WHAT I SAW AT THE IMPEACHMENT

What a contrast. Rahm Emanuel was so oily you could have bottled him for salad dressing. Lanny Davis quivers and snuffles like a man on the verge of a nervous breakdown — long overdue, by the way. David Kendall and John Podesta have faces so pinched and crabbed they can only reflect some soul-deep turmoil. But Craig is normal. You can imagine him going home at night to wife and kids in a center-hall brick colonial in Bethesda and coaching Buddy’s soccer team and helping Sis with her Campfire Girls candy sale. Picture James Carville with a bunch of Campfire Girls.

So this is Greg Craig: a spokesman so nice they named him twice. Today is the long-awaited day when the president’s men have journeyed up to Capitol Hill to make the president’s case, and Greg is the man they have chosen to speak first. As he settles into his opening statement — his voice is like a purr — it becomes quickly apparent that his job is to insult Bill Clinton as thoroughly as possible while still maintaining that basically, deep down, the president is a sweetheart who never lied but feels terrible about all the lies he’s told. At least I think I’m getting that straight.

For legal reasons, of course, Greg can’t use the word “lied.” “Sinful”? Sure, Greg volunteers. “Morally wrong”? You bet. And “evasive” and “misleading” and “blameworthy” and “maddening.” But not a liar. “Open your heart,” he advises members of the committee. (Since when did the White House decide that Republicans have hearts?) Greg is reasonable and calm and he promises the moon. “By the close of tomorrow, all the world will see one simple and undeniable fact,” he says. “There is nothing in the record — in either the law or the facts — that would justify his impeachment and removal from office.”

Greg’s velvety presentation goes over very well with the committee; the deployment of the word “sinful” is a masterstroke. (Top that, Mr. Bauer!) His statement lasts a full 15 minutes, and normally, according to the traditional work schedules of congressional committees, this would be a good time for the honorable members to call a recess and knock off for some well-earned R&R. But Chairman Hyde has promised to run today’s session straight through, without breaks for bathroom time or even feeding. So we are on to yet another panel of experts — panels of experts being this committee’s stock-in-trade — beginning with a pudgy Princeton historian named Sean Wilentz, whose area of expertise is condescension.

Prof. Wilentz broaches two themes that are becoming de rigueur as the president’s defenders make their case. The first is that, as a defender of the president, Wilentz is absolutely emphatic that he is not defending the president, who is “reckless” and “devious.” (Doesn’t anybody like this guy?) Wilentz even cites an article he wrote in the New Republic, proving that he thought the president was scum as far back as 1996. The second theme is a delightful inversion of common sense: that the “rule of law” is under assault not by a chief executive who lied under oath in legal proceedings and employed the vast resources of his office to impede the administration of justice but by the congressmen who are now following the constitutional procedure to remove him for doing that. At least I think I’m getting this straight.

To coax committee members gently toward accepting his view, Prof. Wilentz calls them myopic cowards, fanatics and zealots, guilty of “a degradation of conscience,” and tells them that, if they disagree with him, “history will track you down and condemn you for your cravenness.” I bet he’s a tough grader. As the professor sputters away and steam begins to seep slowly from the ears of the assembled congressmen, poor Greg Craig stares at his hands. His shoulders sag. It’s not hard to imagine what he’s thinking. No sooner has the heroic counsel achieved what heretofore had been deemed impossible — defending Bill Clinton and seeming like a decent guy, all at the same time — than in a wink his hard work comes undone through the self-righteous mewling of this pasty Princeton puke. Greg himself is a Harvard man.
 
TUESDAY AFTERNOON AND EVENING, DECEMBER 8

For the second panel, the White House has assembled a trio of former Democratic congressmen who served on the House Judiciary Committee in 1974. O Days of Blessed Memory! This afternoon is for wallowing in Watergate, and as a Nixon-hater who lapped up every yummy morsel of the scandal as it happened, I fully understand the impulse. For Democrats of Clinton’s generation, Watergate in general, and the committee’s impeachment vote in particular, endures in memory as a sacramental occasion, a divine consummation, a moment of unearthly bliss whose perfection rests somehow on the condition that it never, ever be repeated until they can figure out a way to do it to another Republican president. And now the vulgarians, these Republicans with their clip-on ties and Wal-Mart Sansabelt slacks, are threatening to violate the memory. And it cannot be tolerated.

I think I’m getting this straight: Because Richard Nixon was almost impeached for asking the CIA to mess with the FBI, for misusing the IRS, and for authorizing the plumbers (the plumbers! the very word brings a thrilling shudder!), a president cannot be impeached unless he has done the same thing. This seems to be the argument made, chorus-like, by the three Watergate veterans brought before the committee. But there’s more. Father Robert Drinan speaks dreamily of the “dignity of the majesty of the Rodino committee” and seems at times to be lapsing into reverie. Or maybe napping. Liz Holtzman thinks the president is “reprehensible,” and the third panelist, an ex-politician from Utah who keeps referring to himself appropriately as an “old has-been,” says President Clinton almost certainly perjured himself before the grand jury. I’m beginning to think the president needs some new friends.

