-Caveat Lector- >From NY Daily News TV Misses Out on Ex-Intern's Manhandling of House Team WASHINGTON <Picture: Lars-Erik Nelson><Picture>onica Lewinsky made her international television debut as a star witness yesterday, but House impeachment prosecutors left her best scenes on the cutting room floor. Lewinsky on the hot seat turns out to be the greatest performance since a judge asked Mae West, "Are you trying to show contempt for this court?" And West replied: "No, your honor, I'm doing my best to conceal it." In her taped deposition, recorded last week, Lewinsky ran rings around the House prosecutors as they tried to use her to incriminate the President. But when snippets of that deposition were played for the Senate yesterday, the scenes in which Lewinsky made the House interrogators look like fools were somehow missing. <Picture: byrdr_sen.JPG (6406 bytes)><Picture>Rep. Ed Bryant (R) When Rep. Ed Bryant (R-Tenn.) complained that there was no point in proceeding with the deposition if he had to restrict his questions to her prior testimony, Lewinsky immediately interjected, "Sounds good to me." When Bryant started withdrawing his own clumsy multi-part questions, he noted, "I'm making my own objections now." Immediately, Lewinsky piped up, "We sustain those, too." When Sen. Mike DeWine (R-Ohio) pointed out that her microphone was picking up a private conversation with her lawyers, she said, "Sorry, I was only saying nice things about you all." This poised 25-year-old woman, whom the House Republicans once derided as a marginal employee who could not get a job without Clinton's intervention, suddenly became, in the words of Rep. Jim Rogan (R-Calif.), "an intelligent, articulate young woman." According to the transcript of her deposition, Lewinsky corrected her fumbling interrogators on dates, wouldn't let them put words into her mouth and knew enough to balk when they asked unfocused, multiple questions. It was not exactly a fair contest. With 23 prior interrogations under her belt, Lewinsky probably had more experience at courtroom give-and-take than her questioners. She also was able to slip an elegant shiv into Clinton. Bryant: I assume you think [Clinton] is a very intelligent man? Lewinsky: I think he's an intelligent President. Amazingly, Lewinsky walks out of this with the one thing that we all thought had been forever denied to her: dignity. The House impeachment managers, meanwhile, have been reduced to a state of whimpering. They clearly have given up hope of winning the two-thirds vote needed to remove Clinton, but they are now striving for a majority verdict of guilty on at least one of the two impeachment counts. In their minds, that would vindicate the House vote to impeach the President and would let them claim some blighted form of victory. But what a mess they leave in their wake. In his zeal to convict Clinton, independent counsel Kenneth Starr stripped Lewinsky of all privacy and forced her to confess the most intimate details of her sweaty gropings with her low-rent lover, the commander-in-chief. Lewinsky has a cruel and selfish streak. She tormented her former lover Andy Bleiler by threatening to expose their affair to his wife. She used people to help and defend her � her first lawyer, Frank Carter, and her spokeswoman, Judy Smith � and cast them aside. She shows all the signs of a spoiled brat. As punishment, she has lost her privacy, her employability, perhaps her marriage prospects forever � all for a failed attempt to oust the President. At the end of this four-year nightmare, Starr is under investigation for illegal leaks. The House prosecutors are slinking away in defeat, and the rest of the GOP worries that it might lose control of the Congress in 2000. White House aides are mortgaging their homes to pay legal bills. The two people whose lives are most shattered are Monica Lewinsky and Linda Tripp, the yenta who set all this in motion by telling Starr that Clinton was having an illicit affair. And standing amid this general wreckage with a smile on his lips and gaiety in his heart, figuring out how to save Medicare, preserve Social Security and preserve prosperity, is Bill Clinton, without a mark on him. Some people are lucky like that. It is best to stay far away from them. Original Publication Date: 02/07/1999 Experts Give Tapes Thumbs-Up By DAVID NOONAN Daily News Staff Writer <Picture>ep. Henry Hyde called them a "pitiful three" and wanted 12 more, but there was nothing pitiful about the video-taped performances of impeachment witnesses Monica Lewinsky, Vernon Jordan and Sidney Blumenthal yesterday. Experts were impressed by the trio's grace under Republican fire. "Monica was incredibly well-prepared," said Joseph Rice, head of the Jury Research Institute in San Francisco. "She made great eye contact with the questioner. She looked very serious. Her response time was great. There was no hesitancy." <Picture><Picture: mon_listens.JPG (9162 bytes)>Star of the video show: Monica Lewinsky Lewinsky emerged as the clear star of the mesmerizing video show spliced together by the House impeachment managers. "She put an incredibly human face and voice to something that we've all heard about for a year," Rice said. Robert Gordon, of the Dallas-based Wilmington Institute of Trial and Settlement Sciences, saw Lewinsky as a poised, articulate woman caught between two powerful men. "She was conveying the minimum