“Private” Crimes

September 21, 2000

Once again the Clintons have beaten the rap. Independent counsel Robert Ray has decided not to prosecute the first couple for their part in the Whitewater scam, because he has decided that “the evidence was insufficient to prove to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt that either President Clinton or Mrs. Clinton knowingly participated in any criminal conduct.”

This carefully worded statement was far from the exoneration the White House chose to see in it. Ray merely said he doubted that he could make the charges stick in a criminal trial.

Most crimes are never detected or punished. The few that are brought to trial tend to be fairly clear-cut, with defendants who are too careless or stupid to cover their tracks, too poor to hire a Johnnie Cochran, and too inarticulate to talk their way out of a tight spot. The Clintons are smart, rich, and glib.

They also command vast resources of organized glibness, as we saw during the impeachment proceedings. They are masters of obfuscation; they know how to create and compound complication and confusion, until the jurors’ minds are overloaded with incomprehensible detail.

It would be a waste of time trying to prove their guilt beyond a reasonable doubt under courtroom conditions, even though 14 of their associates in the fraudulent scheme have been convicted. So Ray threw in his hand.

Much of the testimony against the Clintons came from their convicted friends. But what would make a normal person suspicious — on the birds-of-a-feather principle — would only have strengthened the Clintons’ legal defense, as they argued that their former partners were a shady lot, not to be trusted. (So why were the Clintons in cahoots with such characters for so many years? Never mind.)

Bill Clinton has already made his special niche in history by beating an impeachment trial after being caught with his pants down, and I don’t mean “as it were.” Even many of the senators who voted to acquit agreed that he had committed the acts — perjury, obstruction — for which he was being impeached.

The excuse for acquittal was that crimes committed in connection with sex weren’t “high crimes” in the constitutional sense; they didn’t “rise to the level of an impeachable offense.”

Well, it’s certainly true that the Framers of the Constitution weren’t imagining a William Jefferson Clinton when they wrote the phrase “high crimes and misdemeanors.” He was still unimaginable in those days. If his behavior in the Oval Office had occurred to them, they would have assumed there would be no need for impeachment: they would expect that the sheer dishonor of his conduct, once revealed, would force him to resign long before anyone got around to impeaching him. There was no need to specify that “high crimes and misdemeanors” could apply to sordid sexual acts as well as to affairs of state.

If, however, such a man refused to resign, the Framers would surely have agreed that impeachment was warranted for a chief executive who committed perjury and obstructed justice. How could a perjuror and felon be trusted with the faithful enforcement of the very laws he had violated?

But the very word honor has faded from our public vocabulary. We no longer feel that honor is the prime quality required of a public official. Our conception of a president is utilitarian. Is he doing a “good job” in economic terms? Is the country prospering materially under his management? If so, what does his personal conduct have to do with anything? If he sneaks young girls into his office, that’s his private life!

Those senators who refused to convict Clinton for what he had undeniably done argued that he could be prosecuted for his “private” crimes after he left office; some even agreed that he should be prosecuted. The word reprehensible was thrown around a lot.

But Clinton has proved especially adroit at changing the standards by which he is judged. What shocked us at first soon became almost acceptable: sex on the job, lies to the public, lies under oath, silly semantics, phony contrition, smearing prosecutors. By now we’re not shocked when he gets away with anything. We’d be really shocked if he were ever convicted.

Joseph Sobran

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