Clinton Strikes Indictment Deal

By ERIC LICHTBLAU

Jan. 20, 2001 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

WASHINGTON —

In a dramatic punctuation to his tumultuous presidency, President Clinton struck a deal Friday ensuring that he will not be criminally prosecuted for making false statements about his affair with Monica S. Lewinsky.

Clinton, in a surprise deal reached with independent counsel Robert W. Ray just 24 hours before he was to relinquish the presidency, agreed to give up his Arkansas law license for five years and pay a $25,000 fine to resolve a scandal that has shadowed his last three years in the White House.

And, perhaps most critically, he acknowledged formally for the first time that he gave false testimony under oath about his relationship with Lewinsky, a former White House intern.

In exchange for these concessions, Ray--who 15 months ago took over the outside counsel’s job formerly held by longtime Clinton nemesis Kenneth W. Starr--ended a grand jury investigation into whether Clinton’s statements in a Jan. 17, 1998, deposition in the Paula Corbin Jones sexual harassment case constituted perjury and obstruction of justice.

That action abruptly ended intensive preparation by Ray’s office for a possible indictment of Clinton after he left office.

In a statement released by the White House, Clinton said: “I have apologized for my conduct, and I have done my best to atone for it with my family, my administration and the American people. I have paid a high price for it, which I accept because it caused so much pain to so many people. I hope my actions today will help bring closure and finality to the matters.”

Legal and political observers praised the deal for bringing a graceful end to the scandal that came to define one presidency while clearing the way for the beginning of another.

The Clinton-Lewinsky saga produced national soul-searching, continuous legal wrangling and the second impeachment of a president in U.S. history. The scandal’s mark on the presidency also was a key, if often unstated, theme of the 2000 presidential campaign.

“It sounds like it may be a pretty good resolution,” said Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, as rumors about the deal began circulating on Capitol Hill. “Let’s get this behind us.”

President-elect George W. Bush no longer has to grapple with the delicate question of whether to offer Clinton a pardon.

The deal also frees Clinton from the shadow of both a possible criminal indictment and a continued fight with Arkansas court officials over their efforts to permanently disbar him.

And it gives Ray the satisfaction of securing some admission of wrongdoing from Clinton without having to bring a potentially risky indictment in court.

“This provides a fine way out for everyone,” said Lawrence E. Walsh, who served as special prosecutor in the Iran-Contra scandal from 1986 to 1993 and considered bringing criminal charges against President Reagan several years after he left office.

“The country is best served by getting this over with and getting it behind us,” Walsh said in an interview. Had Ray moved to indict Clinton for perjury or obstruction, “I think he would have been acquitted. A jury isn’t going to convict on that kind of legal hair-splitting, and I think the prosecutor realized that.”

Ray, who was seen as a caretaker in 1999 when he inherited the Lewinsky case from Starr, had surprised many Washington insiders by moving aggressively on several fronts.

New Grand Jury in Case Was Impaneled

Although Ray decided in September not to prosecute the Clintons in connection with the Whitewater real estate transaction in Arkansas, there were increasing signs that he might indict the president once he left office over his sworn denials in the Lewinsky matter. In recent months, his office impaneled a new grand jury on the matter, re-interviewed Lewinsky and other witnesses, and contacted former staff prosecutors for assistance in retracing the case.

Deputy independent counsel J. Keith Ausbrook, one of Ray’s two top aides, said in an interview that no final decision was ever reached on whether to indict Clinton and that Clinton was never threatened with indictment during the course of the negotiations that led to Friday’s deal.

“We were preparing. We were engaged in a process that could have led to an indictment, but it was not a certainty,” Ausbrook said.

Discussions about a deal--technically, a “declination” by Ray to prosecute--began several weeks ago, Ausbrook said. While he would not discuss some specifics of those negotiations, he said that the two sides agreed on the basic framework from the beginning and had to work out details on such items as the wording Clinton would use to acknowledge his “false” and “evasive” testimony. The deal was made final about 9:45 a.m. EST Friday.

“We were in substantial agreement on the basic terms of this from the beginning. There were details to be worked out, regarding the timing and specific wording of things,” he said.

