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The Impeachment of Bill Clinton - 20 Years Later spectator.org/the-clintons-v…

The Impeachment of Bill Clinton — 20 Years Later
It was 20 years ago this month that the House of Representatives impeached President Bill Clinton.

The vote took place December 19, 1998, with two of four articles approved by the House, the first on grounds that Clinton had lied to a grand jury (228-206), and the second on grounds that Clinton had obstructed justice (221-212).

He became only the second president (the other in 1868) to be impeached.

At the start of the year, January 17, 1998, Clinton had given a sworn deposition flatly denying a “sexual relationship,” “sexual affair,” or “sexual relations” with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

The deposition took six hours, producing a transcript of 215 pages. Among the curiosities was the president’s striking amnesia over seven women listed as various Jane Does.

All were women that William Jefferson Clinton, retroactive official Father of the MeToo Movement, employed as sexual receptacles — on company time, and usually with the assistance of the state and its workers.

The deposition included sundry, complex discourses over what the master of the parsed word considered to be “sexual relations,” particularly in regard to the soon-to-be-famous “Ms. Jane Doe 6.”

So it came to pass that, on January 26, speaking in the Roosevelt Room at the White House, Bill Clinton doubled down, this time for all the world to see. It would be the signature moment of a perverse presidency. When we think of Ronald Reagan, we think of “Tear down this wall.”

When we think of John F. Kennedy, we think of “Ask not what.” When we think of Bill Clinton, it was his notorious words on this day that remain seared in our collective memory of the Man from Hope.

Speaking at 10:37 a.m., Bill was, in a stroke of supreme irony, flanked by Al Gore to his left and Hillary to his right. (Who says the devil doesn’t have a sense of humor?) Clinton began the occasion with glee.

“Thank you very much,” were his opening words to a room of supporters gathered to celebrate his and Hillary’s and Gore’s new after-school initiative for America’s children. “Let me thank all of you who are here,” said the grateful president.

“Many of us have been working together now for 20 years on a lot of these issues, and this is a very happy day for us.” He proceeded to “thank the First Lady” and then Al Gore and Tipper Gore for their work for America’s families.

Clinton smiled throughout the performance before wrapping up on a stern note. After about a dozen references to keeping America’s youth “healthy and happy and safe,” the president turned serious. He pivoted to a sober statement about some woman — “that woman.”

Standing at the presidential dais and wedged between his wife and vice president, Clinton glared:

“Now, I have to go back to work on my State of the Union speech. And I worked on it until pretty late last night. But I want to say one thing to the American people.”

“I want you to listen to me…. I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time — never. These allegations are false. And I need to go back to work for the American people.”

With that, the 42nd president stomped away, a smiling, satisfied Hillary marching behind him, an inspired, satisfied Al Gore walking aside him.

The president’s performance was impressive, calling to mind a trenchant assessment of him by fellow Democrat Bob Kerry: “Clinton’s an unusually good liar. Unusually good.”

He almost looked like he was telling the truth. I remember it like yesterday.

The impeachment of Bill Clinton began not with that woman Monica but with another woman named Paula; actually, with a wider flock of Monicas and Paulas scattered throughout Arkansas.

The formal process that would lead to Clinton’s impeachment started with Paula Jones as the plaintiff in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas Western Division, with Monica Lewinsky’s name appearing on Jones’ witness list on December 5, 1997.

The faces and names from the past of Boy Clinton, as R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. forever christened him, were finally coming back to haunt him. Monica’s name in Paula’s suit was the tawdry consummation of Bill Clinton’s behavior eventually catching up with him.

The details of the articles in The American Spectator are many and rich. What they show about Bill Clinton is bad enough.

What they likewise tell about Hillary is also shocking, from her horribly foul mouth to the longstanding allegations — based on eyewitness, on-the-record testimony by the state troopers — that she and Vince Foster had a running affair.

“I remember one time when Bill had been quoted in the morning paper saying something she didn’t like,” said one of the troopers, Larry Patterson. “I came into the mansion and he was standing at the top of the stairs and she was standing at the bottom screaming.”

“She has a garbage mouth on her, and she was calling him motherf—er, c—sucker, and everything else. I went into the kitchen, and the cook, Miss Emma, turned to me and said, ‘The devil’s in that woman.’”