disclosure necessary to get through the ordeal," Gordon said. "She was not angry at the President. I don't think she wanted to hurt the President. I think she was just exactly in the predicament Ken Starr wanted her to be in. She knew that if she lied . . . he was going to put her in jail." The relaxed Lewinsky appeared very believable to Rice. "There was nothing to indicate that she was making up a story. She was as solid as can be." Presidential pal Vernon Jordan offered a considerably more formidable presence. "He was sophisticated, erudite, a great wordsmith," Gordon said. "The cross-examiners have to get up a lot earlier than they did in order to compromise the logical consistency of what Jordan intended to share. He just wasn't going to say anything that was going to get him in trouble." Rice found Jordan more tense and controlled. "He wasn't trying to embellish at all. . . . He's not giving anything away. . . . But he's not going to lie for Clinton, either." Sidney Blumenthal garnered the least screen time but made a definite impression. "He seemed less polished and more typical of what you see in the courthouse of people who are under acute stress," Gordon said. ". . . He was a less attractive witness, but I found him quite credible." Original Publication Date: 02/07/1999 ~~~~~~~~~~~~ >From SalonMagazine.CoM Stalking Sidney Blumenthal IS IT POSSIBLE CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS AND HIS | "FORMER FRIEND" ARE BOTH TELLING THE TRUTH? BY JOSHUA MICAH MARSHALL It started with a friend's betrayal -- Linda Tripp's of Monica Lewinsky -- and it may end with one. In what seem to be the waning days of the Clinton scandal, as senators look for a way to end the trial, Washington has been riveted by journalist (and sometime Salon contributor) Christopher Hitchens' decision to submit an affidavit to Republican trial managers swearing that his old friend, presidential aide Sidney Blumenthal, described Lewinsky as a "stalker" over lunch last March, contrary to Blumenthal's own sworn deposition in the trial last week. Hitchens' accusations have elicited bipartisan calls for a Justice Department investigation of Blumenthal. But the legal ramifications of his act may, in the end, be minor. What's certain is that the topic has stunned liberal Washington, providing what writer Christopher Buckley has called "a Chambers vs. Hiss moment," referring to the controversy that divided liberals in the 1950s. Buckley is certainly exaggerating -- it's unlikely anyone will be writing books about this decades from now -- but the Hitchens-Blumenthal split has surprised people who know both men well. Their 15-year friendship was well known in Washington, despite Hitchens' increasingly bitter antipathy toward Blumenthal's boss. Their families regularly socialized, and Hitchens attended Blumenthal's last birthday party and toasted his friend warmly. One journalist who is friends with both men told Salon that Hitchens' decision to attack Blumenthal publicly is due to his "extreme bitterness" over Clinton's ability to slip the noose in the Lewinsky mess. Mutual friends within the liberal and left journalistic community have persistently resisted Hitchens' often diabolical estimation of the president, this friend said, and Hitchens has grown increasingly strident, and vocal, in questioning their sanity and their integrity. Hitchens himself has said that in the course of researching a Nation column on Blumenthal's overzealous defense of Clinton, he mentioned their March lunch to some Republicans. Then he got a phone call from House Judiciary Committee counsel Susan Bogart, who -- surprise, surprise -- had heard of his claims. She asked him to make a sworn statement, which he did, though he has said repeatedly he will never testify against Blumenthal should he be charged with perjury. And perjury is what Republicans have been trying to pin on Blumenthal. It is true that for many months the buzz within journalistic circles was that Blumenthal had peddled various disparaging stories about Lewinsky to the media. And Hitchens repeated that charge Sunday on "Meet the Press." "I would say most of the people I know in the profession who heard that story," Hitchens told host Tim Russert, "they knew it either directly or indirectly from Mr. Blumenthal." But, to date, none but Hitchens have come forward. On Monday a friend of Hitchens' submitted an affidavit swearing that Hitchens told him of his lunch with Blumenthal where the presidential aide smeared Lewinsky, but no journalists have joined Hitchens in revealing that Blumenthal was the source of such stories. Blumenthal has not specifically denied that he discussed the Lewinsky-as-stalker theory in his March 17 lunch with Hitchens and his wife, Carol Blue. His statement over the weekend denied that he was a "source for any story about Monica Lewinsky's personal life." (Hitchens did not return phone calls.) The core of Blumenthal's defense seems to be that literally hundreds of stories describing Lewinsky as a "stalker" had already run in the media before his lunch with Hitchens. Though Blumenthal has said he has no specific recollection of the lunch meeting, he says he would have considered such a lunch with his "then-friend" Hitchens a social event, not a professional meeting. This would mean that he was telling the truth when he said in his trial deposition that he had only talked about the Lewinsky