Starr Report on the Impeachment of President Clinton

THE STARR REPORT

Grounds for Impeachment

of President Bill Clinton

Franklin Alfred Kirby Edwards

Editor

Published at Smashwords

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You know, ever since the election, I’ve tried to shut myself down. I’ve tried to shut my body down, sexually, I mean. . . . But sometimes I slipped up and with this girl I just slipped up. – Bill Clinton to Dick Morris, January 21, 1998.

Pilar Publishing of California

Preface

©2015-2018 Pilar Publishing

Monica loved Bill.

That is clear in reading the Independent Counsel’s report into the sexual affair of President Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky in the 1990s. Her love becomes bitter irony because after she asked her friend Linda Tripp to lie in an affidavit in 1997, she unwittingly sicced federal investigators onto her lover, sending him to impeachment by the United States House of Representatives.

After Ms. Tripp spilled the beans to investigators they approached Ms. Lewinsky at a shopping mall, at a lunch Ms. Tripp had set up. A 2000 federal report on ethics violations by the Independent Counsel gives a detailed account of the very first contact investigators had with Ms. Lewinsky on January 16th, 1998.

In the mall’s food court they flashed their IDs at her.

I told Lewinsky that she was in trouble and that she was the subject of a federal criminal investigation, an investigator said.

Go fuck yourself, Ms. Lewinsky responded. Needless to say this profanity wasn’t spoken by a shrinking violet, but by someone who had been very cozy with the powerful, and arrogant about it, and had no hesitancy in telling a federal investigator where to stick it.

Eventually she turned and testified before a federal grand jury, and ultimately provided the smoking gun in the case against President Bill Clinton: the infamous blue dress, with his semen on it.

Months later, in September 1998, Independent Counsel Kenneth W. Starr released his report in the investigation of the president into allegations that he had carried on sexually with 21-year-old intern Lewinsky in the White House, and committed perjury and acts of obstruction of justice. Starr’s report exploded in the face of America, soiling everybody.

The section titled, Nature of President Clinton’s Relationship with Monica Lewinsky might shock you. Even today, for historical perspective, it is the singularly most prurient report involving an investigation of a sitting president in the 240-year existence of the Republic. As Ken Starr wrote: Many of the details reveal highly personal information; many are sexually explicit. This is unfortunate, but it is essential. The President’s defense against the allegations is based on a close parsing of the definitions that were used to describe his conduct. We have, after careful review, identified no manner of providing the information that reveals the falsity of the President’s statements other than to describe his conduct with precision.

Make that with lurid precision. It not only talks about oral sex and presidential phone sex, it also hints at presidential penetration with a cigar. He was chewing on a cigar, Ms. Lewinsky said, according to the Starr Report. And then he had the cigar in his hand and he was kind of looking at the cigar in . . . sort of a naughty way. And so . . . I looked at the cigar, and I looked at him, and I said, we can do that, too, sometime. If, once you’ve read the report and the only thing you remember is the cigar incident between Bill and Monica, I’ll understand, simply because of its shocking reality that this is a president of the United States we are talking about, and what’s more, it’s going on at the Oval Office.

In all, if you care to count, he got nine blowjobs and had phone sex with Monica Lewinsky fifteen times. At 6:30 a.m. before he left the White House for the 1996 Olympics, and after they had phone sex, the president told her: Good morning! What a way to start a day.

The scandal rocked Democrat Clinton’s White House, titillated the nation, and led the House of Representatives to vote to impeach the president after hours of debate, charging him with lying under oath to a grand jury and obstruction of justice. It is the responsibility of the United States Senate, however, to actually remove a sitting president from office, and this requires a two-thirds majority, the fairly tough threshold to obtain.

With Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court William Rehnquist presiding, on January 7, 1999, the Senate convened something that hadn’t been done since the impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson more than one hundred years before. In February 1999, of 100 senators, 45 Democrats and 10 Republicans voted not guilty on the lying count. On the charge of obstruction, senators were evenly split, 50-50.

