Craig amd Mills Deliver One-Two Punch
Mills Grinds Bob Barr's Snide Remarks to Sausage

Tuesday, January 20, 1999 -- New York -- Day two of the defense presentations in the President's impeachment trial was chock full of methodical demolition of the House Managers' case commenced with the presentation of Greg Craig, who would argue that president Clinton did not commit perjury during his grand jury testimony. It was a double-barreled assault -- Greg Craig and Cheryl Mills assailed both the facts as presented by the House Managers and the impeachability of the charges.

Craig gave a very dry and detailed case -- one which would only inflame those who have accused the President of legalisms -- but his evidence was strong, his rebuttal thorough. Later in the day, Sen. Robert Bennett (R-UT) would say that Craig "lost him" with his very technical description of the case regarding perjury.

In fact, he systematically tore the House Managers' case apart in precise, point-by-point detail on three points-- how bad this article is legally, Constitutionally and structurally; to directly address allegations; and to reply to the House Managers' assertions.

He began by urging the Senate to read the transcript of the testimony and view the tape.

There were four areas in which the Impeachment Article 1 accuses Clinton of perjury, he said -- the nature of the relationship, his testimony regarding his relationship in the Jones depo, his saying he was not attentive to Bennett in the Jones depo, and his denial of influencing testimony of witnesses.

Craig attacked the second and third points immediately as a weakened attempt to revive the issue of perjury in the Jones case -- an impeachment article that failed to pass the House.

Impeachment Article 1, he further argued, was what is referred to as a "double charge" -- a dubious prosecutorial ploy that is discouraged -- and also fails to spell out the specific words Clinton uttered. He presented the standardized form that federal prosecutors must use in perjury cases; "failure to provide [such a] notice violates due process of law."

But worst of all, the failure of the House to be specific at all in "the most important trial in American history" is a violation of Clinton's right to due process, said Craig -- and by failing to be specific, the House has unconstitutionally ceded authority to the House Managers to determine exactly what to charge the President with.

Craig methodically went through the elements of perjury -- and assailed the House managers for not having proven their allegations. At one point, he held up a blowup of the form which federal prosecutors must fill out to spell out the specific wording of perjurous testimony, saying again that the failure of the House to specify which words deprived Clinton of due process. He also played a portion of the tape testimony of two prosecutors who appeared before the House Judiciary Committee explaining the high standard needed to prove perjury.

Craig followed this point with an explanation that anyone called on to prosecute or defend a perjury charge is required to split definitions or parse words as part of their case.

It was at this point that Craig began a methodical use of the House Managers' own words and parsing of words against them, as he cited accepted definitions of the word "several" and "certain." We are "certain" "several" House Managers were none too pleased to see their arguments skewered.

Craig then addressed the issue of the dispute over when exactly the Lewinsky relationship began -- and argued that not only was it an honest dispute, but even Henry Hyde had argued it was not an important or serious charge.

And following a fifteen-minute break, Craig went through the legalistic gymnastics the Jones attorneys went through in arriving in a definition of sex, playing a 14-minute portion of the Paula Jones deposition during which Bob Bennett and the Jones lawyers sparred over the definition of sex. Once again, the Jones lawyers sounded picky and finicky -- and accused the President of playing politics! What hypocrites.

Craig turned to specific allegations made in both the House Managers' brief and in James Rogan's presentation -- countering the charges first with their marginal relevance, and then the fact that the Jones suit was thrown out. He then brought up the element of ambush on the part of the Jones attorneys -- and Lindsey Graham's voting against the Jones perjury article on these very grounds.

The fact remains, said Craig, that Rogan's claims concerning the Jones deposition was an attempt to bootstrap the allegations to the Grand Jury perjury article. In fact, Clinton extended and clarified much of the Jones testimony, said Craig, and Clinton did not deny that he was alone with Lewinsky when he went before the Grand Jury -- but Craig also said that Clinton met the goal of being truthful in the Jones depo without being helpful. Craig tore into House Managers' assertions that Clinton perjured himself, citing a "painful" example in the Grand Jury concerning his revelations regarding Gennifer Flowers -- if he went in with the intention of denying embarrassing facts, he never would have testified that way concerning Gennifer Flowers in the Jones case.

Craig's presentation contained a strong undercurrent -- the implication that Clinton was entrapped by the Jones attorneys. It appeared to us that he was practically inviting Senators who are skeptical of the House Managers' case to ask questions concerning how the President was put in this position and why certain charges were not in the Starr referral but in the House Managers' brief.

Craig turned to the House Managers assertion that Clinton perjured himself when he said that he had not been paying attention to Bennett disputing sex definitions -- a charge not made in the Starr referral either. And Craig reiterated that there was no evidence that Clinton was indeed acknowledging Bennett or Judge Wright. The moment is well into the deposition after Clinton had been questioned about Lewinsky, said Craig, and his argument that Clinton's statement that he was thinking about his testimony is more than plausible, given that the Jones lawyers had unleashed a series of entrapping questions.

