What’s remarkable so far about an ongoing FX miniseries about the Bill Clinton impeachment saga is how accurately it portrays aspects of the legal cases.
My colleague Tiana Lowe has deftly limned how the series makes a lot of “thoughtful choices” about how to portray Clinton inamorata Monica Lewinsky and how obviously guilty Clinton was of “systemic sexual harassment.” Likewise, Impeachment: American Crime Story really does a good job of showing, in a way seamlessly woven into the narrative, that various aspects of the former president’s behavior really did appear to constitute, yes, crimes.
Granted, so far I’ve seen only five of the planned 10 episodes. Yet as someone who helped investigate the Clintons as a congressional staffer and then wrote about them for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and the Wall Street Journal, I have been surprised that this series does not do Hollywood’s usual whitewashing of the Clinton record.
The unfortunate Clinton aide Vince Foster and White House counsel Bernie Nussbaum are portrayed as troubled by shady dealings for which they were expected to cover. Clinton is portrayed not just as a cad but as a highly calculating, manipulative sleazeball, one trying to suborn perjury by insinuation and manifest implication. Onetime Lewinsky friend and witness Linda Tripp is portrayed — whether fairly or not, I don’t know — as an odious personality but one who actually does have reason to be appalled at Clintonworld’s rampant immorality.
Meanwhile, the parallel legal cases involving, first, independent counsel Ken Starr (on the Whitewater land development deal and related matters) and, second, Clinton harassment accuser Paula Jones, are portrayed in step-by-step developments that viewers can readily follow. In a key meeting of the Starr legal team, Starr is portrayed as sort of creepily religious (Hollywood almost always represents faith as creepy) but still with integrity. While he says he strongly believes Clinton is guilty of crimes, he also says that as they are “one witness short” of being able to prove it, he does not think it right to make a criminal referral to Congress.
Quite accurately, the youngest member of Starr’s team, future Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, is portrayed as careful and honest, advising the rest of the team that it would be wrong to make a referral without positive proof. This comports not only with significant other reporting, including by famed investigator Bob Woodward (for whom Kavanaugh surely was a major, self-protecting source), but with my own experience. As I was writing a Whitewater piece (before the Lewinsky affair came to light) commissioned by the Wall Street Journal, Kavanaugh’s superiors asked him (on background) to walk me through some of the already-public, but significantly dense, evidence. I was struck then by how meticulously he highlighted evidence and context that tended to make the Clintons look less guilty of several allegations. He was studiously fair-minded.
Meanwhile, the series notes one of the key legal elements so often lost in the shuffle over the years, namely that the involvement of Clinton fixer Vernon Jordan provided a direct nexus between the Lewinsky situation and the far-flung Whitewater probe. In short, Starr was not just an Inspector Javert with a prurient interest in illicit sex but somebody chasing reasonably connected legal leads.
As Impeachment takes care to have Starr note, the Whitewater probe already had secured convictions of 12 people (eventually 14), including Arkansas Gov. Jim Guy Tucker (an otherwise nice guy, but that’s another story), for very real crimes. The central Whitewater investigation was legitimate, and both Clintons were lucky to emerge without criminal charges filed against them.
To any reasonably open-minded person, it has been obvious for decades that Bill and Hillary Clinton are corrupt. Appropriately, the series Impeachment does nothing to allay that reality.
