Presidential Affairs: Bill Clinton and the Lewinsky Affair
Does a President's personal failings in adhering to his marriage vows affect his fitness to lead? And if he lies to his nation about a personal collateral matter, such as whether or not he was sexually intimate with a White House intern, is that grounds for his impeachment? These and other questions were on the minds of the public and in Congress during the second term of President Bill Clinton when he became the second President (after Andrew Johnson) to be the subject of an impeachment trial before the Senate in 1999.
The Lewinsky scandal, as it came to be known, was an political sex scandal which came about as the result of an extramarital sexual relationship between 49-year-old President Bill Clinton and a 22-year-old White House employee, Monica Lewinsky. The matter eventually led to Clinton's impeachment in 1998 by the U.S. House of Representatives and his subsequent acquittal on all impeachment charges of perjury and obstruction of justice in a 21-day Senate trial.
In 1995, Monica Lewinsky was hired to work as an intern at the White House during Clinton's first term. While working at the White House she began a personal relationship with Clinton. She confided the details of what took place between Clinton and her to her friend and Defense Department co-worker Linda Tripp. Tripp secretly recorded their telephone conversations. In January 1998, Tripp learned that Lewinsky had sworn an affidavit in a civil lawsuit brought by Paula Jones in which Lewinsky denied having a relationship with Clinton, Tripp delivered the tapes of her conversations with Lewinsky to Kenneth Starr, the Independent Counsel who was investigating Clinton on other matters, including Whitewater (allegations of illegal real estate transactions), the White House FBI files controversy, and the White House travel office controversy.
During his grand jury testimony Clinton was questioned about whether or not he had sexual relations with Lewinsky. His responses were carefully worded. For example, he told his questioner, "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is", referring to the truthfulness of his statement that "there is not a sexual relationship, an improper sexual relationship or any other kind of improper relationship."
Lewinsky told Tripp that she had sexual encounters with Bill Clinton on nine occasions from November 1995 to March 1997. According to her published schedule, First Lady Hillary Clinton was at the White House on seven of those days. When rumors of possible hanky-panky leaked out, Lewinsky's superiors relocated her job to the Pentagon in April of 1996, because they felt that she was spending too much time around Clinton. United Nations Ambassador Bill Richardson claimed that he was asked by the White House in 1997 to interview Lewinsky for a job on his staff at the UN. Richardson did so, and offered her a job, but she declined to accept the offer.
Lewinsky confided in a coworker, Linda Tripp, about her relationship with Clinton. Tripp persuaded Lewinsky to save the gifts that Clinton had given her, and not to dry clean a semen-stained blue dress. Tripp told literary agent Lucianne Goldberg about her conversations with Lewinsky, and Goldberg advised Tripp to secretly record them. Tripp began doing so in September 1997. Goldberg also urged Tripp to take the tapes to Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr and bring them to the attention of lawyers working on the Paula Jones case. In the fall of 1997, Goldberg told reporter Michael Isikoff of Newsweek about the tapes.
In January 1998, after Lewinsky had submitted an affidavit in the Paula Jones case denying any physical relationship with Clinton, she asked Tripp to lie under oath in the Jones case. Tripp decided to give the tapes of her conversations with Lewinsky to Starr, who was investigating the Whitewater controversy and other matters. With this new information, Starr chose to expand the investigation to include Lewinsky and her possible perjury in the Jones case.
News of the scandal first was published on January 17, 1998, on the Drudge Report website. Drudge reported that Newsweek editors were sitting on a story by investigative reporter Michael Isikoff exposing the affair. The story broke in the mainstream press on January 21 in The Washington Post. Clinton immediately denied that there was any truth to the story. On January 26, President Clinton, standing with his wife, spoke at a White House press conference, and issued a forceful denial in which he said:
"Now, I have to go back to work on my State of the Union speech. And I worked on it until pretty late last night. But I want to say one thing to the American people. I want you to listen to me. I'm going to say this again: I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time; never. These allegations are false. And I need to go back to work for the American people. Thank you."
First Lady Hillary Clinton stood by her husband throughout the scandal. On January 27, in an appearance on NBC's Today she said, "The great story here for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president."
The issue became a hot topic of media coverage, but nothing could be definitively proven beyond the taped recordings because Lewinsky was unwilling to discuss the affair or testify about it. On July 28, 1998, things changed when Lewinsky received transactional immunity in exchange for grand jury testimony concerning her relationship with Clinton. She also turned over to the investigators the semen-stained blue dress that Linda Tripp had encouraged her to save without dry cleaning. The Starr investigators now had damning evidence against Clinton that could prove the relationship despite Clinton's official denials.
