During his January 17 deposition in the Paula Jones civil suit, President Clinton was asked this rather simple question: “At any time, were you and Monica Lewinsky alone together in the Oval Office?” Clinton answered, “I don’t recall,” and then launched a longish speculation about how it was “possible” that she had brought him documents to sign “once or twice” on weekends. The Jones lawyers next tried several times to pin down the president on whether he and Lewinsky had ever been alone together in the hallway adjacent to the Oval Office. Clinton responded that Lewinsky had once been in the hallway to deliver a pizza — but “I don’t believe she was there alone” and “I have no other recollection” of such a circumstance. “I don’t believe we were alone in the hallway, no.”
One more attempt, then. “At any time, have you and Monica Lewinsky ever been alone together in any room in the White House?” Clinton squirmed a bit at this all-encompassing query. “I think I testified to that earlier,” he finally said. “I think that there is a, it is — I have no specific recollection” of any encounter with the woman beyond a “general memory” of the pizza and documents, and “I don’t remember” anything the two had ever said to each other.
But by the testimony of Monica Lewinsky — and Betty Currie, six current or former Secret Service officers, and a Navy steward — she and Clinton were indeed alone together, in and around the Oval Office, on many occasions over a two-year period ending late last year. Less than three weeks before Clinton’s January deposition, they had a long private conversation there about Lewinsky’s subpoena in the Jones case. And seven months after Clinton’s deposition, at his grand-jury appearance on August 17, the president himself suddenly remembered that he had done something wrong “when I was alone with Ms. Lewinsky” in the White House.
In other words, the memory lapse about being alone with Lewinsky — claimed by Bill Clinton under oath on January 17 — was a lie. And there were many, many other memory lapses, each of them, too, a lie.
In the Jones deposition, the president was asked when he had last spoken to Lewinsky. He replied, “I don’t remember.” Had she already been served a subpoena at the time? “I don’t know.” Had Clinton ever mentioned to Lewinsky the possibility that she might be called to testify in the Jones litigation? “I’m not sure”; he may have made an innocent joke about it in her presence. What had been Lewinsky’s reaction to this purported joke? “Nothing that I can recall.” Had the president ever given gifts to his intern? “I don’t recall.” A hat pin? “I could have” given her a hat pin, but “I don’t remember.”
All this forgetfulness was false. Most of it is proven false by Clinton’s own subsequent grand-jury testimony. He did “remember a conversation about the possibility of her testifying,” the president acknowledged on August 17. There were at least three such conversations in December 1997, and about the last of them Clinton now concedes, “I knew by then, of course, that she had gotten a subpoena.” At this final meeting, Clinton and Lewinsky explicitly discussed the hat pin. And then, the president told the grand jury, he gave her additional gifts — just 20 days before he swore in federal court that he couldn’t specifically remember ever doing so.
Bill Clinton’s memory, it appears, is unique in the annals of cognitive psychology. The president does not dispute that twice in the days immediately following his Jones deposition he summoned Betty Currie to the Oval Office and made her listen to an (inaccurate) account of his relationship with Lewinsky: e.g., “We were never really alone.” Clinton was not here coaching Currie with answers to questions she might later be asked, he assured the grand jury. He was merely trying “to understand what the facts were” and “quickly refresh my memory.” Our president works very hard to remember things that aren’t true, and is content to forget a great number of other things that are.
In fact, the only matter about which his memory has ostensibly functioned with almost super-human precision is sex. At his Jones deposition in January, he could not have been more certain that he had “never” had an “extramarital sexual affair” or “sexual relations” or “an affair” with Monica Lewinsky. And it was “absolutely true” that they had not had a “sexual relationship.” And it “would not be the truth” if anyone said otherwise.
Before the grand jury in August, of course, the president abruptly recovered his memory of “inappropriate intimate contact” with the young lady, his magic phrase for repeated acts of oral sex. But he also emphatically remembered that his earlier, finely parsed sworn statements on the subject were entirely honest. When the Jones lawyers asked him whether he’d ever had sex with Lewinsky — “as I understood this term to be defined” and as “most ordinary Americans” would understand it — Clinton did not, he now claims, think they were asking him about fellatio. He thought, instead, that they were asking him about anything and everything except that.
The president’s lawyers are the only people alive who pretend to believe that Bill Clinton believes he was not questioned concerning oral sex during his Jones deposition. And a disbelief in Clinton’s asserted state of mind while under oath, they insist, is not enough to establish that his testimony constitutes criminal perjury. Courtroom answers that are “literally true,” however unresponsive to questioning, are not perjurious, the White House points out. And answers to “fundamentally ambiguous” questions “can never be perjury.” And “nobody can be convicted of perjury based on only one other person’s testimony.”
As applied to the Lewinsky scandal, this is a thoroughly dishonest portrait of the perjury statutes. The case law is crystal clear. The literal truth of a witness’s testimony is not judged against his private interpretation of reality; words must be analyzed “in their common sense and usage.” A question asked of that witness does not become “ambiguous” simply because he later invents some alternative linguistic universe in which more than one factual answer might be possible. The so-called “two witness” rule for determining perjury is not in force when feigned forgetfulness is alleged; “false memory” perjury can be proved by circumstantial evidence alone. And no witness or evidence is required at all when two or more sworn statements are flatly inconsistent — when, for example, you claim to have forgotten something in January and then remember it in August.
The president of the United States is guilty of systematic, bald-faced perjury. Which fact, it seems to us, is all anyone needs to know about what Congress and the nation must do now.
Washington is nervous over the prospect of impeachment. Many in the city, their eyes on the polls, would welcome some workable second choice. And so a grand-compromise “plea bargain” deal is now in the air — recently endorsed even by the New York Times, whose editorial page has all year long been an honorably stalwart critic of the president’s appalling behavior. The deal would work like this: Clinton would confess to perjury. He would be censured (and perhaps fined) by Congress. He would be promised, in return, that he could retain the presidency, that Kenneth Starr’s Lewinsky probe would be suspended, and that Clinton would never be indicted for any crime revealed by that probe.
This deal is not so tidy as it looks. Congress has no power over the independent counsel’s office, and so cannot assure the president that Kenneth Starr will cease and desist. Congress cannot unilaterally fine any citizen, including the president; that would be an unconstitutional “bill of attainder.” So Clinton would have to formally accept such a penalty — and thereby enshrine an extraconstitutional congressional disciplinary power over every future president. The presidency as an institution would be permanently weakened, even more than it has been already.
And absent such a fine, censure would become a purely rhetorical reprimand of Clinton — a mere slap on the wrist. Which would be worse than useless. Presidential adultery, the White House now lamely but correctly contends, is not an impeachable “high crime or misdemeanor.” But repeated presidential perjury surely is. An American president leads the nation by deed and word. If his deeds are repulsive and his words cannot be trusted, then he cannot lead. And if our politics makes such an official judgment about the president’s character, but then leaves him in office anyway, it will be sanctioning a future in which White House perjury — and a chief executive without effective authority — is tolerable.
It is not. The country needs a real president — a new president, Albert Gore — as soon as possible. Congress should provide us one. Clinton must be removed from the White House.
David Tell, for the Editors
