Investigating President Clinton - 20 February 1998

There are two – and only two – topics that absorb our days and some of our nights.

It seemed, a few days ago, we were close to an American-sponsored attack, an aerial attack, on Iraq and something close to a confession from Mr Clinton about the nature of his odd relationship with a young White House woman intern one, by the way, of 250 lowly White House aides.

That was less than a week ago. Today, although as I speak, both the United States Air Force and Monica Lewinsky might well have blown their stack overnight, as I speak, we seem neither quite on the verge of war in the Middle East nor of a confession from the White House.

Since I last talked about the White House personal scandal, I've tracked through the daily steps taken to protect one or other witness or potential witness in the Clinton-Lewinsky matter and I find that over 50 lawyers are involved, doing what American lawyers are meant to do. Either belligerently protecting somebody from prosecution or blocking the threatening legal moves of other lawyers or defying the opposition counsel or examining the law as it now stands and wondering how to bend it.

And now we have lawyers both inside and outside the game, threatening to prosecute the independent prosecutor, Mr Kenneth Starr, for his rough tactics in collecting evidence, such as wiring people so as to record their conversation with unwitting second persons.

The original taping of Monica Lewinsky without her knowledge was done in Maryland, where such a tactic is illegal. Nobody seems to have bothered much about that, since the ensuing tapes were so hot as to attract the attention of Mr Starr, the special counsel or prosecutor.

I might as well repeat now that this institution of a special prosecutor is only a quarter of a century old. One was appointed – with great resistance from President Nixon – to look into the murky business of Watergate, the midnight raid on Democratic headquarters inspired by Nixon, covered up by him, whose actual involvement from the beginning took over two years to expose and having resigned in disgrace, to avoid trial for impeachment and certain conviction.

Well after Nixon's going, Congress passed an Act setting up the institution of a special counsel in cases where there might be a suspicion of crime in the executive, that is the presidential branch of government.

The idea was admirable in the beginning, based on the sensible old Roman question: who shall police the policemen? In serious matters, like Watergate, better not have the President's resident prosecutor, the attorney general.

So we got used to the idea of a special counsel or prosecutor. He was called upon when that land deal the Clintons were involved in in their Arkansas days turned fishy and I believe that investigation is still not closed. Anyway two people, at least, have gone to gaol over it.

Then there was the even fishier story of the missing FBI files which turned up in the White House. Somebody better look into that. And then the attorney general denied a prosecutor over a scandal that called for a Senate investigation – the contribution of millions of dollars, many from Asia, to President Clinton's reelection campaign.

Much of that has been proved and subpoenas have gone flying, some suspects have got lost, either here or abroad and Mr Clinton and Vice President Gore have used a flock of lawyers to maintain that none of these millions were solicited expressly for Mr Clinton, even if that's where they wound up. However, win one, lose one.

Since the special prosecutor can poke his nose into any corner of the presidency, the White House, the Cabinet, federal judges, embassies, I assume anywhere that gives off a suspicious smell, Mr Starr has been free to move into the Paula Jones case.

She's the young lady who accused the President of a gross sexual approach in a hotel room in Little Rock, when he was governor. Mr Starr's association with Miss Lewinsky is very slender indeed. He heard about and heard her secret taping and what it was alleged to contain and thought she might be a useful character witness in the Paula Jones case. So he subpoenaed her to appear before the Grand Jury that's sitting on the Jones case.

I take a deep breath at this point, a breath of disbelief in a sentence I've just read in a Washington dispatch from an English correspondent saying that most Americans probably don't know what a special prosecutor is or even a Grand Jury.

Well Americans have now had 25 years' daily experience of the sleuthing of special prosecutors, six in Reagan's time, four already in Clinton's and there can hardly be an American over 18 who has not been called or sat on a Grand Jury.

