A bitterly partisan House Judiciary Committee took its impeachment inquiry beyond Monica Lewinsky, sex and perjury Tuesday to explore whether President Clinton might have violated federal law in the 1996 campaign.
Over cries from Democrats that Republicans were embarking on a major “fishing expedition,” the committee’s GOP majority voted to issue subpoenas to FBI Director Louis Freeh and prosecutor Charles LaBella to determine whether a memo that LaBella wrote to Atty. Gen. Janet Reno finds possible law-breaking by the president.
The committee also subpoenaed the LaBella memo, as well as a similar one written by Freeh, along with other Justice Department documents related to the department’s investigation into whether Clinton and his administration violated fundraising laws.
The committee’s effort to obtain the memos, which contain confidential grand jury information, will be the subject of a Wednesday hearing before U.S. District Judge Norma Holloway Johnson. House Judiciary Chairman Henry Hyde (R-Ill.) said he was confident his panel would obtain the documents.
The committee voted the subpoenas in the middle of a daylong hearing that included testimony from two convicted perjurers, both women who had been convicted after lying about sex, along with legal experts and military officials who testified about the implications of lying under oath.
The hearing produced some heated exchanges, including one in which Harvard University law professor Alan Dershowitz accused Hyde and the committee of “trivializing the rule of law” by selectively prosecuting the president and seeking to impeach him for lying about sex.
The two women convicted of perjury, psychiatrist Barbara Battalino of Los Osos, Calif., and Pam Parsons of Atlanta, a former women’s basketball coach at the University of South Carolina, both said that lying under oath about their sexual affairs had terrible consequences for them.
If Clinton escapes the impeachment inquiry without being punished, Parsons and Battalino said, it would set a bad example for the nation’s judicial system and for children across the country.
“I hope that is not what happens,” said Battalino, who pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice after she lied about a sexual encounter with a patient in a government hospital.
In calling a series of witnesses on perjury, committee Republicans sought to highlight lying under oath as perhaps the most serious allegation against Clinton and the one most likely to be approved by the House.
Despite the expansion of the committee’s impeachment inquiry into the campaign-finance realm, Hyde said he still intended to finish his investigation and have articles of impeachment before the House by the end of the year. But if presidential criminality is found, he said, the panel’s work may be extended. A committee vote on the articles could come as early as next week, but Hyde said the vote could occur the following week.
“I think next week will be a big week in our lives,” Hyde told the committee.
The chairman told reporters he would rule out of order proposals by Democrats to censure the president as an alternative to impeachment. Committee Democrats appeared to be united behind a censure resolution, but Hyde’s intention to rule it “non-germane” complicates their task of getting one before the House.
On the campaign fundraising vote, Judiciary Committee officials had said Monday night that they decided to go ahead with the subpoenas after unnamed government officials tipped the committee that the LaBella memo contained evidence of possible criminal wrongdoing by the president.
But a high committee staffer gave another version, saying “there was no tip or anything” and that the panel decided to go forward because investigators weeks ago had seen the heavily edited LaBella memo and acted on a hunch that there must be evidence of criminality blotted out. He called it “just normal due diligence.”
If the committee’s new probe yields little in the way of new grounds to impeach the president, it would prove a major disappointment to Republicans who have long suspected the two memos contain explosive information. Justice Department officials have been working with the panel’s staff for release of the documents, a sign that they may fall short of GOP expectations.
Democrats called the committee’s expansion into a new line of inquiry nothing more than a politically motivated attempt to please the Republican Party’s right wing and an effort to bolster a weak case against Clinton. They said that a truly thorough investigation of the campaign-finance controversy would take weeks.
Rep. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), a committee member who is leaning toward voting for impeachment, said the panel’s fundraising probe “will go where 10 days will take it.” He said the panel did not have time to investigate the matter thoroughly, that only an independent counsel could do that. But he said that if the memos contain damaging information, they could help establish a pattern of behavior tending to support impeachment of the president.
“Chaos is reigning,” said House Democratic Leader Richard Gephardt (D-Mo.), who called on the speaker-elect, Rep. Bob Livingston (R-La.), to bring the inquiry to a swift end. Clinton spokesman Joe Lockhart said, “This is like a bad rerun of a show that nobody wanted to watch the first time.”
Both the LaBella and Freeh memos to Reno, which recommended the appointment of an independent counsel to investigate possible fundraising violations, contain grand jury testimony, said Rep. Martin Meehan (D-Mass.). “The last thing a prosecutor would want to do is release information to these turkeys,” he said, pointing to the committee room.
The panel had requested the two memos without the formality of a subpoena, and the Justice Department was understood to be working toward complying with the request when the subpoenas were issued.
The department is considered to be more willing to comply with the Judiciary Committee’s subpoena than it was with that of Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.), chairman of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee. Many in the department believe Congress has more of a right to the documents in an impeachment proceeding, which is a constitutional process, than in its ordinary role of overseeing the system of justice.
The committee will take closed-door testimony from Freeh and LaBella as soon as a time can be worked out, according to committee officials. Separately from the fundraising matter, the committee will take closed-door testimony from White House deputy counsel Bruce Lindsey later this week.
Gephardt wrote a letter to House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), who will step down at the end of the month, expressing his concern that Democrats might not be able to offer a censure proposal if the committee sends articles of impeachment to the floor.
Gephardt also criticized expansion of the inquiry into fundraising and said Hyde’s committee lacks direction. The chairman said he is moving in the right direction by “getting the facts.”
Hyde, increasingly under attack by Democrats, defended the way he has conducted the inquiry. To Democrats who said he has called no witnesses to support a case for impeachment, he said the White House and Democrats have not rebutted the evidence in Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr’s report.
“We haven’t called a lot of witnesses because you’ve pleaded nolo contendre (no contest),” Hyde told Democratic members. On a few occasions, he seemed on the verge of losing his temper, telling Democrats that “all you do is browbeat the chairman for trying to do his job.”
Republicans rejected Democratic suggestions that they drop the impeachment matter and allow Clinton to be subject to criminal prosecution after he leaves office. Dershowitz agreed with GOP members that criminal prosecution after he leaves office would be unlikely.
Rep. Asa Hutchinson (R-Ark.) said that steeled him to push ahead with impeachment. “The country would say we punted on third down if we did not deal with this,” he said.
As the committee heard testimony from the two convicted perjurers, one delivered a decidedly mixed message when asked about the effect of the perjury on her life.
Pam Parsons, who was caught in a lie over her relationship with a 17-year-old woman, described her experience as a “personal journey into hell” and said that healing can occur only when a perjurer admits the truth.
But, she added: “I resigned in the middle of the season. We were second in the nation and 7-0 and then . . . we dropped out of the Top 20, and the team’s never been the same. When you remove a leader, sometimes things you don’t want will happen. One thing you don’t want now is not to have a leader in a world where leadership matters.”
Democrats have been making the same argument to Republicans.