On August 17, 1998 Clinton admitted in taped grand jury testimony that he had what he called an "improper physical relationship" with Lewinsky. That evening he gave a nationally televised statement admitting his relationship with Lewinsky which was "not appropriate".
In his deposition for the Paula Jones lawsuit, Clinton had denied having "sexual relations" with Lewinsky. Based on the evidence provided from the DNA analysis of the semen stain on the blue dress that Lewinsky had provided, Starr concluded that Clinton's sworn testimony was not only false, but that Clinton had committed the criminal offense of perjury.
During the deposition, Clinton was asked "Have you ever had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky, as that term is defined in Deposition Exhibit 1?" The question was referring to an agreed definition of "sexual relations" reached by the lawyers from both sides of the Paula Jones case. Later, another definition was created by the Independent Counsel's Office. In answer to a question which referred to that definition, Clinton answered "I have never had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky." Clinton later stated, "I thought the definition included any activity by me, where I was the actor and came in contact with those parts of the bodies". Clinton was saying that if he had performed oral sex on Lewinsky, that would constitute sexual relations with her, but not if she had performed oral sex on him. In other words, Clinton denied that he had ever contacted Lewinsky's "genitalia, anus, groin, breast, inner thigh, or buttocks".
In December 1998, Clinton's Democratic Party was the minority party in both chambers of Congress. Some Democratic members of Congress, and most in the opposition Republican Party, believed that Clinton's giving false testimony and allegedly influencing Lewinsky's testimony were crimes of obstruction of justice and perjury and thus impeachable offenses. The House of Representatives voted to issue Articles of Impeachment against him. This was followed by a 21-day trial in the Senate. At the conclusion of the trial all of the Democrats in the Senate voted for acquittal on both the perjury and the obstruction of justice charges. Ten Republicans voted for acquittal for perjury. Five Republicans voted for acquittal for obstruction of justice. Clinton was thereby acquitted of all charges and remained in office. There were also attempts to censure the president by the House of Representatives, but those attempts failed.
The scandal likely affected the 2000 U.S. presidential election. Democratic Party candidate and sitting vice president Al Gore claimed that Clinton's scandal had been "a drag" that deflated the enthusiasm of their party's base. But Clinton claimed that the scandal had made Gore's campaign too cautious, and that if Clinton had been allowed to campaign for Gore in Arkansas and New Hampshire, either state would have put Gore over the top in the electoral college regardless of what happened in Florida.
During the scandal, supporters of President Clinton alleged that the matter was private and "about sex", and they claimed hypocrisy by at least some of those who advocated for his removal. For example, during the House investigation it was revealed that Henry Hyde, Republican chair of the House Judiciary Committee and lead House manager, also had an affair while in office as a state legislator. Hyde, aged 70 during the Lewinsky hearings, called it a "youthful indiscretion" that occurred when he was 41.Barr lost a primary challenge less than three years after the impeachment proceedings.
Larry Flynt, the publisher of Hustler magazine, offered a $1 million reward for information about sexual indiscretions by Republican members of Congress who were leading the impeachment campaign against President Clinton. Although Flynt claimed to have the goods on up to a dozen prominent Republicans, only one (Congressman Robert Livingston of Louisiana) retired after learning that Mr. Flynt was about to reveal that he had also had an affair. Livingston had been expected to become Speaker of the House of Representatives in the next Congressional session. When Livingston resigned he challenged Clinton to do the same.
Other casualties of this moral blowback included Dan Burton, Republican Representative from Indiana, who had stated "No one, regardless of what party they serve, no one, regardless of what branch of government they serve, should be allowed to get away with these alleged sexual improprieties." In 1998, Burton admitted that he himself had an affair in 1983 that produced a child. Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, Representative from Georgia and leader of the Republican Revolution of 1994, admitted in 1998 to having had an affair with a House intern while he was married to his second wife, at the same time as he was leading the impeachment of Bill Clinton for perjury regarding an affair with intern Monica Lewinsky. Republican Helen Chenoweth-Hage from Idaho aggressively called for the resignation of President Clinton and admitted to her own six-year affair with a married rancher during the 1980s.
Two months after the Senate failed to convict him, President Clinton was held in civil contempt of court by Judge Susan Webber Wright. His license to practice law was suspended in Arkansas for five years and later by the United States Supreme Court. He was also fined $90,000 for giving false testimony. Clinton declined to appeal the civil contempt of court ruling. He cited financial problems as the reason he did not appeal, but he still maintained that his testimony complied with Wright's earlier definition of sexual relations.
