Counsels Wrap Up Their Cases in Tape

By Thursday, the public and the House Judiciary Committee were wearily familiar with the script--the evidence, the arguments, the sex. All that remained was to wow them with one last grabber performance before the curtain fell.

But when the camera focused on the impeachment witness table for the last time, it was clear that the committee’s two top lawyers had studied at different theatrical schools.

The summation given by Abbe Lowell, counsel for the Democrats, went high-tech and highbrow. He quoted from Alexander Hamilton and showed black-and-white footage from history (read, Watergate history.) The edgy attorney from Brooklyn steadily built his case with a let’s-go-to-the-videotape approach to bring the president’s version of events alive, “calling” witnesses to the stand and then playing either audio or video of their testimony.

David Schippers, the Republicans’ lawyer, was more like the D.A. in Perry Mason, full of innuendo, talking about the “crafty mind” of a president who uses “lame and obviously contrived’ explanations. Schippers, bearded and bearish from Chicago, stuck to a time-lined narrative, giving dates and phone records to substantiate his account of the whole seamy affair and playing almost all the parts himself--the voices, the wicked sorcerer, the dumb princess. The only time he went “live” was with short clips of the videotape, never publicly shown before, of President Clinton’s Jan. 17 deposition in the Paula Corbin Jones sexual harassment case.

“I’d like you to listen to the president’s deceptions for yourself,” Schippers said.

But at that moment what the national television audience got to see was the woman seated two rows behind Schippers’ left shoulder, scowling. It was his wife, Jacquelin.

Schippers went back to video only two more times, both to show Clinton at the Jones deposition in a cat-got-your-tongue moment. In one, the president was asked if he had ever been alone with former White House intern Monica S. Lewinsky.

“I think I testified to that earlier,” Clinton says, showing pique in his body language. “I have no specific recollections.”

Then the two television sets stacked one atop the other went blank and Schippers, referring to Lewinsky’s dress stained with the president’s semen, intoned: “Life was so much simpler before they found that dress. Wasn’t it?”

Lowell spent more of his allotted two hours turning attention to the television sets as well as to audiotapes of Lewinsky and her former friend, Linda Tripp, who had secretly taped their conversations.

With one audio excerpt, Lowell did publicly what the president’s defenders in the past have been reluctant to do: He undermined Lewinsky by playing a tape of her admitting to Tripp: “I was brought up with lies all the time.”

Lowell also used selective editing to mock independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr, showing him saying over and over again, “I would have to search my recollection,” in his questioning by the committee.

“Before this committee starts making the phrase, ‘I don’t recall, I don’t remember, I’d have to think about it,’ something that you would bring to the floor of the Senate,” said Lowell, referring to the next stage of this drama if the House votes impeachment, “see what an unfair tactic that really is.”

The only time Lowell used tape of the president during the Jones deposition was to illustrate the confusion over the legal definition of “sexual relations” that is at the root of the perjury charges against the president.

“I thought you and the public should hear how this all first started,” said Lowell, introducing the tape. It showed the president, mute and fidgety in a polka dot tie, as the voices of lawyers and Judge Susan Webber Wright play out an argument over the definition of sex.

“I think this could really lead to confusion,” the president’s lawyer, Robert S. Bennett, is heard saying while Clinton knits his brow.

A Democratic committee source said Lowell did not know until the last moment that the Republican staff had asked the House sergeant-at-arms to get the tape of the president’s Jones deposition from a “secure” room in a remote Capitol Hill office building.

“We didn’t even have time to edit it or go over it,” said the source. “We just stuck it in the VCR and stopped it when we had enough.”

Republican sources said Schippers’ staff did not have much more of an opportunity to refine his presentation. His staff was up until 3 a.m. working over his case and preparing for the day of last-gasp presentations.