Lewinsky Video Takes the Spotlight in Trial Arguments

Monica S. Lewinsky took center stage in President Clinton’s impeachment trial Saturday, with House Republican managers and White House lawyers dueling over whether her video image and well-chosen words support or undermine the effort to remove him from office.

Her youth written in her expressions, the 25-year-old former White House intern nevertheless appeared poised and confident on the videotape. And the president’s defense team homed in on her contentions that Clinton never directly encouraged her to lie or bought her silence to hide their sexual affair.

But the House prosecutors used many of the same video snippets--along with segments from depositions of presidential confidant Vernon E. Jordan Jr., White House aide Sidney Blumenthal and the president himself--to suggest that Clinton orchestrated a “broad tapestry of corruption” to conceal his affair with Lewinsky.

The senators, who later this week are to vote on whether Clinton should become the first president removed from the White House, displayed decidedly mixed reactions to the testimony beamed electronically into the Senate chamber.

Republican senators seemed transfixed, their eyes trained on the big-screen television monitors that lined the chamber. But many Democrats either busied themselves in unrelated paperwork or turned their heads away.

“I certainly think it’s devastating to the White House,” proclaimed Sen. Larry E. Craig (R-Idaho) during a break in the trial.

But Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) walked away unimpressed. “I don’t think it’s a bombshell one way or the other to see” Lewinsky, she said.

Although the House prosecutors stressed that this case is not about sex, they frequently depicted Lewinsky as a wronged young woman tossed aside by a man of great influence.

“Monica Lewinsky,” said Rep. James E. Rogan (R-Glendale), is “a bright lady whose life has forever been marked by the most powerful man on the Earth.”

Rogan insisted that when their relationship was revealed slightly more than a year ago, Clinton “responded not in love, not in friendship, not even with a grain of concern for her well-being or emotional stability.”

“Instead,” Rogan continued, “the president took the deep and apparently unrequited emotional attachment Monica Lewinsky had formed for him and prepared to summarily take her life and throw it on the ash heap.”

But the president’s lawyers, in their presentation on the evidence, complained that the House managers presented a “terribly misleading” case in their effort to persuade senators that Clinton committed perjury and obstructed justice.

“The managers have cleverly snipped here and there in an effort to present their story, even if as a result the story they are telling you is not Ms. Lewinsky’s story,” Clinton lawyer Nicole Seligman told the Senate. “They have distorted, they have omitted and they have created a profoundly erroneous impression.”

She went on to assert that the Lewinsky video bolsters the president’s case, and she defended the White House legal team’s decision not to ask her any questions when it attended the deposition Monday in Washington.

“Ms. Lewinsky reaffirmed her previous testimony [before a federal grand jury last year] and provided extremely useful supplements to that testimony,” said Seligman.

“We asked her no questions. Why? Because there was no need. Her testimony exonerated the president.”

Outside the chamber, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) continued to lead an effort to build support for censuring the president in the wake of his expected acquittal on the impeachment charges this Thursday or Friday.

One draft describes Clinton’s “inappropriate relationship” with Lewinsky as “shameless, reckless and indefensible” and declares that his “conduct in this matter has brought shame and dishonor to himself and to the Office of the President.” But because it stops short of saying Clinton broke the law, it may not pick up the backing of enough senators for passage.

Saturday’s session began with a moment of silence to mourn the death of Raymond Scott Bates, 50, a veteran legislative clerk who called the roll of Senate votes, including recent impeachment tallies. He was killed and his wife critically injured when the couple was struck by a car as they crossed a street in suburban Virginia on Friday night.

In summarizing their impeachment case, Rogan spoke first for the House managers. “We seek no congressional punishment for a man who chose to cheat on his wife.”

But Rogan argued for “constitutional accountability for a president who chooses to cheat the law,” and he implored the Senate to weigh the credibility of Lewinsky versus Clinton.

“If you believe her,” Rogan said, “you will see how the president wove a web of perjury and obstruction of justice. . . . You will see why a just and proper verdict in this body would be to replace him as president with Vice President Al Gore.”

The video excerpts of the deposition Lewinsky provided Monday that the managers showed included one in which she describes a late-night phone call from the president in late 1997. She said Clinton discussed the fact that she could file a sworn affidavit to avoid testifying in the Paula Corbin Jones sexual harassment lawsuit pending against the president.

Lewinsky intimated that she and Clinton had devised a cover story from the start of their affair and that “it was part of the pattern of the relationship.”

