The Breach

by Peter Baker

  Republicans were steaming. This professor from an ivory tower had just called them zealots and fanatics in their own hearing room. Ruff and Craig winced. Whatever good will Craig might have engendered with his measured introduction was quickly lost. Instead, he found himself being peppered with questions, an eventuality he had not prepared for. Craig had thought the committee members would question his witnesses, not the lawyer who introduced them. But now Craig was on the spot, deflecting barbed GOP inquiries. Several Republicans took note of his concession that the president was evasive and maddening and pressed Craig to explain why that was not the same thing as lying under oath.

  Now, Mr. Craig, did he lie to the American people when he said, I never had sex with that woman? demanded Bob Inglis, a lame-duck conservative Republican from South Carolina who had just lost a bid for the Senate and would leave Congress in the next few weeks. Did he lie?

  He certainly misled and deceived Craig started to answer.

  Inglis cut in. Well, wait a minute, now. Did he lie?

  the American people. He misled them and did not tell the truth at that moment.

  Inglis was not satisfied. Did he lie to the American people when he said, I never had sex with that woman?

  You know, he doesnt believe he did. And because of the

  He doesnt

  May I explain, Congressman?

  He doesnt believe that he lied?

  No, he does not believe that he lied, because his notion of what sex is, is what the dictionary definition is. It is in fact something you may not agree with, but in his own mind, his definition was not

  Inglis was virtually apoplectic. This is an amazing thing, that you now sit before us and youre taking back all of hisall of his apologies. Youre taking them all back, arent you?

  No, Im not.

  In their seats behind him, Craigs fellow White House lawyers grew increasingly nervous. Craig was not supposed to respond to questions; Ruff would do that at the close of their case the next day. Tell them Ruff is coming! the other lawyers whispered at Craig. He tried, but it was not enough to satisfy the committee members.

  Still, while Craig was getting battered, the White House team was about to get an important break. Hyde, who cherished his reputation for fairness and hated that it had been ripped apart, decided to let the Democrats offer their censure resolution for a vote in committee. He did not think it had any chance to passhe had already come down formally against it himselfbut it would at least keep the Democrats from bellyaching that they did not get the chance. As the hearing droned on that Tuesday, Hydes chief aide, Tom Mooney, found Julian Epstein, his Democratic counterpart, and told him the committee would consider and vote on the articles of impeachment Thursday and Friday, staying all night if they had to. If you want censure, Mooney added, then John Conyers would have to send a letter formally requesting it. This was a major breakthrough, Epstein realized. If Hyde allowed a vote on censure in committee, it established a precedent for allowing a vote on the floor.

  After the days hearings ended, Clinton attended a dinner where he was feted with leaders from Northern Ireland as peacemakers for their role in forging the Good Friday accords. Across the ballroom at the Omni Shoreham Hotel, Clinton spotted Congressman Peter T. King, a maverick Republican from New York who had been outspoken in his opposition to impeachment and had been working with White House aides to battle Tom DeLay and The Campaign. Clinton and King had gotten to know each other well during years of work on the Northern Ireland conflict. King had become so identified with the Catholic cause there that Irish nationalist leader Gerry Adams liked to call him Sinn Feins congressman in Washington.

  Clinton told Susan Brophy, his legislative liaison who was sitting at Kings table, to arrange a meeting at 10 P.M. following the dinner. When they met backstage, Clinton and King talked for a few minutes about the Irish peace process and the recent troubles that had emerged in Belfast, then the president turned to impeachment and asked what could be done. The president said he had noticed that Al DAmato, the New York senator just defeated for reelection, had come out against impeachment and wondered whether King had anything to do with that.

  Yes, he had asked Al to make the statement as a personal favor, King replied, and in return promised to pass along this message to the president: Tell your friend in the White House even though he came into New York four times against me, Im still doing this for him.

  Clinton laughed. Ive always liked Al, he said, overlooking the enmity he had harbored during DAmatos Senate Whitewater hearings and his jubilation when the senator lost reelection the month before. King suggested Clinton should call DAmato the next day to thank him. Maybe that would motivate the senator to call his friends in the New York House delegation. Clinton agreed.

  Then King laid out his assessment of the situation for the president. The vote was still very much in play, but Clinton had to find a way to reach out to the undecided Republicans. The combination of DeLay pushing for impeachment and the impression that the president was defying Congress with his answers to the eighty-one questions had made the vote closer than it would have otherwise been.

  Clinton grew irritated. His answers to the eighty-one questions were honest, he insisted. The president was clearly aggravated that anyone could suggest otherwise. He stated in those answers that his previous sworn testimony had been true and misleading, which was not a crime, he explained. He went on for several minutes in defense of his testimony and response to Congress.

  Like Tim Roemer the night before, King finally interrupted. With all respect, Mr. President, I know you believe this, but most members of Congress think its bullshit. Whether its fair or not, the reality is that these undecided Republicans think you are trying to screw the Congress, and you must accept that. Clinton had to figure out what undecided Republicans wanted him to say, because at this point he probably only had one more shot at it, King said.

