Clinton Impeachment Trial

The impeachment of President Clinton arose out of the findings of an independent counsel—Kenneth W. Starr, a former Republican U.S. solicitor general. Starr was appointed in 1994 to investigate Whitewater, a tangled web of political and financial relationships involving an Arkansas land investment by then-governor Clinton and his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, in the 1970s and 1980s. The investigation subsequently widened to cover the 1993 firing of White House travel office employees and the White House's requests in 1993 and 1994 for hundreds of Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) files on former Republican administration officials. Then, in January 1998, Starr received authorization to broaden his probe to include allegations that Clinton had had an extramarital affair with then-twenty-two-year-old White House intern Monica S. Lewinsky, lied about it under oath, and urged her to lie about it under oath. When the allegations became public that month, Clinton quickly and vehemently denied all charges.

Clinton had said he did not have a sexual relationship with Lewinsky in a January 1998 civil deposition in a sexual harassment lawsuit brought against him by former Arkansas state employee Paula Corbin Jones. Lewinsky had signed an affidavit in that case, also denying a sexual relationship with Clinton. The Supreme Court in Clinton v. Jones had allowed that case to go forward when it decided in May 1997 that a sitting president could face civil charges. Starr used Clinton's deposition in his investigation, even though the judge in the Jones case deemed the Lewinsky portion of it immaterial and eventually dismissed the civil suit.

Starr's office took grand jury testimony and issued numerous subpoenas that the Clinton administration challenged in court. Federal district court rulings in May 1998 prevented Clinton from invoking executive privilege or attorney-client privilege to keep his aides from testifying before Starr's grand jury and from establishing a “protective function” privilege to keep Secret Service agents from giving testimony. Avoiding comparisons to Nixon during the Watergate scandal, the White House did not appeal these decisions to the Supreme Court—including the constitutionality of Starr's [Page p78]subpoena for Clinton, himself, to appear before the grand jury.

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