‘Perjury and Obstruction of Justice Are Not Private Acts’

These are excerpts from the arguments presented Saturday by GOP House prosecutors:

Stephen E. Buyer (Ind.)

The offenses you have been hearing about over the course of the last two days require the president’s removal from office. . . . Perjury and obstruction of justice are not private acts, these are public crimes, and therefore are quintessential impeachable offenses. For the president’s premeditated assault on the administration of justice must be interpreted as a threat to our system of government. . . .

Now, you will hear next week from the president’s lawyers that the offenses charged by the House are not impeachable. In other words: Even if the allegations are true, so what? . . . I find this offensive, and the Senate should too. . . .

Lying to one’s spouse about an extramarital affair is not a crime. But telling that same lie under oath before a federal judge as a defendant in a civil rights sexual harassment lawsuit is a crime.

Hiding gifts given to conceal the affair is not a crime. But when those gifts are part of a subpoena in a judicial proceeding, the act of hiding the gifts becomes a crime. . . .

The Constitution recognizes that truth-telling under oath is central to the maintenance of our republic. . . . The crime of perjury was among the few offenses that the first Congress outlawed by statute, and that affirms the framers’ view of its seriousness. In 1790 . . . Congress made the crime of perjury punishable by imprisonment of up to three years, a fine of up to $800, disqualification from giving future testimony, and “stand[ing] in the pillory for one hour.” Today perjury is punishable by up to five years’ imprisonment in a federal penitentiary . . .

Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.)

I’m going to talk to you a bit about some decisions [the Senate] has made regarding the crime of perjury and obstruction of justice, and the impeachment clause in the Constitution, as it applies to federal judges . . . things that you did that have served this country well. . . .

What’s a high crime? How about if an important person hurts someone of low means? It’s not very scholarly, but I think it’s the truth. I think that’s what they meant by high crimes. Doesn’t even have to be a crime. It’s just when you start using your office and you’re acting in a way that hurts people, you’ve committed a high crime. . . .

Ladies and gentlemen, what [the president] stands charged of in this Senate happened eight months . . . after some members of this body said, “Mr. President . . . if you go into that federal grand jury and you lie again, you’re risking your presidency . . . “

I don’t want my country to be the country of great equivocators and compartmentalizers for the next century. And that’s what this case is about, equivocation and compartmentalizing. . . .

Judge [Harry] Claiborne. Convicted and removed from office by the Senate 90-7 [in 1986], for what? Filing a false income tax return “under penalties of perjury.” One thing [the accused] said in that case was: “ . . . Cheating on your taxes has nothing to do with being a judge.” Do you know what the Senate said? “It has everything to do with being a judge.”

. . . Let’s go to Judge [Walter L.] Nixon . . . convicted and removed from office [in 1989] for what? Perjury before a grand jury. He tried to fix a case for a business partner’s son in state court. . . . If a federal judge can be thrown out of office for lying and trying to fix a friend’s son’s case, can the president of the United States be removed from office for trying to fix his [own] case?

Impeachment is about cleansing the office. Impeachment is about restoring honor and integrity to the office. . . . Remember how you felt when you knew you had a perjurer as a judge. . . . You couldn’t live with yourself knowing that you were going to leave a perjuring judge on the bench. Ladies and gentlemen, as hard as it may be, for the same reasons, cleanse this office. The vice president will be waiting outside the doors of this chamber.

Charles T. Canady (Fla.)

[The] Senate has already determined that, as a serious offense against the system of justice, perjury is proper grounds for removal from office. . . . The Senate should not establish a lower standard of integrity for the president than the standard it has already established for federal judges. . . . The Senate should not allow a president who has violated his constitutional duty and oath of office, and made himself a notorious example of lawlessness, to remain in office. . . .

Contrary to the claims of the president’s lawyers, there is not a bright line separating official misconduct by a president from other misconduct of which the president is guilty. Some offenses will involve direct and affirmative misuse of governmental power. Other offenses may involve a more subtle use of the prestige, status and position of the president to further a course of wrongdoing. There are still other offenses in which a president may not misuse the power of his office, but in which he violates a duty imposed on him under the Constitution. . . .

As we have been reminded repeatedly, the Constitution imposes on the president the duty to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” The charges against the president involve multiple violations of that duty. A president who commits a calculated and sustained series of criminal offenses has--by his personal violations of the law--failed in the most immediate, direct and culpable manner to do his duty under the Constitution. . . .

There is no principled basis for contending that a president who interferes with the proper exercise of governmental power--as he clearly does when he commits perjury and obstruction of justice--is constitutionally less blameworthy than a president who misuses the power of his office. . . .

George W. Gekas (Pa.)

The moment of truth is fast approaching. That moment of truth will swoop down on you at some point in the near future, at which time the millions of words that have been spoken thus far, the thousands of pages of documents and the hundreds of exhibits and the dozens of individuals that have been involved in the preparation and annotation and the accumulation of all the data and evidence, all of that will be funneled into that last moment . . . before you cast that final vote.

And we would not have even had to contemplate [this] . . . if early on President Clinton had faced his moment of truth. . . .

The moment of truth was staring him right in the face. And if he would have acknowledged it, that moment, had paid faith and allegiance to that moment, we would not be arguing here today, nor would we have even heard of a possible impeachment inquiry. . . .

The managers and I, every member of the Senate, every individual who is here with us today reveres the office of the presidency. . . . Any innuendo or any kind of impulse that anyone has to attribute any kind of motivation on the part of these men of honor . . . other than to do their constitutional duty, should be rebuffed.

Henry J. Hyde (Ill.)