  Clinton grew emotional again. Dont the people in Congress realize what I have gone through the last three months? Do they think this has been a walk in the park? Im not just trying to save my ass. . . . Just because I come to work every day and keep my head up doesnt mean this isnt tearing me apart. I have to act that way because I am the president. Clinton, sitting in a chair opposite King, grabbed the congressmans knee several times to emphasize his point.

  King said he sympathized. But the president should reach out to some moderate Republicans, such as Congressmen Michael N. Castle of Delaware, who was interested in finding a censure solution, and Jack Quinn of New York, who had always been supportive of Clinton.

  The president said he was convinced that if he telephoned members, some Republicans would claim he was trying to pressure them. They would have news conferences and Clinton would be embarrassed.

  That shouldnt be the case with Castle, King said, given that he and Clinton knew each other when they were both governors of their small states.

  Clinton reminisced for a moment about how in the late 1980s he and Castle had worked across party lines together on education initiatives with Congress and how much he had enjoyed that. During the final markup of legislation in the House, Clinton recalled sitting in to help the drafting.

  I dont even know if that was legal, the president joked.

  Make sure Ken Starr doesnt hear about that or hell go after you on that also, King said, laughing.

  But Clinton looked at him as if he did not hear, so King repeated that Castle would be key because he regularly spoke with nine or ten moderates.

  Eventually, the talk turned to the Senate and what a trial there might look like. The president gave a sardonic prediction of a trial supervised by the senator from West Virginia. Bob Byrd has been waiting for this all his life, Clinton said, strangely amused at the prospect. He can give long speeches about the Constitution and impeachment. I can just see him walking around the Senate. Hell just love it.

  Clinton mentioned that he heard that Larry Flynt, the publisher of Hustler magazine who had been advertising a $1 m
illion bounty for evidence of congressional adultery, was going to make sensational disclosures about Republicans, including some on the House Judiciary Committee.

  King said he had heard eleven or twelve might be named.

  That would be terrible, Clinton replied. He said he did not want anyone else to go through what he had.

  Im afraid thats where its leading, King replied.

  Then, as if not wanting the evening to finish on such a sober topic as impeachment, Clinton abruptly switched the subject to football.

  Isnt Doug Flutie great? he asked.

  On the second day of the White House defense on Wednesday, December 9, the Clinton team had a small surprise in store for the Republicansone of their own. In recent days, the presidents advisers had been hunting around the country for a prominent Republican to join them at the witness tableanyone with an R after his name. They considered former senators Warren Rudman and Jack Danforth. Greg Craig called Lowell P. Weicker Jr., a maverick who served on the Watergate investigating committee while in the Senate, but he did not accept the invitation. Finally the White House recruited William F. Weld, a Justice Department official in the Reagan administration who just recently stepped down as the Republican governor of Massachusetts. In keeping with the Watergate theme, Weld had worked on the House staff during the Nixon impeachment alongside Hillary Clinton. Predictably unpredictable, though, Weld had a little surprise for his friends at the White House too. When his turn at the microphone came up, he presented a plan to punish Clinton short of impeachment. In addition to censure, Weld suggested, Congress should force the president to agree to pay a fine of hundreds of thousands of dollars, sign an acknowledgment of wrongdoing, and take his chances with possible prosecution in criminal court. White House aides looked at each other when Weld rolled it out, but they were not unhappy. If he wanted to play broker, that was fine with them.

  Besides, by this point, the White House had all but dispensed with the public fiction that it was agnostic on censure. It had become an article of conventional wisdom in Washington that Clinton would eagerly accept it, even if the covert negotiations involving Ruff, Hyde, and Lloyd Cutler remained a closely guarded secret. After Weld and other experts were finished, Ruff took over the presentation to the Judiciary Committee and for the first time in a public forum openly invited censure. In a discussion of the charge of grand jury perjury, Ruff said it boiled down to a he-said, she-said conflict over whether Clinton touched certain parts of Lewinskys body. If you believe he acted in this fashion, you ought to censure him in whatever fashion seems most appropriate, Ruff said, but you cannot overturn the will of the people, even if you find that there is clear and convincing evidencewhich I do not think you canthat the president was wrong and Monica Lewinsky was right on that point.

  In making his case before the committee, Ruff provided a sharp contrast to the image of an acid-tongued Clinton defender. He was low-key, thoughtful, deferentialthe anti-Carville. I truly do not mean to speak unkindly of the independent counsel, he said at one point. Ruff walked the committee members through the case as he saw it, pointing out the holes he had found while offering concessions much like Craigs maddening description of the day before.

  Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner, the second-ranking Judiciary Republican, pressed Ruff right from the start to say whether the president had lied under oathyes or no. Ruff resolutely refused to be drawn in, choosing his own, more deliberate words to characterize the presidents statements.

  But did he lie? Sensenbrenner demanded.

  I have no doubt that he walked up to a line that he thought he understood, answered Ruff, who appeared uncomfortable trying to walk a line of his own. Reasonable peopleand you maybe have reached this conclusioncould determine that he crossed over that line and that what for him was truthful but misleading or nonresponsive and misleading or evasive was, in fact, false. But in his mindand thats the heart and soul of perjuryhe thought and he believed that what he was doing was being evasive but truthful.