He had skated by, and after the Senate trial, President Clinton said he was profoundly sorry for his misbehavior.

While the Senators who voted against removal lacked the balls to do the right thing, President Clinton should have taken the moral high road just as discredited President Richard M. Nixon had done in 1974. Mr. Clinton should have resigned. Because he didn’t, the nation endured him for another three years. By the time the forty-second president finished his second term on January 20, 2001, the nation was suffering a severe case of Clinton fatigue.

This former Arkansas governor had essentially brought the Oval Office to a decadent new low. Consider this from the report: While the President continued talking on the phone (Ms. Lewinsky understood that the caller was a Member of Congress or a Senator), she performed oral sex on him.

President Nixon might have commanded a cadre of crooks, and he might even have been one himself. But nobody ever accused the ridged Richard Nixon of having oral sex in the Oval Office. Mentioning Mr. Nixon reminds me of the thing that brought him down – a secret White House tape-recording system. The Clinton sex scandal had another kind of taping system – Ms. Lewinsky!

Her memory of the events, the sex and what was said by whom is nothing less than miraculous. Finish reading the report and see if you agree. While Mr. Clinton and his lackeys come across as fog heads who can’t remember anything when testifying before the grand jury, Ms. Lewinsky remembers every dirty detail. And when Starr’s investigators checked her facts against White House phone logs and Secret Service visitor records, she proved correct nearly every time. She might have been a Clinton bimbo, but she was a smart one.

During the scandal Mr. Clinton maintained his innocence. I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky, he had famously proclaimed. His words – that woman – must have struck the impressionable Ms. Lewinsky right in the heart, and who knows, might have helped turn her into being a federal witness against him. Not only had she admitted to prosecutor Starr that she had been blowing the president at the White House, she said they even talked about a future together. As they hugged, she spotted a gardener outside the study window, and they moved into the hallway by the bathroom. There the President was ‘the most affectionate with me he’d ever been,’ Ms. Lewinsky testified. He stroked her arm, toyed with her hair, kissed her on the neck, praised her intellect and beauty. In Ms. Lewinsky’s recollection: He remarked . . . that he wished he had more time for me. And so I said, well, maybe you will have more time in three years. And I was . . . thinking about us sort of being together, I think I kind of said, oh, I think we’d be a good team, or something like that. And he . . . jokingly said, well what are we going to do when I’m 75 and I have to pee 25 times a day? And . . . I told him that we’d deal with that. Ms. Lewinsky testified that ‘I left that day sort of emotionally stunned’ for ‘I just knew he was in love with me.’"

Mr. Clinton’s statement that I did not have sexual relations with that woman has been hotly debated since he uttered it.

Did they have sex? There is no evidence they rolled on the Oval Office carpet and fornicated. During a phone conversation on September 5, according to Ms. Lewinsky, she told the President that she wanted to have intercourse with him. He responded that he could not do so because of the possible consequences, the Starr Report said. Most young Americans today agree with Mr. Clinton’s definition of sexual relations; that oral sex isn’t really sex. In 2010, WebMD reported that 80 percent of young adults surveyed believe oral-genital contact doesn’t count as sex. It pointed to researchers who said that President Clinton’s statement about non-sex with Ms. Lewinsky was the pivotal turning point in society’s changing views about oral sex. They dubbed the attitude shift as the Clinton-Lewinsky effect.

The Clinton-Lewinsky effect. Oral sex isn’t sex. Wow! Such a fine legacy for a U.S. president to have. Others like Teddy Roosevelt have built parks, or like Franklin Roosevelt have won wars. Even Herbert Hoover, a compassionate man, organized food relief for Europe after World War I, But Bill Clinton. He gave us a definition of sex.

