The New Republican Hypocrisy

The BBQ Pit
121

Let’s remember, too, that the threshhold for questions during a deposition is different than the threshhold at trial. At trial, a question must seek relevant evidence. During a deposition, a question may seek relevant evidence, or it may seek evidence that is itself irrelevant, but is reasonably calculated to lead to the discovery of relevant evidence.

In any event, it’s not for the deponent to judge the relevancy of the evidence sought. If he wishes to withhold testimony under a claim of relevance, he can, and the matter will be adjudicated by a judge. But he may not decide, on his own, that a particular question is irrelevant and offer up a lie in response.

122

To some degree, don’t prosecutors do that anyway? Look for as many charges as they can bring, and go with a lot of small things if they don’t find something major? See also: Capone, Al. That can be abused, but you don’t get to lie in court just because you think the thing being investigated is not a crime.

Bob, please read my last post before this one. I responded to almost everything you just repeated to rjung. I don’t remember Clinton ever saying “I did not have sex with that woman.” The phrase he used in his famous address to the nation, not under oath, was “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.” In his wisdom, he may have chosen to say something other than “sex,” perhaps to say they not only hadn’t had intercourse, but hadn’t done other stuff. As I showed, he also said it under oath. I don’t think you can say his comments under oath were the result of an honest difference of opinion about what sex is, since the term was defined pretty clearly.

123

Cite page and line please. We already dealt with the deposition above, and I can see why they didn’t get a conviction in the Senate, the question wasn’t asked.

You may contend that the deponent isn’t allowed to interpret what he thinks is relevant and argue it later, but it seems that the jury of Senators disagreed with you. I am reliably informed that Clinton was acquitted of the very charges being made. I reviewed what was available at the time, and I didn’t see where they asked him a question and he lied. But if you’ve got a page and line cite that I missed, I’ll be happy to look for argument’s sake. But for fact’s sake, the jury acquitted, get over it and stop being a sore loser.

124

I think somebody did that. :rolleyes:

125

Let’s start with a definition

Scroll down about half way and you get

oooh, here comes “the question”

If he had a blowjob from Monica, did his genitals not touch part of her body, thus making it “sexual relations”?

126

You’ve been given a cite directly above.

Do not confuse the Senate with a jury. Their purpose was not to judge a criminal trial. They did not hear testimony. There was no effort to examine any senator for bias. Their question was not “Did he commit the acts?” Their question was “Should he be removed from office?” To that question, and that question only, they answered “no”.

A real criminal jury is a fact-finder. They hear testimony, both direct and by cross-examination. They are chosen to be a neutral tribunal. They are tasked with resolving factual disputes in testimony and rendering a verdict based on criminal law.

None of that describes the Senate’s role.

Do you believe that a Senate “conviction of impeachment” would serve as a bar to future criminal prosecution under the double jeopardy clause? Do you believe that the Senate’s “acquittal of impeachment” serves as a bar to criminal prosecution?

Hint: they don’t. The impeachment trial in the Senate is not analogous to a criminal trial, and you cannot argue from the results that the Senate found any particular set of facts to be proven or unproven.

127

Yes, you did cite to a deposition, but not any other grand jury testimony and I read it. It’s my understanding that that “deposition” is what is referred to as the grand jury testimony. Anybody else is welcome to cite something else.

Here’s the point, Clinton didn’t gratify Lewinsky by touching her, it was vice versa. The definition which you cited can fairly be read as saying that if Bill did not intend to gratify Monica, Bill did not touch Monica to have sexual relations with her, then he didn’t. Did Monica have relations with Bill per that definition, yes.

The fact of the matter is that they deliberately did not ask him “did Ms. Lewinsky perform fellatio on Mr. Clinton” when they already knew she had. Were this only a legal case (and not fundamentally about politics), that would be lawyer malpractice to fail to ask that question. To substitute a multi-part definition of “sexual relations” that doesn’t cover this instance is not just bizarre, it is political. And the jury rightly dealt with it on that basis.

There was a reason that they did not ask Clinton “did Ms. Lewinsky perform fellatio on you” directly: they knew he would answer in the affirmative, and so they substituted the line of questioning they used because they knew he would dance around it. He did because it was fatally flawed. It was like it was written by lawyers who knew nothing about sex (there’s a stretch) with human beings.

So Starr’s guys still didn’t get Clinton because they played at lawyer and prosecutor and politics instead of asking: did female A blow male B. It was a lot of crap about who was pleasuring whom. Bill didn’t think he was pleasuring Monica. Had he done more than shove a cigar up her patootie, there might be a case. But he did not kiss her, he did not perform cunnilingus on her, he did not fuck her. His reasoning was that she was pleasuring him, and not vice versa, which was entirely compliant with the badly written legalistic defnition of sexual relations.

I don’t know who wrote that definition, but it seems to me that it is almost as if Clinton’s lawyers demanded the other side use that definition and then laughed when they did.

Do I think Clinton got a blow job from Lewinsky? Yes. Do I think the prosecutor knew it when they asked those questions? Yes. Do I think the prosecutor asked the question any comptent lawyer would have asked? No. And they didn’t because they knew if they asked direct question Clinton would answer it truthfully and they were hell bent on prosecuting him, not a crime. That’s prosecutorial misconduct, not perjury.

What this has always boiled down to is whether the “sexual relations” definition adequate. There are people who think it is, and people who don’t. I’m in the camp who thinks it is inadequate, you think it is just fine. Good for you. The jury agreed with me. Get over it Sore Loserman.