Later in the day, House manager Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) drew one of the session’s few laughs when he referred to this call. “Where I’m from, if you call someone at 2:30 in the morning, you’re up to no good.”

Graham quickly turned serious, saying of Clinton, “He was up to no good. He told her: ‘My heart is breaking because you’re on this witness list [in the Jones case],’ and maybe here’s a way to get out of it. That’s the God’s truth. That’s what he did, and that was wrong and that’s a crime.” The managers also played a segment in which Clinton, in his deposition in the Jones case, said his secretary Betty Currie and Jordan told him only “in passing” that there was an effort underway to find Lewinsky a new job.

“That’s all I know about that,” Clinton testified.

But then the managers played an excerpt from Jordan’s deposition last week in which the Washington lawyer contradicted the president and suggested Clinton was behind his successful efforts to obtain a job offer for Lewinsky in New York.

“There was no question but that [Clinton] asked me to help and that he asked others to help,” Jordan said.

House manager Asa Hutchinson (R-Ark.) described it this way: “This was not a casual matter for the president. He was interested, he was directing the show. . . . He was consumed with preventing the truth from coming out.”

The managers further noted that gifts Clinton had given Lewinsky wound up at Currie’s home, under her bed, and that while Lewinsky said it was Currie who wanted the gifts, the managers believe she was acting on Clinton’s behalf.

Graham Speaks Emotionally

In summing up the House’s case, Graham spoke emotionally.

Reflecting on the tensions surrounding the impeachment trial and the weariness of many lawmakers toward it, he paraphrased the cry of an angry spectator on Thursday.

“It was shouted in these chambers, ‘For God’s sake, vote,’ ” Graham said.

Quietly, he added: “For God’s sake, get to the truth. For God’s sake, figure out what kind of person we have here in the White House.”

Seligman, handling the bulk of the president’s defense, played a longer version of the excerpt in which Lewinsky discusses the late-night phone call from Clinton. Seligman said the clip provided no evidence of any criminal intent by the president to persuade Lewinsky to lie to Jones’ lawyers in her affidavit.

There was, Seligman said, “no discussion of content. No discussion of logistics. No discussion of timing. Virtually no discussion at all.”

“And that very brief exchange is the heart of the case,” Seligman said.

Confronting the issue of alleged “cover stories,” Seligman played a separate sound bite from Lewinsky’s video in which the young woman maintained her affidavit denying “sexual relations” with Clinton was “literally true.”

Lewinsky conceded that her statements could be seen as “misleading [and] incomplete,” but Seligman argued that fell far short of demonstrating any conspiracy between her and the president to purposefully draw up an affidavit that was untruthful.

“We know that the managers are disappointed and want to blame their disappointment on Ms. Lewinsky,” Seligman said. “But when you get to the substance, today’s presentation by the House managers shows that they have not in fact identified any significant area where Ms. Lewinsky’s testimony [in her videotaped deposition] differs from her earlier testimony in the grand jury.

“Her view of the cover stories has been consistent from Day One.”

Rehnquist Eager to Wrap Up Session

At one point Saturday, it was clear U.S. Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist was eager to wrap up the session. Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) suggested a brief break, but Rehnquist interrupted, “Let’s keep going.”

As laughter filled the room, Lott quipped: “I guess that settles that.”

Off the Senate floor, the House managers produced an affidavit that they said raised questions about the truthfulness of Blumenthal’s testimony. Blumenthal, in his deposition last week, acknowledged that Clinton had lied to him in describing Lewinsky as a stalker, but the White House aide denied that he, in turn, leaked that derogatory comment to reporters.

But Christopher Hitchens, a Vanity Fair contributing writer, said in the affidavit prepared for House prosecutors that Blumenthal, at a lunch early last year, had characterized Lewinsky as a stalker to him.

Graham passed the affidavit onto Republican senators. He said the Senate would have the jurisdiction to determine whether Blumenthal was not truthful in his testimony. It was unclear Saturday whether the Senate would pursue the matter.

Although the two-thirds majority needed to oust Clinton appears unobtainable for the prosecutors, they still have a chance to gain one Democratic convert: Sen. Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia.

“It will be very difficult to stand and say, ‘Not guilty.’ Very difficult,” Byrd said in an ABC-TV interview to be aired today. “Who is kidding who here? I have to live with myself. I have to live with my conscience, and I have to live with the Constitution.”