WASHINGTON -- It was all fronts of a defense in a single day.
From morning to evening, President Clinton and his legal team demonstrated every method of counter-attack in the most perilous battle of his presidency.
It began at a prayer breakfast, with Clinton's lip-biting show of contrition and a single dramatic tear.
Then came the midday legal counter-attack, voiced by Clinton's lawyers in a 73-page rebuttal using finely calibrated logic. Later, those lawyers asserted before the cameras that independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr was simply trying to embarrass the president with his report.
And finally, at dusk, a presidential address at an Irish-American community gathering, with Clinton charming an incongruously jubilant crowd, using his folksy good humor and signature optimism.
After the lurid details of Starr's report, Clinton's defense has emerged as a combination of expansive apologies, political stage management and deft lawyerly argument. But the president's allies, including his lawyers, recognize that Clinton's fate ultimately will be decided not through courtroom arguments but through political and public persuasion.
Yesterday, however, was dominated by the evolving legal defense, which Clinton promised early in the day would be "vigorous." And it was. First, Clinton's private lawyer, David E. Kendall, and the White House counsel, Charles F. C. Ruff, outlined in their written rebuttal a rigid definition for the "high crimes and misdemeanors" that merit impeachment -- a definition that essentially rules out all transgressions short of acts such as treason.
In writing, Clinton's team does not dwell on apologies. The rebuttal instead rejects the most serious accusations by the independent counsel: that Clinton committed perjury, obstructed justice, tampered with witnesses and abused the power of his office.
Legal argument
While Clinton told the audience at the emotional prayer breakfast in the White House that "legal language must not obscure the fact that I have done wrong," there could be no language more legal than the words his lawyers used to define perjury.
In its rebuttal, Clinton's legal team insisted that -- despite the graphic details of the Starr report -- the president's testimony about his relationship with Lewinsky in the Paula Corbin Jones case and to a federal grand jury did not constitute perjury. Noting that a literally truthful answer that implies a lie is not the same thing as a lie, the Clinton lawyers argue that testimony that is "fundamentally ambiguous cannot, as a matter of law, be perjurious."
Legal experts say the White House is defending what his lawyers say are Clinton's technical truths to prove a point: This sort of perjury is not as dangerous or ultimately as harmful to the country as the lies that led the House Judiciary Committee to approve articles of impeachment against President Richard M. Nixon in 1974.
"You have to get House members thinking in terms other than, 'He lied, therefore he should be impeached,' " said Glenn Ivey, a former lawyer for Senate Democrats during the Whitewater hearings who now teaches law at the University of Maryland. "I think the White House needs to get them to recognize that the bar needs to be higher than that."
As the House considers whether to move on with impeachment proceedings, Clinton's lawyers argue that Watergate was worlds apart from, and ultimately far more dangerous than the Starr allegations.
The Clinton rebuttal document was completed in a hasty all-night session after Republicans refused to deliver the Starr report to the White House even a few minutes ahead of releasing it publicly. But it is hardly a slapdash document -- it anticipates every variety of Starr attack and is peppered with barbs directed at the independent counsel.
When Clinton's lawyers write that Starr was seeking the truth, they put that word in quotation marks. The rebuttal describes Starr's investigation as "amorphous, languorous, expensive and seemingly interminable." The lawyers contend that Starr's team left no stone unturned -- "or (we believe) unthrown" -- in the investigation.
The rebuttal goes on to accuse Starr of manipulating the timing of the investigation to trap the president and illegally broaden the reach of the independent counsel's inquiry, beyond the Whitewater land deal -- and beyond the Jones sexual misconduct case.
His lawyers' legal arguments aside, Clinton can do little to soften the impact of the salacious details in the report that are likely to embarrass or even disgust the public. Even so, Clinton's lawyers do take on some of the less graphic accusations by Starr with some details of their own.
The Clinton rebuttal asserts that Lewinsky never suggested that the infamous "talking points" -- which sought to influence Linda R. Tripp's testimony in the Jones case -- came from the White House, and that the independent counsel tried to smear Clinton by leaking otherwise to the media. The rebuttal lists 19 news clippings suggesting that the talking points came from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
On other key points related to questions of perjury and obstruction of justice, the Clinton lawyers contend that the president never instructed his personal secretary, Betty Currie, to collect gifts that the president had given to Lewinsky to avoid being turned over to the grand jury.
The rebuttal also states that any help Clinton or his allies gave to Lewinsky in a New York job search was rather perfunctory and offered as a courtesy, not as an effort to buy Lewinsky's silence about her relationship with the president.
More broadly, the rebuttal tries to dampen impeachment talk in Congress.
"The simple reality of this situation is that the House is being confronted with evidence of a man's efforts to keep an inappropriate relationship private," the lawyers wrote.
The allegations are "extravagant attempts to transform a case involving inappropriate personal behavior into one of public misconduct," the lawyers wrote.
Scant details
Clinton's team has offered scant details on the Lewinsky-Clinton relationship. But the rebuttal describes Clinton as feeling "responsible" for Lewinsky after the former intern was transferred from the White House to the Pentagon in April 1996. The rebuttal describes Clinton inquiring with the deputy personnel director at the White House about other possible jobs for Lewinsky, although the former intern never returned for a job there.
The rebuttal suggests that the Clinton-Lewinsky relationship fell short of a full-blown affair. Clinton's lawyers object to the Starr report's use of the term "18-month relationship" to describe the Clinton-Lewinsky relationship, choosing instead to depict it as encounters that occurred sporadically "on certain occasions in early 1996 and once in 1997."
The lawyers went on to defend Clinton against accusations that he wrongfully invoked attorney-client privilege or tried to bar Secret Service agents from testifying. It concludes by asserting that Starr's team overstepped legal bounds in pursuing its case.
But clearly, public attention was far more focused on Starr's report yesterday than on the point-for-point legalese offered by Clinton's team. Even so, there was one thing the independent counsel could not offer yesterday that Clinton could: An old-style political rally, complete with thunderous standing ovations and the embrace of a crowd.
"Mr. President, there are no summer soldiers or sunshine patriots here today," Brian O'Dwyer told Clinton at the reception for Irish-Americans early in the evening.
Toward the end of his speech, as daylight dimmed outside the brightly lighted tent, Clinton looked at the crowd with gratitude: "Hillary and I will never forget what you've done for us today, and I suspect you know."
Pub Date: 9/12/98