| They badly wanted to brand me with a big I, and believed that for the rest of my life and for some time thereafter, the fact of my impeachment would loom far larger than the circumstances of it, and that before long no one would even talk about what a hypocritical farce the whole process had been, and how it was the culmination of years of unconscionable conduct by Kenneth Starr and his cohorts
Just after the vote, Dick Gephardt brought a large group of the House Democrats who had defended me to the White House so that I could thank them and we could show unity for the battle aheadAl Gore gave a stirring defense of my record as President, and Dick made an impassioned plea to the Republicans to stop the politics of personal destruction and get on with the nations businessHillary commented to me afterward that the event almost had the feel of a victory rallyThe Democrats had stood up not just for me but, far more importantly, for the Constitution
I certainly hadnt wanted to be impeached, but I was consoled by the fact that the only other time it had happened, to Andrew Johnson in the late 1860s, there were also no high crimes and misdemeanors; just like this case, that was a politically motivated action by a majority party in Congress that couldnt restrain itself
Hillary was more upset about the partisan political nature of the House proceedings than I wasAs a young lawyer, she had served on John Doars staff for the House Judiciary Committee during Watergate, when there was a serious, balanced, bipartisan effort to prada bag with metal handle fulfill the constitutional mandate of defining and finding high crimes and misdemeanors in the official actions of the President
From the beginning, I had believed that the best way to win the final showdown with the Far Right was for me to keep doing my job and let others handle the defenseDuring the proceedings in the House and Senate, thats what I tried to do, and many people told me they appreciated it
The strategy worked better than it might haveThe release of the Starr report and the determination of the Republicans to proceed with impeachment brought with them a marked shift in the media coverageAs Ive said, the media was never a monolith; now even those who had previously been willing to give Starr a free ride began to point out the involvement of right-wing groups in the cabal, the abusive tactics of the OIC, and the unprecedented nature of what the Republicans were doingAnd the TV talk shows began to show more balance, as commentators like Greta Van Sustren and Susan Estrich, and guests like lawyers Lanny Davis, Alan Dershowitz, Julian Epstein, and Vincent Bugliosi made sure that both sides of the case were heardMembers of Congress also made the case, including Senator Tom Harkin, House Judiciary Committee members Sheila Jackson Lee, and Bill Delahunt, himself a former prosecutorProfessors Cass Sunstein of the University of Chicago and Susan Bloch of Georgetown released a letter on the unconstitutionality of the impeachment process signed by four hundred legal scholars
As we headed into 1999, the louis vuitton denim pleaty bag unemployment rate was down to 4 percent and the stock market had rebounded to an all-time highHillary had hurt her back while making a Christmas visit to employees in the Old Executive Office Building, but it was getting better, after her doctor told her to stop wearing high heels on the hard marble floorsChelsea and I decorated the tree and went on our annual Christmas shopping spree
My best Christmas presents that year were the expressions of kindness and support from ordinary citizensA thirteen-year-old girl from Kentucky wrote me to say that Id made a mistake, but I couldnt quit, because my opponents were meanAnd an eighty-six-year-old white man from New Brunswick, New Jersey, after telling his family he was going to Atlantic City for the day, instead rode the train to Washington, where he took a cab to the Reverend Jesse Jacksons houseWhen he was greeted by Jesses mother-in-law, he told her he was there because the Reverend Jackson was the only person he knew of who talked to the President, and he wanted to send me a message: Tell the President not to quitI was around when the Republicans tried to destroy Al Smith [our presidential nominee in 1928] for being a CatholicHe cant give in to themThe man got back in his cab, returned to Union Station, and took the next train homeI called that man to say thank youThen my family and I went to Renaissance Weekend and into the new year
O n January 7, Chief Justice William Rehnquist officially opened the impeachment trial in the Senate, and Ken Starr indicted Julie Hiatt balenciaga yellow Steele, the Republican woman who wouldnt lie to back up Kathleen Willeys story
A week later, the House impeachment managers made a three-day presentation of their caseThey now wanted to call witnesses, something they hadnt done in their own hearings, with the exception of Kenneth StarrOne of the managers, Asa Hutchinson from Arkansas, who had prosecuted my brothers drug case as Uattorney in the 1980s, said the Senate had to let them call witnesses, because if he were a prosecutor, he couldnt indict me for obstruction of justice, the issue he was charged with handling, based on the meager record the House had sent to the Senate! On the other hand, another of the House managers argued that the Senate had no right to judge whether my alleged offenses met the constitutional standard of impeachment; he said the House had done that for them and the Senate should be bound by their opinion, despite the fact that the Hyde committee had refused to articulate a standard for judging what conduct was impeachable
In his closing argument to the Senate, Henry Hyde finally gave his interpretation of the constitutional meaning of impeachment when he said in essence that trying to spare oneself embarrassment over private misconduct was more of a justification for removal from office than misleading the nation about an important matter of stateMy mother had raised me to look for the good in everybodyWhen I watched the vituperative MrHyde, I was sure there must be a DrJekyll in there somewhere, but I was having a hard time finding him
On cartier replica watch ladies santos steel the nineteenth, my legal team began its three days of responseChuck Ruff, the White House counsel and a former Uattorney, led off, arguing for two and a half hours that the charges were untrue and that even if the senators thought they were true, the offenses did not come close to meeting the constitutional standard for impeachment, much less removalRuff was a mild-mannered man who had been wheelchair-bound for most of his lifeHe was also a powerful advocate, who was offended by what the House managers had doneHe shredded their evidentiary arguments and reminded the Senate that a bipartisan panel of prosecutors had already said that no responsible prosecutor would bring a perjury charge on the facts before them
I thought Ruffs best moment was when he caught Asa Hutchinson red-handed in a telling misrepresentation of factHutchinson had told the Senate that Vernon Jordan began helping Monica Lewinsky to get a job only after he learned she would be a witness in the Jones caseThe evidence proved that Vernon had done so several weeks before he knew or could have known that, and that at the time Judge Wright made the decision to allow Lewinsky to be called as a witness (a decision that she later reversed), Vernon was on a plane to EuropeI didnt know whether Asa had misled the Senate because he thought that the senators wouldnt figure it out or because he thought that they, like the House managers, wouldnt care whether the presentation was accurate or not
The next day Greg Craig and Cheryl Mills addressed the specific chanel sheepskin bag charg |
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