Today, over two decades later, the Lewinsky Scandal continues to color the image that many people have of Bill Clinton. That image was made worse when revelation of Clinton's past friendship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein came to light and when it became known through unsealed court documents that Clinton had twice visited Epstein's private island. Despite being the last President to preside during a time of budget surplus, the first thing that comes to mind for many people about Clinton's presidency is the Lewinsky Affair.
The Lewinsky scandal, as it came to be known, was an political sex scandal which came about as the result of an extramarital sexual relationship between 49-year-old President Bill Clinton and a 22-year-old White House employee, Monica Lewinsky. The matter eventually led to Clinton's impeachment in 1998 by the U.S. House of Representatives and his subsequent acquittal on all impeachment charges of perjury and obstruction of justice in a 21-day Senate trial.
In 1995, Monica Lewinsky was hired to work as an intern at the White House during Clinton's first term. While working at the White House she began a personal relationship with Clinton. She confided the details of what took place between Clinton and her to her friend and Defense Department co-worker Linda Tripp. Tripp secretly recorded their telephone conversations. In January 1998, Tripp learned that Lewinsky had sworn an affidavit in a civil lawsuit brought by Paula Jones in which Lewinsky denied having a relationship with Clinton, Tripp delivered the tapes of her conversations with Lewinsky to Kenneth Starr, the Independent Counsel who was investigating Clinton on other matters, including Whitewater (allegations of illegal real estate transactions), the White House FBI files controversy, and the White House travel office controversy.
During his grand jury testimony Clinton was questioned about whether or not he had sexual relations with Lewinsky. His responses were carefully worded. For example, he told his questioner, "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is", referring to the truthfulness of his statement that "there is not a sexual relationship, an improper sexual relationship or any other kind of improper relationship."
Lewinsky told Tripp that she had sexual encounters with Bill Clinton on nine occasions from November 1995 to March 1997. According to her published schedule, First Lady Hillary Clinton was at the White House on seven of those days. When rumors of possible hanky-panky leaked out, Lewinsky's superiors relocated her job to the Pentagon in April of 1996, because they felt that she was spending too much time around Clinton. United Nations Ambassador Bill Richardson claimed that he was asked by the White House in 1997 to interview Lewinsky for a job on his staff at the UN. Richardson did so, and offered her a job, but she declined to accept the offer.
Lewinsky confided in a coworker, Linda Tripp, about her relationship with Clinton. Tripp persuaded Lewinsky to save the gifts that Clinton had given her, and not to dry clean a semen-stained blue dress. Tripp told literary agent Lucianne Goldberg about her conversations with Lewinsky, and Goldberg advised Tripp to secretly record them. Tripp began doing so in September 1997. Goldberg also urged Tripp to take the tapes to Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr and bring them to the attention of lawyers working on the Paula Jones case. In the fall of 1997, Goldberg told reporter Michael Isikoff of Newsweek about the tapes.
In January 1998, after Lewinsky had submitted an affidavit in the Paula Jones case denying any physical relationship with Clinton, she asked Tripp to lie under oath in the Jones case. Tripp decided to give the tapes of her conversations with Lewinsky to Starr, who was investigating the Whitewater controversy and other matters. With this new information, Starr chose to expand the investigation to include Lewinsky and her possible perjury in the Jones case.
News of the scandal first was published on January 17, 1998, on the Drudge Report website. Drudge reported that Newsweek editors were sitting on a story by investigative reporter Michael Isikoff exposing the affair. The story broke in the mainstream press on January 21 in The Washington Post. Clinton immediately denied that there was any truth to the story. On January 26, President Clinton, standing with his wife, spoke at a White House press conference, and issued a forceful denial in which he said:
"Now, I have to go back to work on my State of the Union speech. And I worked on it until pretty late last night. But I want to say one thing to the American people. I want you to listen to me. I'm going to say this again: I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time; never. These allegations are false. And I need to go back to work for the American people. Thank you."
First Lady Hillary Clinton stood by her husband throughout the scandal. On January 27, in an appearance on NBC's Today she said, "The great story here for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president."
The issue became a hot topic of media coverage, but nothing could be definitively proven beyond the taped recordings because Lewinsky was unwilling to discuss the affair or testify about it. On July 28, 1998, things changed when Lewinsky received transactional immunity in exchange for grand jury testimony concerning her relationship with Clinton. She also turned over to the investigators the semen-stained blue dress that Linda Tripp had encouraged her to save without dry cleaning. The Starr investigators now had damning evidence against Clinton that could prove the relationship despite Clinton's official denials.
On August 17, 1998 Clinton admitted in taped grand jury testimony that he had what he called an "improper physical relationship" with Lewinsky. That evening he gave a nationally televised statement admitting his relationship with Lewinsky which was "not appropriate".