In 1998 when the scandal broke most American voters didn’t care about the President’s splitting of hairs over the definition of sex. Getting blowjobs in the White House was pretty awful stuff. Perhaps plugging their noses, they sure ate up the report, which often reads like a tawdry novel. That is why newspapers across the country printed the report in its entirety at great expense, and usually carried warnings like: Readers should be warned that the report contains descriptions of sex acts.

The investigation turned up evidence, suggesting that Mr. Clinton was an old hand at sexual liaisons. In her sexual harassment lawsuit against Mr. Clinton, the document which began to unravel fellatio in the White House, Paula Jones accused Mr. Clinton of, while governor of Arkansas, exposing himself to her and asking for oral sex. In her testimony in the investigation Ms. Lewinsky stated that Mr. Clinton would not let her perform oral sex to completion. It was her understanding, she said, that his refusal was related to trust and not knowing me well enough.

One thing is made clear in the Starr Report: Having sex near the most powerful room in the world – the Oval Office – isn’t easy to accomplish in private, given the nature of the presidency. People were coming and going a lot. In fact, once White House staffers began noticing how much face-time Ms. Lewinsky was getting with the president she was transferred to a job at the Pentagon.

Consider this from the report: Fear of discovery constrained their sexual encounters in several respects, according to Ms. Lewinsky. The President ordinarily kept the door between the private hallway and the Oval Office several inches ajar during their encounters, both so that he could hear if anyone approached and so that anyone who did approach would be less likely to suspect impropriety. During their sexual encounters, Ms. Lewinsky testified, ‘We were both aware of the volume and sometimes . . . I bit my hand – so that I wouldn’t make any noise.’ On one occasion, according to Ms. Lewinsky, the President put his hand over her mouth during a sexual encounter to keep her quiet. Concerned that they might be interrupted abruptly, according to Ms. Lewinsky, the two of them never fully undressed.

While Mr. Clinton and Ms. Lewinsky worked to keep their sexual affair secret, there was a close call. They were together in the president’s private study and a Secret Service agent entered the area of Oval Office to inform the president he had an important telephone call.

The White House operator said that the President had an important call but he was not picking up, according to the Staff Report.

When I read that the president wasn’t answering his phone, I hoped it wasn’t word from the CIA that the Russians had launched missiles our way. In another sense it gives new meaning to Hillary Clinton’s campaign ad in her failed presidential bid in 2008. The TV spot showed the White House phone. It’s 3 a.m., the ad said, Who do you want answering the phone? Well, while Bill was busy with Monica’s lips, it seems nobody was answering it.

The Secret Service agent called out, Mr. President? There was no response. The agent stepped into the Oval Office and called out more loudly, Mr. President? This time there was a response from the study area.

Huh?

The agent called out that the President had a phone call, and the President said he would take it.

Ms. Lewinsky fled out a nearby door and the guard said she looked upset.

You’ve all heard of the wrath of a woman scorned. In August 1996 at the president’s 50th birthday celebration at Radio City Music Hall, Ms. Lewinsky attended a cocktail party for major donors and Mr. Clinton reached past her at the rope line to shake hands with another guest, she reached out and touched his crotch in a ‘playful’ fashion.

I always thought presidents had Secret Service protection from gropers.

Over the years Clinton defenders latched onto mention in the Starr Report that suggested Monica Lewinsky preyed on him. They cite this passage: According to Ms. Lewinsky, she and the President made eye contact when he came to the West Wing to see Mr. (Leon) Panetta and Deputy Chief of Staff Harold Ickes, then again later at an informal birthday party for Jennifer Palmieri, Special Assistant to the Chief of Staff. At one point, Ms. Lewinsky and the President talked alone in the Chief of Staff’s office. In the course of flirting with him, she raised her jacket in the back and showed him the straps of her thong underwear, which extended above her pants.

Talk about waving red meat in front of a hungry lion.

Fact is this 21-year-old pursued him, and had a crush on him.

Another fact is,