four articles of impeachment.

With the opening statements likely to carry over into today, the first votes on recommending impeachment are expected this afternoon, although the debate probably will continue into Saturday. A committee vote on the Democratic censure proposal is expected Tuesday.

Lame-duck House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) sent a terse “Dear Colleague” letter to the 435 representatives, advising them that the impeachment matter known officially as House Resolution 581 most likely will be available for review by lawmakers on Wednesday.

“The full House,” Gingrich wrote, “would consider the matter beginning on Thursday.”

At the White House, Jim Kennedy, spokesman for the counsel’s office, said that officials there expect the 37 committee members to vote along party lines and approve the four articles of impeachment for consideration by the full House.

“We know where the votes are,” he said. “There might be some minor suspense, but the bottom line is that some articles are coming out of this committee.”

On the matter of censure as an alternative, Kennedy said the White House is being cautious in its reactions, waiting to see how Congress embraces such an idea.

“You’d first have to see a senior-enough level of bipartisanship on censure in the House,” he said.

But White House Press Secretary Joe Lockhart offered support for the censure proposal.

“The president is looking for a reasonable way to put this behind us, short of impeachment. And from the first look at that document, that appears to meet the criteria,” he said.

Still, he offered no guarantee that Clinton would go along with it and sign a censure document if one is approved by Congress.

At the end of the day, Gregory B. Craig, the White House special counsel on impeachment, said: “We are disappointed and saddened that the committee majority brought this solemn constitutional process down to a level of innuendo, anger and unfair, unsubstantiated charges.”

In remarks directed at all of the members of the House and read to reporters summoned to the White House driveway, he said:

“Before you vote to impeach and remove the president, read the defense of the president, read the majority counsel’s brief and read the minority counsel’s brief, and then be guided by your conscience and your judgment in the national interest.”

As the committee met late into the evening Thursday, the president’s advisors were said to be considering whether Clinton should address the matter publicly.

Some Democrats and moderate Republicans have been saying that the president needs to go further in publicly acknowledging wrongdoing if he is to have any hope of persuading undecided House members to vote against impeachment.

MSNBC reported late Thursday the contents of a draft statement that it said the president could deliver as early as today. The draft would have Clinton reiterate that his “conduct was terribly wrong” and that he is “profoundly sorry.” He would also say:

“I expect to be held accountable for my conduct. I am living through the painful, private consequences of my actions. But I know there should be public consequences as well. I am ready to accept those consequences.”

Clinton, according to aides, devoted very little time to impeachment matters Thursday, although they said that he spoke briefly with his lawyers to praise their work.

He took part in a ceremony marking the 50th anniversary of Human Rights Day, traveled to the Agriculture Department for the presentation of a portrait of former Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy and in the afternoon presided at a budget planning meeting.

The committee began its day by hearing lengthy legal summations of the case for and against Clinton. But there were light moments.

Schippers speculated at one point that the president must have thought he was in the clear until it turned out that Lewinsky had never laundered a navy blue Gap dress stained with his semen.

“Life was so much simpler before they found that dress, wasn’t it?” Shippers remarked.

Lowell, chief investigative counsel for the Democrats, reminded the committee that Clinton had indeed at one time hoped to escape public embarrassment over his affair with the former intern.

“The president wanted to conceal his private improper relationship from anyone he could,” he said. “As my daughter would say: ‘Duh!’ ”

Reactions from the committee members fell along party lines.

“We can talk about sound bites and video excerpts all we want,” said Rep. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), saying that he was unmoved by the Democratic presentation. “But I know what happened here, and it’s very disturbing.”

Democratic members were equally dismissive of the Republican presentation.

“It was boring. It was tedious. It was full of falsehoods,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-San Jose).

Schippers Speaks About the Future

Schippers used the president’s own words against him in the video snippets from Clinton’s statements in the Jones deposition and before the grand jury.

“Today, after our investigation, I have come to a point I prayed I would never reach,” said Schippers, a Democrat who voted for Clinton twice but now supports his ouster.

“What I say here will be forgotten in a few days. But what you do here will be incised in the history of the United States for all time to come.

“Unborn generations--assuming those generations are still free and are still permitted to read true history--will learn of these proceedings and will most certainly judge this committee’s actions. What will be their verdict?”