On the other hand, I doubt any of my listeners in Britain has ever sat on a Grand Jury. I don't know about the Commonwealth, which immediately urges me to sketch out the fascinating history of the Grand Jury, of the brilliant, arrogant English lawyer who alone mounted a devastating attack on it and got it abandoned 84 years ago and abolished in Britain for ever.

But that can wait, best till the Paula Jones Grand Jury has decided, which is all Grand Juries have to do, whether there is a case. From the massive, suffocating coverage that Miss Lewinsky and her allegation has been given, you'd think we were coming to the end of a trial.

We have, in law, not yet decided whether it's worth a trial, but the feeling that we're deep inside an unprecedented presidential ordeal is due to two overlapping habits that have overwhelmed the press and the other media in the past 25 years or so.

One is the decision of serious newspapers to fall into the tabloid habit of printing and blowing up sexual allegations about public men and, in this country, the entirely new habit of leaking testimony given in a Grand Jury room. This is a criminal act, for a Grand Jury hearing is secret. The public prosecutor presents his case, the defendant, the accused is not even allowed a lawyer. He may sit outside for consultation.

How much more, then, is the Grand Jury Mr Starr's special creature. Mr Starr may wander far and wide, peering into every cranny, picking up anybody's tapes if they could serve his purpose and he can, and has, put on the witness stand at the Grand Jury hearing anybody he thinks could be a useful peripheral witness. Miss Lewinsky's mother, for instance, who from merely the visible, facial evidence of a drained woman coming out of the jury room, the Lewinsky mother had a brutal two days or more under Mr Starr's attentions.

The unrelieved harshness of these tactics has given Mr Starr the nickname of Inspector Javert, the police inquisitor who went so mercilessly after Jean Valjean. His qualifications as a neutral, disinterested judge are being questioned far and wide.

He's an ardent Republican, associated with the right and if there's one aim of his legal pursuit that becomes more glaringly clear every day, it is his determination to bring President Clinton down. This has recruited a whole new band of Clinton sympathisers.

When the president was faced, last weekend, with the suggestion, with the pleas of some of his friends, that he come forward and tell us all, to say what exactly was the nature of his attachment to a very, very minor young woman aide he gave presents to, he wrote to, he got his closest friend to procure a job for, when things went wrong in the White House and again at the Pentagon, and who once she was gone, was given access to the White House 37 times, the president's response to this plea has been to mobilise many of his old advisers, Cabinet office and cronies, from Arkansas, from his first administration and barricade himself behind batteries of lawyers.

So it looks now as if the defence of the realm, the Clinton realm, is deep in a last-ditch resistance to the special animus of the special prosecutor and knowledgeable people who were saying a month ago that the president might go within the week, are now predicting a long, hot summer and, at the quickest, the passing of testimony and a report from Mr Starr – he can't prosecute – to the House judiciary committee which then would have to go all over everything and decide, if then sitting as a Grand Jury, whether there is a case to be made for drafting articles of impeachment.

Is there evidence of high crimes and misdemeanours, as the Constitution defines them, so that such articles might then be passed on to the Senate, which then sits as a trial court with the president in the dock? Just now it looks like a long, long trail a-winding into the land of our dreams and our fears.

And how about Iraq? The administration took the brave step last Tuesday of holding a sort of New England town meeting, come one, come all, in the middle of the country, in Ohio.

Six hundred ordinary citizens gathered and posed questions about the plans for Iraq. Secretary Albright and Defense Secretary Cohen got much more than they bargained for – sharp questions, shrewd questions, full of misgivings about what aerial bombing would or could do. A small riot outside, inside a fractious booing mob that wants peace at any price.

It was a bad omen and, in the following days, turned out to be a blurred reflection of a country not at all united on a policy towards Saddam, as it was united and with the blessing of the United Nations and most of the Arab world, on the mission to get Saddam out of Kuwait.

The fact is, or was, as United Nations Secretary General Annan went to Baghdad, the administration was beginning to fear it might have more to lose at home, as well as in the Arab world, if it maintained its purpose of mounting a war, however limited, in Iraq.

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