Ruff Finds Prosecution ‘Fudging’

He called it “prosecutorial fudge.”

White House Counsel Charles F.C. Ruff, in a methodical deconstruction of the case against President Clinton, accused House prosecutors of fudging some key facts.

“Be wary, be wary of the prosecutor who feels it necessary to deceive the court,” Ruff said. He then delivered two striking examples.

According to House Republican counsel David Schippers and Rep. Asa Hutchinson (R-Ark.), one of the 13 House prosecutors, the crucial date in the obstruction of justice charge was Dec. 11, 1997, the day U.S. District Judge Susan Webber Wright ruled that other women, such as Monica S. Lewinsky, could be deposed in Paula Corbin Jones’ sexual harassment case against Clinton.

“The judge’s order came in. And that triggered the president into action,” Hutchinson said last week. “The president triggered [his friend] Vernon Jordan into action,” who then met with Lewinsky about helping her get a job in New York. His blow-up chart showed the “chain of events” with the judge’s order followed by Lewinsky’s meeting with Jordan.

Schippers, in his closing argument to the House Judiciary Committee last month, dramatized the same sequence of events. “Why the sudden interest” in Lewinsky on that day? he asked. “Oh, yes. Something happened [to explain Jordan’s involvement]. On the morning of Dec. 11, Judge Wright ordered that Paula Jones was entitled to information” regarding women such as Lewinsky, Schippers said.

On Tuesday, Ruff put his own blow-up before the Senate, a transcript from the judge’s chambers. It showed that Wright indeed ruled on the issue of other women on Dec. 11, but she did so in a conference call that began at 5:33 p.m. CST in Little Rock, Ark., hours after Jordan had met with Lewinsky. At that hour, Jordan had left Dulles International Airport in northern Virginia on a flight to Amsterdam, Ruff said.

Similarly, the House prosecutors made a great issue of phone records that showed a cellular call from the president’s secretary, Betty Currie, to Lewinsky’s Watergate apartment at 3:32 p.m. on Dec. 28, 1997, hours after Lewinsky last met with Clinton.

Schippers called this “the key evidence . . . that proves conclusively that Ms. Currie called Monica” about the gifts, rather than the other way around, as Currie had suggested.

But Ruff showed transcripts from FBI interviews in which Lewinsky repeatedly said she and Currie had met at 2 p.m. to exchange the gifts, well before the phone call.

Pausing regularly, the White House counsel did not offer his explanation for the apparent mistakes that he had highlighted. Rather he let the senators surmise that the prosecutors, in their zeal to build a case, had either ignored the facts or deliberately misrepresented them.

After Ruff finished, House prosecutors were quick to appear before the cameras to analyze Ruff’s performance.

Rep. Bob Barr (R-Ga.) said that he “focused on little time discrepancies” while ignoring the broader case. Hutchinson said that the Dec. 11 order was not as important as he suggested last week. “It was the witness list [issued Dec. 5] that really kicked things into gear.”

The confusion over dates does not undercut the House case, they said. Instead, it shows the need for the Senate to hear witnesses.

“I think the chronology of events is in dispute. The way that is resolved is through witnesses,” said Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.).