In his deposition for the Paula Jones lawsuit, Clinton had denied having "sexual relations" with Lewinsky. Based on the evidence provided from the DNA analysis of the semen stain on the blue dress that Lewinsky had provided, Starr concluded that Clinton's sworn testimony was not only false, but that Clinton had committed the criminal offense of perjury.
During the deposition, Clinton was asked "Have you ever had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky, as that term is defined in Deposition Exhibit 1?" The question was referring to an agreed definition of "sexual relations" reached by the lawyers from both sides of the Paula Jones case. Later, another definition was created by the Independent Counsel's Office. In answer to a question which referred to that definition, Clinton answered "I have never had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky." Clinton later stated, "I thought the definition included any activity by me, where I was the actor and came in contact with those parts of the bodies". Clinton was saying that if he had performed oral sex on Lewinsky, that would constitute sexual relations with her, but not if she had performed oral sex on him. In other words, Clinton denied that he had ever contacted Lewinsky's "genitalia, anus, groin, breast, inner thigh, or buttocks".
In December 1998, Clinton's Democratic Party was the minority party in both chambers of Congress. Some Democratic members of Congress, and most in the opposition Republican Party, believed that Clinton's giving false testimony and allegedly influencing Lewinsky's testimony were crimes of obstruction of justice and perjury and thus impeachable offenses. The House of Representatives voted to issue Articles of Impeachment against him. This was followed by a 21-day trial in the Senate. At the conclusion of the trial all of the Democrats in the Senate voted for acquittal on both the perjury and the obstruction of justice charges. Ten Republicans voted for acquittal for perjury. Five Republicans voted for acquittal for obstruction of justice. Clinton was thereby acquitted of all charges and remained in office. There were also attempts to censure the president by the House of Representatives, but those attempts failed.
The scandal likely affected the 2000 U.S. presidential election. Democratic Party candidate and sitting vice president Al Gore claimed that Clinton's scandal had been "a drag" that deflated the enthusiasm of their party's base. But Clinton claimed that the scandal had made Gore's campaign too cautious, and that if Clinton had been allowed to campaign for Gore in Arkansas and New Hampshire, either state would have put Gore over the top in the electoral college regardless of what happened in Florida.
During the scandal, supporters of President Clinton alleged that the matter was private and "about sex", and they claimed hypocrisy by at least some of those who advocated for his removal. For example, during the House investigation it was revealed that Henry Hyde, Republican chair of the House Judiciary Committee and lead House manager, also had an affair while in office as a state legislator. Hyde, aged 70 during the Lewinsky hearings, called it a "youthful indiscretion" that occurred when he was 41.Barr lost a primary challenge less than three years after the impeachment proceedings.
Larry Flynt, the publisher of Hustler magazine, offered a $1 million reward for information about sexual indiscretions by Republican members of Congress who were leading the impeachment campaign against President Clinton. Although Flynt claimed to have the goods on up to a dozen prominent Republicans, only one (Congressman Robert Livingston of Louisiana) retired after learning that Mr. Flynt was about to reveal that he had also had an affair. Livingston had been expected to become Speaker of the House of Representatives in the next Congressional session. When Livingston resigned he challenged Clinton to do the same.
Other casualties of this moral blowback included Dan Burton, Republican Representative from Indiana, who had stated "No one, regardless of what party they serve, no one, regardless of what branch of government they serve, should be allowed to get away with these alleged sexual improprieties." In 1998, Burton admitted that he himself had an affair in 1983 that produced a child. Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, Representative from Georgia and leader of the Republican Revolution of 1994, admitted in 1998 to having had an affair with a House intern while he was married to his second wife, at the same time as he was leading the impeachment of Bill Clinton for perjury regarding an affair with intern Monica Lewinsky. Republican Helen Chenoweth-Hage from Idaho aggressively called for the resignation of President Clinton and admitted to her own six-year affair with a married rancher during the 1980s.
Two months after the Senate failed to convict him, President Clinton was held in civil contempt of court by Judge Susan Webber Wright. His license to practice law was suspended in Arkansas for five years and later by the United States Supreme Court. He was also fined $90,000 for giving false testimony. Clinton declined to appeal the civil contempt of court ruling. He cited financial problems as the reason he did not appeal, but he still maintained that his testimony complied with Wright's earlier definition of sexual relations.
Today, over two decades later, the Lewinsky Scandal continues to color the image that many people have of Bill Clinton. That image was made worse when revelation of Clinton's past friendship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein came to light and when it became known through unsealed court documents that Clinton had twice visited Epstein's private island. Despite being the last President to preside during a time of budget surplus, the first thing that comes to mind for many people about Clinton's presidency is the Lewinsky Affair.