The timing was important because Ray wanted to get the deal done while Clinton was still president.

While that issue was not “a deal-breaker,” it “was of some importance,” Ausbrook said. “There were two reasons, we felt, to get it done now: [Ray] didn’t want to have things hanging over the next president’s term. And because this dealt with [Clinton’s] conduct in office, we felt it should be addressed while he was still in office. It’s just symbolic.”

Officials with the Arkansas Supreme Court’s Committee on Professional Conduct, which had been seeking Clinton’s disbarment, were notified of the Ray-Clinton agreement on Friday and said they found it to be “a satisfactory resolution.”

The committee had moved for Clinton’s permanent disbarment, a penalty that Clinton had vowed to vigorously oppose.

Clinton’s attorney David E. Kendall said in a letter to Ray on Friday that he believed even the five-year suspended law license was “far harsher” than an Arkansas lawyer would typically get in such a situation.

But Kendall and Clinton said that they believed bringing the matter to a close was in everyone’s best interests.

“I have taken every step I can to end this matter,” Clinton said in his statement.

Indeed, Clinton had previously agreed to pay Jones $850,000 to settle her claims that he sexually harassed her in a Little Rock, Ark., hotel room in 1991. And he did not contest a $90,000 fine imposed by U.S. District Judge Susan Webber Wright, who found Clinton in contempt for giving “false, misleading and evasive” testimony in Jones’ lawsuit.

In that 1998 deposition, Clinton told Jones’ attorneys that he did not recall ever being alone with Lewinsky and that he did not have sexual relations with her.

‘Evasive’ Answers Cited in Order

In his statement Friday as part of the Ray settlement, Clinton said that he has “had occasion frequently to reflect on the Jones case. . . . I tried to walk a fine line between acting lawfully and testifying falsely, but I now recognize that I did not fully accomplish this goal and that certain of my responses to questions about Ms. Lewinsky were false.”

A separate order agreed to by Clinton and filed in Arkansas goes on to acknowledge that the president “knowingly gave evasive and misleading answers” in his deposition, thus interfering with the litigation of the Jones case and “setting a poor example for other litigants.”

Kendall asserted, however, that the president never tried to obstruct justice.

“He doesn’t make any such acknowledgment,” Kendall told reporters outside the White House. Clinton has “conceded that he tried to conceal the relationship with Ms. Lewinsky. He tried to conceal that, and we have acknowledged that that was evasive and misleading. But it’s not obstruction of justice. It’s not intentional falsification.”

White House spokesman Jake Siewert said that the lingering legal issue in the controversy was not whether Clinton should be sanctioned but how severely.

The Arkansas bar committee “now has formally acknowledged that this is not properly a disbarment case. Had the committee not attempted to disbar him, the president would have settled this case long ago by accepting an appropriate sanction,” Siewert said.

For a man with a keen interest in shaping his presidential legacy, the question of Clinton’s bar license was always more symbolic than practical. While he was first admitted to the Arkansas bar in 1973, he has practiced law only sporadically since then.

Clinton’s future--other than his role as the husband of freshman Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton--is still undetermined, but Friday’s agreement placed no restrictions on whether he can apply for a law license in New York or elsewhere, officials said.

Ray said he hopes the agreement will “help restore faith and trust” among the public when it comes to investigations of high-ranking public officials.

Ray said that his agenda when he took over Starr’s investigation was not to win the case but--in the words of former Supreme Court Justice George Sutherland--to ensure that “justice shall be done.”

“This resolution, by agreement with President Clinton, means that justice has in fact been done. It is in the best interests of law enforcement and the country,” Ray said.

“The country has reached the end of the tortuous path it has traveled for the last three years.”

Times staff writer Robert A. Rosenblatt contributed to this story.

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Timeline of the Lewinsky Case

Key events in the Monica S. Lewinsky case:

1995

Early July: Lewinsky begins as White House intern.

November: Lewinsky and President Clinton begin intimate relationship.

1996

April: Lewinsky is transferred to a Pentagon job, meets Linda Tripp.

1997

September: Tripp begins secretly recording conversations with Lewinsky.