Craig then taught the House Managers a few things about what the meaning of the word "is" is -- by pointing to the manner that the OIC read the statement to Clinton during the Grand Jury testimony! It WAS at least ten months since Clinton had been involved with Lewinsky. Yes, it was bad politics, admitted Craig, but not perjury -- Clinton committed the offense of nit-picking. And his statement about "is" was to point out that Bob Bennett was being accurate.

In article two, Craig said, the House Managers charge Clinton with obstruction of justice in conspiring with Lewinsky to file a false affidavit -- yet, Craig points out, the wording of the "false" affidavit is in fact legally accurate because of the wording and what Lewinsky believed constituted sex.

Onto the gifts -- Craig pointed out that the only evidence of perjury concerning the gifts is conjecture from one question to Miss Lewinsky. And the discussions with his aides -- he said he did not have sex with them and was careful with the wording. This, said, Craig, is insupportable.

He concluded by summing up the charges -- pronouncing each as frivolous or "oath-against-oath" disagreement that is never prosecuted.

He presented perhaps his most powerful argument against impeachment -- that if the Senate convicts the President, they will make the Presidency vulnerable to frivolous impeachment.

And he then took one last, well-deserved pot shot at the House Managers -- that they must convict the president because "no one is above the law." The criminal justice system is there to see to it that no one is above the law -- not the impeachment process, which is a process of removal. This is not an assault on the system of government or an abuse of the powers of the Presidency.

He quoted James Wilson's comments making distinctions in Presidential accountability in private and public affairs -- and impeachment is the mechanism for crimes of state. The criminal justice system can and may deal with this, he said.

He concluded by talking about Election Day and free elections -- and said that there were no grounds "to remove Clinton, who was elected freely, openly and fairly... We dare not reverse that decision without cause." Moreover, it is easier to remove judges than members of Congress, and decisions to remove elected offices "have been and should be different than those for judges, who serve for life and on good behavior."

The right to vote with good faith in the outcome, moreover, is the birthright of every American, who cast their vote with the belief that they and they alone elect the President, he concluded. Do not net this case and these charges -- flawed as they are -- undermine an essential right and principle of American democracy.

After a second break in the trial, Cheryl Mills introduced herself as an "army brat" and talked a little bit about herself and how honored she felt representing the President.

She launched immediately into a devastating rebuttal of the House Managers' case regarding obstruction of justice and the gifts Clinton gave Lewinsky. Her argument was that Lewinsky was the one who wanted the gifts out of her apartment because she suspected that the Jones people might tap her phone or break into her apartment to steal the gifts -- and the House Managers ignored her motivation completely in their convoluted conspiracy theory.

She also made mention of the nine versions of the Lewinsky-Clinton conversations concerning Christmas gifts and the Jones case which Ms. Lewinsky related during her own testimony -- versions which totally blow the conspiracy theory out of the water, including some in which Lewinsky says that she brought up the issue of gifts, and Clinton either didn't reply or said "I don't know."

These versions weaken an already fragile circumstantial case based upon facts that just don't fit. Mills, like Craig, used the very words -- "stubborn facts" -- that Henry Hyde thought he had used so effectively in his summation. Maybe Hyde should have quoted Ronald Reagan's infamous misquoting of the very same words: "Facts are stupid things."

She also addressed at length Clinton's conversation with Betty Currie the day following his Lewinsky testimony -- and the fact that the President had other things than obstruction on his mind that day.

She went over the statutes cited by the House Managers -- and the fact that they do not stand up to the legal definition of witness tampering because there was no effort to intimidate, threaten or for that matter influence Betty Currie -- and that the House Managers overreached when they argued that the President had the intent of influencing Currie. The facts belie their overreaching -- Clinton, in fact, needed to mention Currie on a number of occasions in his Jones testimony, and when asked if it was usual for Currie to work past midnight, he answered "You'd have to ask her."

The reason, Mills said, that Clinton asked Currie about Lewinsky's visits was that Clinton wanted to assess Betty's perception of the relationship -- given that the story had broken on an internet gossip site. He was concerned about how the media would handle the story.

Mills turned to video evidence in which a number of experts refuted the idea that Clinton could have committed obstruction of justice.

She also slammed Bob Barr with one of the best lines of her presentation when she refuted his comment that the case was like a "Swiss watch" -- she said the House Managers would be lucky to make sausage out of the parts!

Mills concluded with a deft and powerful undermining of the constant assertion by the Managers of the words "civil rights" in connection with the Paula Jones lawsuit and their "grave concern" that "the house of civil rights must fall."

"I know I speak for the President," she said, as she related that Clinton was taught by his grandfather that his black customers were good people who deserved a fair shot. She said she's not worried about the future of civil rights because Paula had her day in court -- and the judge threw out the case because she had no case.

And the vote to acquit would not shake the house of civil rights -- because civil rights were not at the core of the Paula Jones case.

In doing so, Mills elevated Clinton into the pantheon of American civil rights champions -- and by implication made the assertions of "civil rights" by House Managers (who frankly don't give a hoot about the rights of minorities or women) look as phony and tarted up as the Jones lawsuit itself.

It was a powerful argument, and set the entire impeachment coup in a new context: the Managers attempt to usurp "civil rights" as a fraud in and of itself.

Mills' appearance was by far not only the best lawyering but the most powerful presentation to date in the impeachment trial.

-- David J. Gonzo