Scandalous Administration

Scandalous Administration

Campaign Rumors

The Clinton administration was plagued by scandals and allegations of corruption. Women, money, and power led to the impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton in 1998 by the House of Representatives and trial by the Senate in 1999. From the beginning of his 1992 campaign, rumors swirled about Clinton's penchant for women. The first scandal concerned a woman named Gennifer Flowers, who alleged that she had a twelve-year affair with Clinton while he was the governor of Arkansas. She also claimed that he got her a job in the state government because of their relationship. Clinton refused to admit the affair and went on national television with his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, claiming that even though they had had problems in their then seventeen-year marriage, they loved and supported each other. The appearance defused the rumors and seemed to end Clinton's personal problems, at least until after the inauguration.

Jones v. Clinton.

The second womanizing scandal broke shortly after President Clinton's inauguration, when his opponents convinced a young woman in Arkansas, Paula Corbin Jones, to go public with an allegation of sexual harassment that had occurred in 1991. Jones claimed that at a political function Clinton had invited her up to his hotel room, where he exposed him-self. Clinton denied the allegation and used his staff to attack Jones's veracity. Rather than disappearing, However, Jones filed suit in federal court on 6 May 1994, seeking $700,000 in damages for "willful, outrageous and malicious conduct." Clinton sought dismissal of the suit on the grounds of presidential immunity, a precedent established by President Thomas Jefferson whereby presidents have refused to acknowledge the right of the judicial branch to subpoena a sitting president because of the doctrine of separation of powers. U.S. District Court Judge Susan Webber Wright agreed with the precedent that a sitting president could not be tried, but did allow that fact-finding could continue. In 1996 a three-judge appeals panel of the Eighth U.S. Circuit Court reversed the lower court, ruling that the trial could proceed. The case was then appealed to the Supreme Court, which in May 1997 upheld the appeals-court holding. The trial date was set for 27 May 1998. During the next year lawyers for Clinton and Jones wrangled over the charges and evidence. Wright dismissed the lawsuit in April 1998. Jones promptly appealed to the circuit court. On 13 November 1998 an out-of-court settlement was reached when Clinton agreed to pay Jones $850,000, but he admitted to no wrongdoing.

Lewinsky

After the publicity surrounding the initial charges, the Jones case nearly disappeared until Kenneth W. Starr, special prosecutor for the Whitewater affair, started investigating charges of perjury by President Clinton in his testimony in federal court during the Jones hearing. Starr's investigation led him to other cases of womanizing by Clinton. One in particular led to the impeachment of Clinton: the case of a White House intern, Monica S. Lewinsky, who claimed to have had a sexual relationship with the president. Starr wanted Lewinsky to testify in the Jones case in order to discredit Clinton's testimony and prove perjury charges. Lewinsky had been surreptitiously taped by her friend and coworker, Linda R. Tripp, as she confessed her relation-ship in telephone conversations. Those tapes and the information contained on them became the center of the third major scandal, which eventually led to the impeachment of Clinton in late 1998.

Whitewater

Flowers, Jones, and Lewinsky were not enough by themselves to lead to impeachment. Other scandals, involving money and power, also stained the reputation of the Clinton administration. Four months into his first term, Clinton was accused of illegally firing employees of the White House travel office in order to give work to an Arkansas firm. A Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) inquiry ensued in what became known as Travelgate. This scandal was overshadowed when a more far-reaching controversy, known as White-water, surfaced. Whitewater was a land-development project in 1978 in which Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton had invested with partners James B. and Susan McDougal. At the time of the investment Clinton was attorney general of Arkansas, and James McDougal was a fast-talking financier who bought the Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan in 1981 to help underwrite his deals. Within two years of purchasing Madison Guaranty, it was in trouble and McDougal had to contract with the Rose Law Firm, where Hillary Rodham Clinton was a partner, for help. Both Madison Guaranty and the Whitewater Development Corporation failed in the late 1980s because of financial mismanagement. The tederal government spent $60 million to rescue investors, and McDougal became the center of a federal investigation. Over the next decade, government investigators tried to determine to what extent the Clintons were involved in the failure of Madison Guaranty. A pall was further cast over the Clinton administration when Deputy White House Counsel Vincent W. Foster Jr., who had been handling the Whitewater case for the Clintons, was found dead in a Washington park on 20 July 1993, causing the lunatic fringe to speculate about the alleged involvement of the Clintons in his death. In 1994 special counsel Starr, a Republican, began investi-gating the Whitewater-Madison Guaranty case. Between 1993 and 1999 a team of thirty lawyers and ten

investigators worked on the case. During that time they spent millions of dollars and sent several defendants to jail, including the McDougals; Jim Guy Tucker, sitting governor of Arkansas; and Deputy Attorney General Webster Hubble, who had been Hillary Rodham Clinton's law partner. Starr, however, was not able to gather enough evidence to indict the president or Mrs. Clinton on criminal charges, so he used evidence of perjury in the Jones case to incriminate Clinton. (The Whitewater charges were eventually determined to be unfounded.) By the time Starr's report was sent to Congress in September 1998, it was 2,800 pages long, including graphic detail with thousands of footnotes, and contained accusations and recommendations relating to perjury and misconduct in office that formed the basis of the impeachment and trial of President Clinton.

Sources:

"Jones v. Clinton Special Report," Washingtonpost.com, Internet website.

Jeffrey Toobin, A Vast Conspiracy: The Real Story Of The Sex Scandal That Nearly Brought Down A President (New York: Random House, 2000).

"Whitewater Timeline," Washingtonpost.com, Internet website.