mess "with friends and family." Several Blumenthal defenders have observed that if the presidential aide had wanted to plant the stalker story with a journalist, Hitchens would have been his last choice. The British journalist is open in his utter contempt for the president, and it would stand to reason that if Blumenthal were going to leak the story into the press he would leak it to reporters who have been more supportive of Clinton. N E X T+P A G E+| "I am baffled by it" STALKING SIDNEY BLUMENTHAL | PAGE 1, 2 - - - - - - - - - - Three such reporters contacted by Salon on Monday categorically deny that Blumenthal ever relayed any such story to them. Lars-Erik Nelson, the New York Daily News columnist who has been sympathetic to the White House through most of the last year, says Blumenthal never smeared Lewinsky. "I am baffled by it," he told Salon late Monday afternoon when asked for his thoughts about Hitchens' accusation. Though he had been talking with him "continually throughout the past year," Nelson said, Blumenthal had never mentioned Clinton's stalker story. Veteran New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis said the same thing. Though he had spoken with Blumenthal on only a few occasions, he said, Blumenthal had "never" relayed the stalker story Clinton had told Blumenthal in January. New York Observer and Salon columnist Joe Conason told Salon Monday afternoon that Blumenthal "never mentioned" the stalker story. Conason, who said that Blumenthal had last week "specifically released him" from any confidences related to their conversations, said that he had spoken to Blumenthal on numerous occasions regarding the Lewinsky scandal, and specifically asked him for any information that might lead him to believe that the president and not Lewinsky was telling the truth. But Blumenthal would say only that he "believed the president." In his Salon column this week, Conason revealed that Republicans had contacted other journalists, including Arkansas writer Gene Lyons, to see if they had received any "stalker" stories from Blumenthal. Those efforts came up dry. So what's going on here? Are we apt to see a Kathleen Willey vs. Julie Hiatt Steele battle of wills over who's telling the truth? Probably not. A close look at just what each man has said leads to the conclusion that the facts actually in dispute may be minimal or even non-existent. In fact, even Hitchens told Russert on "Meet the Press" that from what he saw on the deposition videotape, Blumenthal "has not lied to Congress." Blumenthal told the House managers at his deposition that he had never revealed to anyone -- save his wife -- his conversation with the president in which Clinton said that Monica was known as a stalker. He also said that he was not the source for any story that depicted Monica as a stalker. He did say, however, that he had spoken with "friends about what was in the news stories every day, just like everyone else, but when it came to talking about her personally, I drew a line." By March 17, when Hitchens says he discussed the matter with Blumenthal over lunch, more than 400 stories had been published that included some version of the Lewinsky-as-stalker story. So it seems conceivable that the two men discussed the issue of Lewinsky being described as a stalker -- and both would still be telling the truth in their sworn statements of the last week. Sources familiar with various aspects of the case, reached late Monday afternoon, expressed doubt whether the entire question would ever lead to an indictment of Blumenthal, or anything more than a perfunctory investigation of the matter by Justice Department lawyers. Independent counsel Kenneth Starr is known to loathe Blumenthal, and would no doubt love to get his prosecutorial powers around Blumenthal, but he has no jurisdiction in the matter. One staffer from the office of a conservative Republican senator, who is no friend of the president, told Salon that there had as yet been little serious discussion among Republican senators of pressing the matter with the Justice department. "It's up to the Justice Department," the staffer told Salon. "There's not much people on the Hill can do about it." House manager Henry Hyde pushed to introduce the Hitchens affidavit into the record of the impeachment trial, but the move was blocked by the Senate. Like so many peripheral developments in the course of the scandal, the Blumenthal-Hitchens episode seems -- at least at this point -- destined to live only briefly in bold headlines. But the underlying passions and bitterness the scandal has loosed, and the severed friendships and associations it has left in its wake, may turn out to be the most enduring consequences of the entire drama. SALON | Feb. 9, 1999 Joshua Micah Marshall, associate editor of the American Prospect, is covering the impeachment trial for Salon. ~~~~~~~~~~~~ >From wsws.org WSWS : News & Analysis : North America : Clinton Impeachment A journalistic fink for the extreme right Nation columnist Christopher Hitchens fingers Clinton aide By Martin McLaughlin 9 February 1999 Saturday's proceedings in and around the Senate impeachment trial provided an instructive demonstration of the politics and principles of the milieu of ex-radicals and ex-Stalinists which sustains such publications as the weekly journal The Nation. Within minutes of the release of a videotape of the testimony of White House