This account of Hillary is far from atypical.

Over 30 hours interviewing four state troopers, two of which, Larry Patterson and Roger Perry, courageously went on the record with breathtaking candor.

It is crucial to understand that these Arkansas troopers — in both the Brock and Wattenberg articles — were not a bunch of bumpkins who had just rolled off the turnip truck.

They were the cream of the crop, among the highest ranking in the state, with decades of veteran experience.

“We lied for him and helped him cheat on his wife,” said Patterson of Bill Clinton, “and he treated us like dogs.”

He treated them worse than that. Does your dog pimp for you?

“The troopers said their ‘official’ duties included facilitating Clinton’s cheating on his wife,” wrote Brock.

“This meant that, on the state payroll and using state time, vehicles, and resources, they were instructed by Clinton on a regular basis to approach women and to solicit their telephone numbers for the governor;”

“...to drive him in state vehicles to rendezvous points and guard him during sexual encounters; to secure hotel rooms and other meeting places for sex; to lend Clinton their state cars so he could slip away and visit women unnoticed;”

“... to deliver gifts from Clinton to various women (some of whom, like [Gennifer] Flowers, had state jobs); and to help Clinton cover up his activities by keeping tabs on Hillary’s whereabouts and lying to Hillary about her husband’s whereabouts.”

Trooper Larry Patterson recalled what would soon become a classic in Clinton lore. Clinton had just finished fulfilling himself with one of his women. He justified it to Patterson: “he told me that he had researched the subject in the Bible and oral sex isn’t considered adultery”

As former Democratic speechwriter-turned-pundit Chris Matthews put it, Bill Clinton “didn’t decide to tell the truth, he got caught.” Yes, chimed in legal analyst Stuart Taylor, Clinton was “a fundamentally dishonest man,” who “cannot be trusted.”

As for the wife he said he misled, Hillary first learned the sloppy truth from lawyers, not Bill, who had told her on August 13. She then began absorbing the treacherous details, published widely in the press and in the Starr Report delivered to Congress on September 9, 1998.

There had been 18 months of gifts and at least a half-dozen sexual encounters between Bill and Monica, one while on the phone with a congressman, another with Bill maneuvering a favorite cigar as a sexual instrument.

They occurred between November 15, 1995 and March 29, 1997, the peak of Bill Clinton’s reelection campaign.

The first sexual encounter took place on the same day that Clinton signed a “Family Week” proclamation.

On that November 15, Lewinsky, walking through the hall on her way to the ladies’ room, spotted the president of the United States and greeted him by lifting her jacket to flash him the straps of her thong underwear — what the girl later winsomely described as a “little smile.”

Hillary’s husband invited the intern back to his office.

Another infamous episode unfolded on Easter Sunday, April 7, 1996. After Bill spent the morning at church, he headed back to the White House. He was in the Oval Office all afternoon, from 2:21 to 7:48 PM.

He telephoned Monica at her home, clearly in need — of something. He told her to come to the White House. When she got there, she told the secret service officer that she needed to deliver papers to the president. The officer admitted her to the Oval Office. It was 4:56 PM.

Four months later, in December 1998, the House would pass two articles of impeachment, delayed only slightly when an audacious President Clinton smoked off a military strike against Saddam Hussein. It was universally suspected as a wag-the-dog stunt.

It did not, however, delay the Republican House members.

The most respected voice in the impeachment proceedings was Congressman Henry Hyde, admired on both sides of the aisle and hailed for his fairness and decency. Hyde passionately argued the case for impeachment based less on sexuality than illegality.

“It’s not a question of sex,” said Hyde in his brilliant floor speech before the historic vote. “It’s a question of lying under oath. The issue is perjury, lying under oath. The issue is obstruction of justice.”

Actually, it was all of those things. Bill Clinton had a sexual problem as well as a legal problem. He had trouble with truth throughout his personal and public life. He had a problem keeping his hands to himself and cajoling women to put their hands (and whatever else) on him.

His warped legal-moral ethics prompted him to enlist the hands of the state and its functionaries to lie for him, cover up for him, obstruct for him, and, for all intents and purposes, practically pimp for him.

These problems had clear roots and warning signs way back in Arkansas. The wily days of Boy Clinton in Little Rock in the 1980s came back to bite President Clinton in the White House in the 1990s.