Tale of the Tape Deals Managers’ Case a Setback

The prosecutors’ favorite witness came before the Senate on Saturday and cut a large hole in the prosecution’s case.

The core of the obstruction of justice charge against President Clinton is that he “corruptly encouraged” Monica S. Lewinsky on Dec. 17, 1997, to file a “false affidavit” to avoid testifying in the Paula Corbin Jones sexual harassment case.

Before the Senate, the House prosecutors have portrayed Clinton as a master manipulator, conspiring to control all the actors in his “web of obstruction.”

But Lewinsky, testifying via videotape Saturday, portrayed the president as being surprisingly uninterested and uninvolved in the details of the Jones case. She said Clinton did not discuss with her anything about her affidavit and that she decided on her own to avoid the Jones litigation.

“I didn’t want to have anything to do with Paula Jones or her case,” the former White House intern said. “I knew nothing of sexual harassment.”

Asked by prosecutors to confirm that the president told her to file a false statement with Jones’ lawyers, Lewinsky refused. “There was no discussion of what would be in the affidavit,” she said. “He didn’t discuss the content of my affidavit with me at all, ever.”

True, she wanted to conceal their sexual encounters. “I thought it was nobody’s business,” she said.

Like the president, Lewinsky said she hoped she could file a statement with Jones’ lawyers that was “literally true, although misleading.”

Her sworn statement said the two did not have a “sexual relationship.” This was true, she said, in the sense that they did not have intercourse. It was false, in that they had a series of “intimate encounters,” as Clinton delicately put it before the grand jury.

From afar, the dispute over Lewinsky’s sworn statement may seem like a minor matter. However, it triggered the entire investigation and prosecution that led to the president’s impeachment.

In November 1997, Linda Tripp, Lewinsky’s former friend, told the Jones lawyers that they should subpoena Lewinsky, because she had had sexual encounters with Clinton. They did.

Lewinsky told Tripp she planned to deny any such relationship if asked by Jones’ lawyers.

Tripp then told prosecutors working for independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr that they should investigate Lewinsky, because she planned to file a “false affidavit” denying these sexual encounters. They did.

Nine months later, Starr advised the House of Representatives that it should impeach Clinton for conspiring to obstruct justice in the Jones case, and in December, it voted to do so.

Now, as the impeachment trial is nearing an end, the Senate trial focused for the first time on whether the president did indeed urge the former intern to file the famous “false affidavit.”

Saturday’s testimony showed again that the Clinton-Lewinsky affair makes for a compelling story of scandal, but a weak legal case.

At each stage, Clinton’s critics have pointed to the president’s conduct as repulsive and irresponsible.

On Saturday morning, House trial manager, Rep. James E. Rogan (R-Glendale), led off by denouncing the president as a reckless sexual predator.

In recent weeks, Rogan has been barely able to contain his smoldering anger and contempt for Clinton. He characterized Lewinsky as young and vulnerable, “the image of a young woman very much like a family member.” She came under the spell of a powerful president, twice her age, who “impulsively began using her for his gratification,” he said.

If being a cad were an impeachable offense, the House prosecutors proved Clinton guilty.

But when Rogan and his colleagues seek to inflate Clinton’s reckless behavior into a crime, let alone a “high crime” warranting his removal from office, their case has been exposed as thin and circumstantial.

They have not been able to show that the president told Lewinsky to lie, that he promised her a job for her silence, or that he ordered his secretary, Betty Currie, to hide gifts they had exchanged.

The House prosecutors have maintained Clinton obstructed justice in the Jones case by concealing his relationship with Lewinsky. According to Rogan, Clinton set out “to destroy the lawful right” of Jones to pursue her claim.

This remains unproved, and probably unprovable. Judge Susan Webber Wright ruled in April that Jones had no case of sexual harassment, because she had no evidence of job discrimination.

So it would be hard to argue that Clinton “destroyed” Jones’ case by hiding his relationship with a potential witness, because the courts said Jones did not have a case in the first place.

The House prosecutors have repeatedly asserted that any act that might obstruct justice in some way is a federal crime. For example, by telling a false story to a “potential witness” in a legal proceeding, Clinton committed a crime, Rep. Asa Hutchinson (R-Ark.) said Saturday.

But the Supreme Court rejected this “potential witness” theory four years ago in the case of Judge Robert Aguilar. He had been convicted of obstruction of justice for lying to two FBI agents who were investigating whether he had revealed a secret wiretap.

“We do not believe that uttering false statements to an investigating agent who might or might not testify before a grand jury is sufficient,” wrote Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist. “Under [this] theory, a man could be found guilty if he knew of a pending investigation and lied to his wife about his whereabouts at the time of a crime.”

Undeterred by the chief justice’s looming presence, Rogan argued Saturday that Clinton committed a crime when he told his aide, Sidney Blumenthal, a false story of his relationship with Lewinsky a few days after the scandal exploded in the press.

This was a crime, Rogan confidently asserted, because Clinton figured Blumenthal would be a “conduit” for sending the false story to the grand jury in a few months.

* MONICA ON HER OWN: Monica S. Lewinsky steps out of the shadows of scandal into the political spotlight. A18