They are followed this evening by James Hamilton, a Washington lawyer. He calls the president “disgraceful.” He is joined by Richard Ben-Veniste, another Watergate veteran who served under the second Watergate special prosecutor, St. Leon of Jaworski. I notice that when he settles himself at the witness table, Ben-Veniste, a short fellow, perches atop a copy of the thick appendix of supporting materials that Ken Starr submitted to the committee. Talk about contempt for the evidence. Ben-Veniste says the president’s behavior was “improper,” since all the other insults have already been taken. Like their predecessors, the two lawyers insist that any article of impeachment has to be approved on a “bipartisan basis,” which means that there can’t be an impeachment unless the people who oppose impeachment vote to impeach. Am I getting this straight?
 
WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, DECEMBER 9

Committee Republicans keep complaining that the White House is not addressing the facts of the case, but now, when chief White House counsel Charles Ruff appears before the committee ostensibly for that purpose, the Republicans scarcely ask him any factual questions at all. All the members labor under the traditional “five-minute” rule, allotting everyone 300 seconds to address the witness. The reasoning behind the rule reveals all you need to know about the purpose of congressional hearings. It allows every member a chance to have attention (and TV cameras, if present) focused on himself, while simultaneously making it impossible to elicit substantive information in any sustained manner.

As a result, Ruff’s potentially illuminating Q & A proceeds at the customary stuttering pace. Everyone succumbs to drowsiness. I’m sitting behind the president’s personal attorney, David Kendall, and I notice he’s taken to doodling in a notebook. He draws three boxes and labels them “Draft Articles of Impeachment.” In the first box he writes “A”; in the next he writes “An”; and “The” in the third. Articles, get it? He elbows his law partner Nicole Seligman, sitting next to him, and points to his doodle. She giggles. Heh-heh. A little impeachment humor. Which confirms my suspicion: This man knows how to party.

Suddenly the atmosphere changes. I notice a couple of Republicans have passed on their allotted five minutes, and when the questioning comes to the next-to-last Republican, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, I see why. “Mr. Ruff,” says Graham, in his Huck Finn drawl, “do you know Sidney Blumenthal?”

Lewinsky scandalphiliacs like me know immediately where he’s headed — straight toward one of the more curiously unremarked elements in the case. Presidential aide Blumenthal testified before the grand jury about a conversation he’d had with the president shortly after the scandal broke, in which the president, in some detail, told Blumenthal that Lewinsky was a stalker — one sick little intern. Blumenthal is the White House’s Leaker in Chief, and sure enough, stories started to appear in the papers that Lewinsky was . . . a stalker.

Graham starts reading out Blumenthal’s testimony, and the air in the hearing room thickens. For the first time in hours Democrats are paying attention.

The minutes tick by, and Hyde announces: “The gentleman’s time has expired. The chair recognizes the gentlelady from California, Ms. Bono.”

And Bono says, “I yield my time to Mr. Graham,” and Graham continues without pause, reading the press clips about Lewinsky the stalker, including one in which Charlie Rangel, the New York Democrat, repeated the accusation.

The Democrats begin to stir. When Graham’s time is up again, another member yields his five minutes to Graham. “This is something that is more than consensual sex,” he’s saying. “This is something, in my opinion, ladies and gentlemen, where a high public official is using the trappings of his office, the White House, to go after a potential witness who possesses information that would hurt his political and legal interests.”

It is — finally! — a moment of great drama, electrifying, even.

Now, powerful men who use their positions to slander young women are a great bugbear of Democrats, as we all know, and by the time Graham is reaching a rhetorical climax they are indeed on their feet, appalled. But they’re appalled at Graham, not the president.

“Point of order!” shouts Barney Frank. “Mr. Chairman, a point of personal privilege,” hollers Maxine Waters. When order is restored she accuses Graham of sexism and especially of “trying to set [Lewinsky] up to be angry at the President of the United States in case she’s called as a witness.” This is fast thinking on Maxine’s part.

After the hearing concludes, and the hallways empty out, I find Frank sitting alone on a table outside the hearing room. I ask him what he thought of Graham’s accusations.

“The single most despicable thing I’ve ever seen in Congress,” he says.

Congressman, you’ve been in Congress almost twenty years. You mean this was the . . .

He stands up and points his finger. “The most despicable thing I’ve ever seen in Congress. To drag in a man of Charlie Rangel’s integrity . . .”

But what do you think of what he said?

“Graham? He’s obviously . . .”

No, the president. Why would the president tell Blumenthal all that?

“I don’t know what Blumenthal testified to.”

Well . . .

“And neither do you. Have you read his testimony?”

Sure.

“I do not know what Blumenthal testified to. Do you understand what I’m saying? Do we have some kind of language barrier here? I don’t know that the president said that.”

He said she was a stalker.

“Was she? Maybe she was. But to impugn Charlie Rangel, as though Charlie Rangel is some kind of dupe, as though he’s some poor dupe who can’t think for himself . . .”

Maybe the Republicans are right. Maybe there’s no point in asking questions any longer.

Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.