Schippers argued, for instance, that Clinton had a “very pointed discussion” with Lewinsky to influence her to keep their relationship a secret after she was subpoenaed by Jones’ lawyers.

“He did not say specifically, ‘Go in and lie,’ ” Schippers said. “What he did say is: ‘You know, you can always say you were coming in to see Betty [Currie, presidential secretary] or that you were bringing me letters.’ ”

But the truth, Schippers said, is that Clinton and Lewinsky were fully involved in White House sex romps.

“The president and Monica Lewinsky were spending a significant amount of time together in the Oval Office complex,” he said. “It was no longer expedient simply to refer to Ms. Lewinsky as a ‘groupie,’ ‘stalker,’ ‘clutch’ or ‘home wrecker,’ as the White House first attempted to do.”

Schippers also batted away Clinton’s defense that he never intended to commit perjury, even if he believed his testimony would be misconstrued. To support his view, he played a video of Clinton saying that he did not recall the many gifts he had given Lewinsky.

“The essence of lying is in deception, not in words,” Schippers said. “The president’s answer was false. He knew it then and he knows it now.”

Although Democrats said that Clinton’s actions, while wrong, were not a threat to the nation, Schippers argued otherwise.

“Make no mistake,” he said. “The conduct of the president is inextricably bound to the welfare of the people of the United States. Not only does it affect economic and national defense, but, even more directly, it affects the moral and law-abiding fiber of the commonwealth, without which no nation can survive.”

Lowell, who preceded Schippers, said that Clinton’s machinations to hide an embarrassing extramarital affair simply did not rise to the level of other questionable past presidential actions.

He cited Abraham Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s misleading the public about the Lend-Lease program to help England in World War II and Ronald Reagan’s comments in the Iran-Contra scandal.

“The road to dishonor in office can end in this committee, in this room, on this very day,” Lowell said.

Impeachment, he said, “is the political equivalent of the death penalty.”

What the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal really amounted to, Lowell asserted, was Clinton’s falling prey to a political vendetta by Tripp and the Jones lawyers. “He was being set up.”

Even so, the Democratic lawyer said, Lewinsky herself told the grand jury that no one sought to buy her silence by helping her find a new job. Lowell recalled that Lewinsky testified neither Clinton nor presidential friend Vernon E. Jordan Jr. directly urged her to lie.

Lowell also insisted that Clinton, when he denied having “sexual relations” with Lewinsky, understood that term to mean sexual intercourse and not oral sex.

He said Lewinsky had that same understanding when she said, in her affidavit in the Jones case, that they had not had sex. And he played the Tripp tapes in which Lewinsky is heard saying: “We didn’t have sex, Linda. We didn’t have it. . . . We fooled around.”

That interpretation fit the definition the Jones lawyers used when they deposed Clinton, Lowell said, a definition that was reached after much legal wrangling and parsing of words.

Lowell played the videotape of the lawyers and U.S. District Judge Susan Webber Wright struggling with that definition and afterward told the committee:

“You heard and saw the gyrations that it took for three lawyers and a judge to deal with the silly expression. So who would you call to determine that the president did not believe in his interpretation?”

For months, Democrats and Republicans have invoked the House Judiciary Committee that took up the Watergate matter as a model for deliberating presidential impeachment.

Thursday, Lowell went back to that model, noting that Watergate was about secret White House tapes, burglary and Nixon’s use of the CIA and IRS for political gain.

“Here,” he said in contrast, “the charge stands on tapes of Monica Lewinsky and Linda Tripp talking about shopping.”

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Times staff writer James Gerstenzang contributed to this story.

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SURREAL TV

While the hearings played on, NBC had the Clintons engaging in yule small talk. F1

Times on the Web

* You can easily let your congressional representatives know your views of the impeachment proceedings through a service provided by The Times’ Web site: https://www.latimes.com/scandal

IMPEACHMENT: THE SUMMATIONS

“This is not about sex or private conduct. It is about multiple obstructions of justice, perjury, false and misleading statements, witness tampering, abuses of power--all committed or orchestrated by the President of the United States.”--David Schippers, lead GOP counsel

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“Members of the committee, let us not lose sight of the fact that, unlike the case in 1974 (Richard Nixon’s impeachment hearing), Bill Clinton’s alleged crimes are not those of an errant president but are that of an unfaithful husband.”--Abbe Lowell, lead Democratic counsel