aide Sidney Blumenthal, in which he denied any role in circulating invidious descriptions of Monica Lewinsky to the media, House Republican prosecutors released an affidavit by Christopher Hitchens, a British freelance writer based in Washington who pens a regular column for The Nation, contradicting Blumenthal. By Hitchens's account, he and his wife, Carol Blue, had lunch with Blumenthal on March 19, 1998, in the course of which the White House aide told them that Lewinsky was known as the "stalker" and that Clinton had been the victim of her aggressive sexual advances. The House prosecutors distributed copies of the Hitchens affidavit to the press and to the Senate. On Monday morning Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott sought to introduce the affidavit as evidence in the impeachment trial, only to be blocked by Minority Leader Tom Daschle, who has veto power under the procedures decided upon 10 days ago. The sequence of events makes it clear that Blumenthal was the target of a perjury trap. The House prosecutors sought a blanket denial from Blumenthal, having already learned of Hitchens's contrary testimony. They obtained an affidavit from Hitchens on the evening of Friday, February 5, the day before the videotape of Blumenthal's denial was played to the Senate. As soon as the videotaped testimony was shown, a hue and cry went up from the Republicans and the press, branding Blumenthal as a perjuror. As a matter of fact and law, this charge is absurd. Blumenthal's attorney pointed out that the conversation was not between a "source" and the media, but lunchtime gossip between two men who had been increasingly close friends for 15 years. Their families socialized regularly and Blumenthal had passed on hand-me-down toys from his children to Hitchens's son. Blumenthal was not leaking a "smear," but discussing a characterization of Monica Lewinsky that had been circulating in the media for nearly two months. The first article in the Washington Post noting that Lewinsky had been described in some quarters as a "stalker" is dated January 26, 1998. The first use of the term in reference to Lewinsky apparently came in an article by Michael Isikoff in Newsweek magazine dated January 21, 1998. This episode is politically revealing. It demonstrates, not for the first time, the McCarthyite methods which are the essence of the right-wing campaign against Clinton. Both Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr and the House Republican prosecutors have sought to intimidate witnesses, either to coerce testimony from them or to punish them for opposing the drive to destabilize the Clinton White House. Starr jailed Susan McDougal and now is prosecuting Julie Hiatt Steele for perjury, in both cases because they refused to parrot lies scripted by the special prosecutor's office. Blumenthal has been a target both of Starr and the House prosecutors. He was first hauled before a grand jury last spring, with Starr's office suggesting that political criticisms of the Office of Independent Counsel, authored by Blumenthal, constituted "obstruction of justice." The White House aide was one of three witnesses selected by the House prosecutors for interrogation because he is regarded as an advocate of an aggressive response to the Starr investigation. A close adviser to Hillary Clinton, he is held responsible by the Republicans for her televised denunciation last February of the "right-wing conspiracy" behind the attack on the White House. Equally significant is the role of Hitchens. He is emblematic of the prostration of a whole layer of middle class ex-radicals before the right-wing political coup d'etat in Washington. Comforting himself with a little "left" rhetoric--such as criticism of the US bombing of Iraq, for instance--Hitchens ignores the significance of the political struggle in Washington and the historical implications of the ouster of an elected president through a right-wing dirty tricks operation. Careerism too plays a role. Hitchens is about to publish an anti-Clinton volume that, in the circumstances, will find its principal audience in quarters that do not subscribe to The Nation. He would not be the first ex-radical to boost his market value in right-wing circles with a well-timed political provocation. Marxists oppose Clinton and his policies through a struggle to mobilize the working class and build an independent political movement, based on socialist policies, fighting against the profit system as a whole. Our opposition to Clinton is based on principles. It does not signify any support for Clinton's opponents on the right. Precisely because we defend the democratic rights of working people, we implacably oppose the political conspiracy of the extreme right that underlies the impeachment drive. The "plague on both your houses" attitude of Hitchens, however "left" the rhetoric, represents a capitulation to the right wing and its attack on democratic rights. It has led him to become not only an apologist, but a direct instrument of ultra-right and fascistic forces. See Also: As Senate trial winds down, efforts intensify to cover up conspiracy against democratic rights [6 February 1999] Independent counsel threatens to indict Clinton Starr sends a message: the political coup will continue [2 February 1999] Top of page Readers: The WSWS invites your comments. 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