This controversy began with the fact that the president of the United States took an oath to tell the truth in his testimony before the grand jury, just as he had on two previous occasions sworn a solemn oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution and to faithfully execute the laws of the United States. . . .

Despite massive and relentless efforts to change the subject, the case before you, senators, is not about sexual misconduct, infidelity, adultery. Those are private acts and are none of our business. It’s not even a question of lying about sex. The matter before this body is a question of lying under oath.

This is a public act . . . and when committed by the chief law enforcement officer of the land, the one who appoints every United States district attorney, every federal judge, every member of the Supreme Court, the attorney general, [it] does become the concern of Congress. And that’s why your judgment, respectfully, should rise above politics, above partisanship, above polling data.

This case is a test of whether what the Founding Fathers described as “sacred honor” still has meaning in our time, 222 years after those words, “sacred honor,” were inscribed in . . . our Declaration of Independence.

. . . The office of the president is a very special public trust. The president is the trustee of the national conscience. . . . If a presidential perjurer represents our country in world affairs, if the president calculatedly and repeatedly violates his oath, if the president breaks the covenant of trust he’s made with the American people, he can no longer be trusted. And because the executive plays so large a role in representing our country to the world, America can no longer be trusted . . . .

Trust is the mortar that secures the foundations of the American house of freedom.

And the Senate of the United States, sitting in judgment on this impeachment trial, should not ignore or minimize or dismiss the fact that that bond of trust has been broken, because the president has violated both his oaths of office and the oath he took before his grand jury testimony. . . .

Well, what is an oath? An oath is asking almighty God to witness to the truth of what you are saying. Truth-telling . . . is the heart and soul of our justice system . . . .

Senators, as men and women with a serious experience of public affairs, we can all imagine a situation in which a president might shade the truth when a great issue of national interest or national security is at stake. We’ve been all over that terrain. We know the thin ice on which any of us skates when blurring the edges of the truth for what we consider a compelling, demanding public purpose. Morally serious men and women can imagine the circumstances at the far edge of the morally permissible when, with the gravest matters of national interest at stake, a president could shade the truth in order to serve the common good.

But under oath, for a private pleasure? In doing this, the office of the president of the United States has been debased, and the justice system jeopardized. In doing this, he has broken his covenant of trust with the American people. . . .

President Clinton must be convicted of the charges brought before you by the House and removed from office. To fail to do so, while conceding that the president has engaged in egregious and dishonorable behavior that has broken the covenant of trust between him and the American people, is to diminish the office of the president of the United States in an unprecedented and unacceptable way.

Now, senators, permit me a word on my own behalf and on behalf of my colleagues in the House. . . . None of us comes to this chamber today without a profound sense of our own responsibilities in life and of the many ways in which we have failed to meet those responsibilities to one degree or another. . . . We come to this difficult task as flawed human beings under judgment. . . .

Senators, we of the House don’t come before you today lightly. And if you will permit me, it is a disservice to the House to suggest that it has brought these articles of impeachment before you in a mean-spirited or irresponsible way. . . . Some of us have been called “Clinton haters.” I must tell you . . . this is not a question of who we hate. It’s a question of what we love . . . the rule of law, equal justice before the law, and honor in public life. . . .

I wish to read you a letter I recently received that expresses my feelings far better than my poor words:

“Dear Chairman Hyde: My name is William Preston Summers. How are you doing? I am a third-grader in Room 504 at Chase Elementary School in Chicago. I am writing this letter because I have something to tell you. I have thought of a punishment for the president of the United States of America. The punishment should be that he should write a 100-word essay by hand. I have to write an essay when I lie. It is bad to lie because it just gets you in more trouble. I hate getting in trouble. It’s just like the boy who cried ‘wolf’ and the wolf ate the boy. It is important to tell the truth. I like to tell the truth because it gets you in less trouble. If you do not tell the truth, people do not believe you. It is important to believe the president because he is an important person. If you cannot believe the president, who can you believe? If you have no one to believe in, then how do you run your life? I do not believe the president tells the truth any more right now. After he writes the essay and tells the truth, I will believe him again.”

. . . Then there is a P.S. from his dad: “Dear Rep. Hyde: I made my son William either write you a letter or an essay as a punishment for lying. Part of his defense for his lying was that the president lied. He’s still having difficulty understanding why the president can lie and not be punished.”

Mr. Chief Justice and senators, on June the 6th, 1994, it was the 50th anniversary of the American landing at Normandy, and I went ashore . . . at Normandy and walked up to the cemetery . . . where as far as the eye could see there were white crosses, stars of David. And the British had a bagpipe band scattered among . . . the crosses, playing “Amazing Grace” with that pierceful, mournful sound that only the bagpipe can make. And if you could keep your eyes dry, you were better than I.

But I walked up to one of these crosses marking a grave because I wanted to personalize the experience. I was looking for a name, but there was no name. It said, “Here lies in honored glory a comrade in arms known but to God.” How do we keep faith with that comrade in arms? Well, go to the Vietnam Memorial on the National Mall and press your hands against . . . a few of the 58,000 names carved into that wall . . . and ask yourself how we can redeem the debt we owe all those who purchased our freedom with their lives.

How do we keep faith with them? I think I know. We work to make this country the kind of America they were willing to die for. That’s an America where the idea of sacred honor still has the power to stir men’s souls. My solitary, solitary hope is that a hundred years from today, people will look back at what we’ve done and say, “They kept the faith.”

I’m done.

Review video of the House managers’ presentations and contact your congressional representatives from The Times’ Web site at:

https://www.latimes.com/impeach