  By conceding that reasonable people could see Clintons testimony as perjury, Ruff had employed the artful language the speechwriters had been trying to get the president to use. Ruff had presented the strongest case to date for the president and impressed even some of Clintons critics. If you guys win, it will be because of this man, Hyde told Julian Epstein during a break.

  For a moment, it appeared as if Hyde might be rethinking the matter. If so, it did not last long. Toward the end of the day, even before Ruff was finished testifying, GOP committee aides started handing out copies of their draft articles of impeachment. Congressman Bobby Scott had set the trap earlier in the week by complaining that Democrats needed to see the proposed articles well in advance of voting on them. Having let themselves be goaded into handing out the articles before concluding the White House defense hearing, Republicans were offering the Democrats another powerful argument in the partisan defensehow fair could the majority have been when they passed around the impeachment articles without even hearing all of the testimony? That did not stop the Democrats from producing their own proposal amid the hearings. Rick Bouchers censure resolution was also given out to the members and the media before the meeting was over. Hydes favorable appraisal of Ruff aside, the actual hearings had done nothing to change anyones mind in either camp.

  When Tom DeLay heard that Hyde had informally agreed to give the Democrats a vote on censure, he went into a rage. How could Hyde have done that? What was he thinking? He had just knocked out the legs from under them. This would give the Democrats an excuse to argue for a floor vote on censureand a powerful weapon to use to attack the Republican leadership if it refused.

  Are you kidding? DeLay demanded when his aides told him. Get your asses down there and find out whats going on.

  DeLay aides Tony Rudy and Mike Scanlon rushed over to the Rayburn Building as the hearing was still going on and began corralling Republican committee staff members in a last-ditch effort to get Hyde to change his mind. But it was too late. Within a few minutes, Hyde publicly announced his decision to allow the censure vote.

  If DeLay had known what Asa Hutchinson was doing, he would have been even more concerned. On his own, Hutchinson was looking for a possible out. During the hearings, he had run into Howard Berman, the California Democrat who had been part of the breakfast club with Hutchinson, and suggested that one alternative might be for the judge in the Paula Jones case, U.S. District Judge Susan Webber Wright, to step in and punish Clinton using civil sanctions such as a large fine.

  Howard, if the judge would hold a hearing on contemptthere has to be accountabilitythat would be a form of accountability, and then we wouldnt have to have the impeachment, Hutchinson said.

  Berman seized on the idea as a reasonable compromise. Clinton would still be taken to task without the disproportionate response of impeachment. Well, what should we do? Get on the phone with the judge?

  But Hutchinson instantly retreated. He was more thinking aloud than proposing a specific solution. The plan was clearly unworkable; the legislature could hardly intervene with the judiciary to get an executive sanctioned. Besides, Hutchinson realized, it was probably too late.

  With all minds on the Judiciary Committee seemingly made up by now, the summations by two opposing investigators on Thursday, December 10, were aimed instead at the general public and the thirty or so swing House Republicans who would decide the issue on the floor.

  Abbe Lowell went first. Feeling that too many cooks had spoiled his earlier presentations to the committee, Lowell decided against showing his plans to all sixteen members of the Democratic caucus. Thus liberated, Lowell came up with a sharper, more coherent closing argument that attacked the majoritys conclusions in large part by calling the prosecutions own witnesses as his own. For the first time, he questioned Monica Lewinskys credibility, quoting grand jury testimony from friends and others that showed she had lied to them about some aspects of her relationship, such as a false claim that she had once had lunch with Hillary C
linton. He quoted a decade-old statement by Hyde during the Iran-contra scandal that not all lying was necessarily the same. And he mocked the notion that Clinton was lying when he said he could not recall certain things by showing the committee a wickedly effective, MTV-style video montage of the various times Starr had claimed a poor memory during his own appearance before the panel a month earlier.

  Lowell labored to undercut the comparisons to Watergate when, he noted, the charges against Nixon were proved by secret tapes showing he misused the CIA, FBI, and IRS to cover up attempts to sabotage the opposition party. Here, Lowell said sarcastically, the charge stands on tapes of Monica Lewinsky and Linda Tripp talking about going shopping.

  Lowells presentation impressed even some Republicans, who thought he did an effective job of poking holes in the case. I want you to know you unnerved us, Hyde told him during a break. You gave us a lot to think about.

  David Schippers, who was so effective in his initial appearances before the committee, did not go over as well this time. Like Lowell, he made use of a video, showing Clinton weaving and dodging at his Jones deposition. But where Lowell had established an engaging rhythm, Schippers spent much of his time before the committee reviewing phone logs and other small details. Yet rather than let the evidence speak for itself, Schippers could not help throwing in scornful asides aimed at the president. Life was so much simpler before they found that dress, wasnt it? he said at one point. At another, Schippers ridiculed how Clinton described his phone sex calls with Lewinsky. If what happened on those phone calls is banter, then Buckingham Palace is a cabin.