‘Impeachment Is a Political and Not a Criminal Proceeding’

Excerpts from Friday’s question-and-answer proceedings in the Senate impeachment trial:

Question: From Republican Sens. John H. Chafee (R.I.), Larry E. Craig (Idaho), Charles E. Grassley (Iowa) and Strom Thurmond (S.C.) to the House managers:

President Clinton has raised concerns about whether the articles of impeachment are overly vague and whether they charge more than one offense in the same article. How do you respond to these concerns?

Answer: From Rep. Charles T. Canady (R-Fla.):

It is clear from the president’s trial memorandum and his presentation here that President Clinton and his counsel know exactly what he is being charged with. And I would submit to you that if President Clinton had suffered from any lack of specificity in the articles he could have filed a motion for a bill of particulars. He did not choose to do so.

Moreover, articles of impeachment have never been required to be drafted with the specificity of indictments. After all, this proceeding is not a criminal trial. If it were, then we as the prosecutors would not only be entitled to call witnesses, but would be required to call them to prove our case. We would certainly not be put in a position of defending the appropriateness of witnesses. Now, President Clinton wants all the benefits of a criminal trial without bearing any of its burdens.

Impeachment is a political and not a criminal proceeding. And that has been clear from the institution of this proceeding in our Constitution.

And I would also point out that unlike the judicial impeachments of the 1980s, President Clinton has not committed a handful of specific misdeeds that can be easily listed in separate articles of impeachment.

Now, the articles of impeachment allege that President Clinton made one or more perjurious, false and misleading statements to the grand jury and committed one or more acts in which he obstructed justice. Once again, these articles are modeled after the articles adopted by the House Committee on the Judiciary against President Nixon, and were drafted with the rules of the Senate specifically in mind.

Question: From Democratic Sens. Christopher J. Dodd (Conn.) and Patrick J. Leahy (Vt.) to the White House lawyers:

Would you please comment on any of the legal or factual assertions made by the managers in their response to the previous question. Particularly, what would have stopped or limited the House in specifying precisely the statement on which the articles were based?

Answer: Special Counsel Gregory Craig:

In our case, we’re talking about an allegation of perjury. In the 1974 Nixon case, he was not charged with perjury. And I think our argument was that perjury is a different kind of thing. You have to be very specific in what you charge. And you have to be very clear as to what the statement is when you are charging perjury, and that it’s a tradition of our criminal justice system and of our jurisprudence.

Now, the danger here is that if you don’t and you’re overly broad, as we contend Article I is, is that at any given moment you can fill the vessel with what your meaning is.

Question: From Republican Sens. Wayne Allard (Colo.), Conrad R. Burns (Mont.), Bill Frist (Tenn.), Grassley, James M. Inhofe (Okla.), Fred Thompson (Tenn.) and Thurmond:

If the president were a federal judge accused of committing the same acts of perjury and obstruction of justice, and the Senate found sufficient evidence that the acts alleged were committed, should the Senate vote to convict?

Answer: White House Counsel Charles F.C. Ruff:

This really goes right to the heart of the [House] managers’ argument here, which is that there is no difference in the consideration of the impeachment process between an allegation against a federal judge and an allegation against the president of the United States.

It is absolutely crystal clear, from the history of the drafting of the impeachment clause, that the concern of the framers was, ‘Is there such actions as so subvert our government that we can no longer persist in permitting, in their case, the president of the United States to remain in office?’ That question must be dramatically different when you ask it about the conduct of one of a thousand judges . . .

Do you ask the same questions about the trauma that the nation suffers when you are removing a judge and you are removing a president? The answer must be no.

Question: From Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.):

How does the president defend against the charge that by giving false and misleading statements under oath such misconduct abused or violated some public trust?

Answer: Ruff:

It is not enough simply to ask, does a particular generic form of misconduct, however serious it may be, lead inexorably to the conclusion that the president of the United States has committed an impeachable offense? We speak of offenses which this body must ultimately judge as being so violative of his public responsibilities that our system cannot abide his continuing in office.

