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N0KFQ > TODAY 19.12.11 20:39l 93 Lines 4627 Bytes #999 (0) @ WW
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Subj: Today in History - Dec 19
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Sent: 111219/1819Z 15285@KB0WSA.MO.USA.NA BPQ1.0.4
Dec 19, 1998:
President Clinton impeached
After nearly 14 hours of debate, the House of Representatives
approves two articles of impeachment against President Bill
Clinton, charging him with lying under oath to a federal grand
jury and obstructing justice. Clinton, the second president in
American history to be impeached, vowed to finish his term.
In November 1995, Clinton began an affair with Monica Lewinsky, a
21-year-old unpaid intern. Over the course of a year and a half,
the president and Lewinsky had nearly a dozen sexual encounters
in the White House. In April 1996, Lewinsky was transferred to
the Pentagon. That summer, she first confided in Pentagon
co-worker Linda Tripp about her sexual relationship with the
president. In 1997, with the relationship over, Tripp began
secretly to record conversations with Lewinsky, in which Lewinsky
gave Tripp details about the affair.
In December, lawyers for Paula Jones, who was suing the president
on sexual harassment charges, subpoenaed Lewinsky. In January
1998, allegedly under the recommendation of the president,
Lewinsky filed an affidavit in which she denied ever having had a
sexual relationship with him. Five days later, Tripp contacted
the office of Kenneth Starr, the Whitewater independent counsel,
to talk about Lewinsky and the tapes she made of their
conversations. Tripp, wired by FBI agents working with Starr, met
with Lewinsky again, and on January 16, Lewinsky was taken by FBI
agents and U.S. attorneys to a hotel room where she was
questioned and offered immunity if she cooperated with the
prosecution. A few days later, the story broke, and Clinton
publicly denied the allegations, saying, "I did not have sexual
relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky."
In late July, lawyers for Lewinsky and Starr worked out a
full-immunity agreement covering both Lewinsky and her parents,
all of whom Starr had threatened with prosecution. On August 6,
Lewinsky appeared before the grand jury to begin her testimony,
and on August 17 President Clinton testified. Contrary to his
testimony in the Paula Jones sexual-harassment case, President
Clinton acknowledged to prosecutors from the office of the
independent counsel that he had had an extramarital affair with
Ms. Lewinsky.
In four hours of closed-door testimony, conducted in the Map Room
of the White House, Clinton spoke live via closed-circuit
television to a grand jury in a nearby federal courthouse. He was
the first sitting president ever to testify before a grand jury
investigating his conduct. That evening, President Clinton also
gave a four-minute televised address to the nation in which he
admitted he had engaged in an inappropriate relationship with
Lewinsky. In the brief speech, which was wrought with legalisms,
the word "sex" was never spoken, and the word "regret" was used
only in reference to his admission that he misled the public and
his family.
Less than a month later, on September 9, Kenneth Starr submitted
his report and 18 boxes of supporting documents to the House of
Representatives. Released to the public two days later, the Starr
Report outlined a case for impeaching Clinton on 11 grounds,
including perjury, obstruction of justice, witness-tampering, and
abuse of power, and also provided explicit details of the sexual
relationship between the president and Ms. Lewinsky. On October
8, the House authorized a wide-ranging impeachment inquiry, and
on December 11, the House Judiciary Committee approved three
articles of impeachment. On December 19, the House impeached
Clinton.
On January 7, 1999, in a congressional procedure not seen since
the 1868 impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson, the trial
of President Clinton got underway in the Senate. As instructed in
Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution, the chief justice of the U.S.
Supreme Court (William Rehnquist at this time) was sworn in to
preside, and the senators were sworn in as jurors.
Five weeks later, on February 12, the Senate voted on whether to
remove Clinton from office. The president was acquitted on both
articles of impeachment. The prosecution needed a two-thirds
majority to convict but failed to achieve even a bare majority.
Rejecting the first charge of perjury, 45 Democrats and 10
Republicans voted "not guilty," and on the charge of obstruction
of justice the Senate was split 50-50. After the trial concluded,
President Clinton said he was "profoundly sorry" for the burden
his behavior imposed on Congress and the American people.
73, K.O. n0kfq
Another old retired guy
E-mail: n0kfq@winlink.org
N0KFQ@N0KFQ.#SWMO.MO.USA.NA
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