The framers understood the frailties that they were dealing with. They understood the nature of the offense that had been the background of impeachment proceedings in England. And certainly the framers in their debate made it clear that it has to be at the highest level of public trust, the breach of the public trust embodied in the words ‘treason,’ ‘bribery,’ ‘selling your office,’ and similar other ‘high crimes and misdemeanors.’

Question: From Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.):

Do the [House] managers wish to respond to the answer just given by the president’s counsel?

Answer: Canady:

We believe that the response and the position taken by the counsel for the president here really involves two great errors. One error is in establishing a standard of conduct for the presidency that is too low. The other error is in attempting to minimize the significance of the offenses that this president has been charged with.

A president should not be impeached and removed from office for a mistake of judgment. He should not be impeached and removed for a momentary lapse. Instead, he should be impeached and removed if he engages in a conscious and deliberate and settled choice to do wrong; a conscious and deliberate and settled choice to violate the laws of this land. And we submit that he must be impeached and removed if he does that, because in doing so, he has violated his oath of office.

Question: From Republican Sens. Jim Bunning (Ky.), Craig, Grassley and Bob Smith (N.H.):

In your presentation you made the case that the Senate should call witnesses. In light of the White House’s response to this argument, do you still hold this position?

Answer: Rep. Bill McCollum (R-Fla.):

Mr. Chief Justice and senators, the House definitely holds to the position that we should call witnesses. But I think the issue here is what has been related to us in anything we’ve heard in the past few days by the White House counsel that would say we don’t need them.

In any criminal trial you’re going to call witnesses. You need to judge their credibility.

[With Monica Lewinsky] you have to question her testimony, you have to question her believability. You ought to bring her out here.

The same thing is true of the questions with regard to Ms. [Betty] Currie and the phone call dealing with the question of coming over to get the gifts.

Question: From Sen. Richard H. Bryan (D-Nev.):

Would you please comment on any of the legal or factual assertions made by the managers in their response to the previous question focusing on the need for witnesses and the time likely required to prepare for and conduct discovery?

Answer: Clinton lawyer David E. Kendall:

The first question to ask about the need to call witnesses is what would the witnesses add? That hasn’t been described. What you’ve heard are vague expressions of credibility and hope. They would add nothing to what is not already there.

They’re hoping that maybe something will turn up. All the major witnesses have testified, and their testimony is right there.

Question: From Republican Sens. Craig, Mike DeWine (Ohio), Mike Enzi (Wyo.), Frist, Orrin G. Hatch (Utah), Olympia J. Snowe (Maine) and Thompson:

Four days after the president’s Paula Jones testimony, wherein he testified under oath about Ms. Lewinsky, why would Dick Morris conduct a poll on whether the American people would forgive the president for committing perjury and obstruction of justice?

Answer: Ruff:

I couldn’t find any volunteers [to answer this]! (Laughter.)

You know, I think the honest answer has two pieces to it: I don’t have a clue; and it ultimately, although I know it rings all sorts of bells, and the use of that name conjures up all sorts of images, and that’s why I’m sure it finds its way into this process from the managers’ side, but if you look at the record, other than the value that may come to the managers of making reference to that conversation--and I have no idea whether the conversation ever occurred or not--it seems to me of absolutely no relevance whatsoever, because as far as I am able to represent to you, and if the conversation occurred, there is nothing in this record to suggest that it had any impact on the president or any other person.

We know that he did wrong. We know that he misled the American people when he said that he had not had relations with Ms. Lewinsky. I’m not sure what a conversation with Mr. Morris, if it occurred, or a poll, if it was asked for, or the motivation behind that poll, means, once you come to grips with the fact that the president of the United States was deceiving his family, his children, his wife, his colleagues, and the American people in that period in January.