128

Did you read the definition, or does it all depend on what the meaning of “or” is?
1, 2, or 3 does not mean 1.

129

There was no prosecutor involved in that deposition. It was a deposition as part of a civil trial. And, anyway, if he and Lewinsky had oral sex, that would fit under the definition of “sexual relations” under definition 3.

130

Ah, I see. Clinton only saw definition one and said he didn’t do it, not two and three. Now that I have, regrettably, read a little of the Starr report. Thanks for making me debase myself, Bob. Anyway, Lewinsky still contradicts him on several points.

No kidding. :wink:

I’ll stop interjecting, but can I say that this is also pretty funny?

All of which qualifies under definition numero uno. I feel queasy.

As Bricker has already explained, that’s not what the jury did. The jury decided he shouldn’t be removed from office. And as I opposed the impeachment in the first place, as I already stated, even a brilliant legal mind such as yourself can’t reasonably conclude that I’m a sore loser about it. If you like, though, you can try. :rolleyes:

131

No, it wouldn’t any more than 1 or 2. I will acknowledge that people disagree, but I’ll still point out that the jury agreed with Clinton. According to Clinton’s interpretation, it isn’t even close to asking the question.

I notice that the pro-impeachment folks never do address the question of why “blow job” or fellatio by Monica was not asked directly.

132

Yes, you are correct, I was mistaken. Does that change the assumption about bad lawyering? My recollection is that the deposition took place after the Lewinsky charges became public. If a lawyer knows the exact facts, why doesn’t he/she ask and pin the witness down?

133

I don’t care either whether a president cheats on his wife. But there was never any credible evidence of an affair between GHWB and Jennifer Fitzgerald.

134

I’ll note that if you acknowledge Bricker’s post that the jury did no such thing.

You are making me wonder if the phrase “dumber than a sack of hammers” can ever be an understatement.

This deposition was taken in January of 1998, eight months before the Starr Report took up all the spaces next to Hustler on the magazine racks. Could you cite that everybody knew blowjobs were the issue in January of '98?

Clinton being the extremely intelligent guy he is, I expect that if he’d been asked directly about a “blowjob,” he’d have said no, and then later testified that oral sex cannot be termed a “blowjob” unless the blowee licks in a counterclockwise motion, and that because what Ms. Lewinsky’s tongue moved clockwise, what he received was in fact a “hummer.” Any reasonable person would agree. :wink:

135

Some cites:

An audio file.

A cite for the testimony of James Marcinkowski.

Another cite.

Colonel (ret) Patrick Lang on the matter.

136

How is receiving a blow job not “contact between the genitals or anus of the person and any part of another person’s body”?

137

OK. Let’s do this thoroughly.
Monica Lewinsky testified that they had ten separate sexual encounters:

During pretrial discovery, Paula Jones’s attorneys served the President with written interrogatories. One stated in relevant part:

The interrogatory did not define the term “sexual relations.” Judge Wright ordered the President to answer the interrogatory, and on December 23, 1997, under penalty of perjury, President Clinton answered “None.” (President Clinton’s Supplemental Responses to Plaintiff’s Second Set of Interrogatories, see Response to Interrogatory no. 10).

The President was asked if he was ever alone with Ms. Lewinksy. He claimed he did not recall. (Clinton 1/17/98 Depo. at 52-53).

During his grand jury testimony, he was asked if oral sex was covered by the definition of “sexual activity” used in the deposition. He replied that it was not. He conceded that his touching of Ms. Lewinsky’s breasts and genitals WOULD fall within that definition, but insisted that he never did that.

138

What I gather now is that Clinton was only asked about the first definition on that list (circled in byomtoob’s link). Although that would still seem to be false.

139

Obviously we need a special prosecuter to look harder.

140

Well, Al Capone got caught comitting other crimes. My hypothetical Politician X did nothing illegal. That’s where it gets difficult for me.

One scenerio in the case most relevant to this discussion is Libby fibbed about discussions he’d had with, say, his boss. Maybe Cheney got the word from Tennent, Cheney mentioned Wilson was Plame’s husband, but there was nothing illegal or retributive about the discussion. Maybe neither even knew at the time she was covert. So, much later, Libby decides, probably quite rightly after the issue explodes, that such internal dialogue will appear to be, in retrospect, inappropriate, and hence politically damaging to Cheney if word of it got out (which it probably will, as we’ve seen). So he says Rove told him about Plame. It really doesn’t matter for any practical purpose who told him, because it was Libby who divulged Plame’s identity, not Cheney. However, politically, the narrative will be embellished and characterized as a plot from the highest levels to out Plame and discredit Wilson, with Libby acting upon the wishes of the Vice President. Nothing of the sort may have occurred, and even if it did, the only truly questionable action was Libby’s divulgence of the relationship between Wilson and Plame.

Now we know Cheney told Libby, and we know this because some lawyers (who remain unidentified) told the papers. This is not a hypothetical.

Getting back to the hypothetical scenerio (it being a plausible one, I think), Libby gets nailed for perjury because he said someone other than Cheney told him. And that is the only crime committed in the whole debacle.

If, as Bricker says, these proceedings are going to be kept secret, Libby’s actions are far less excusable.

But some matters germain to the proceedings have not been kept secret. Therefore (and believe me, it pains me to say this, because nobody would like to see BushCo. get nailed more than myself), all of this may truly be a tempest in a teapot, as inconsequential as the Clinton BJ Incident. Worse, the Democrats will seek vengeance for Clinton’s trials by siezing only on the technical illegality of the matter, using the conviction as a brand, and magnifying it with suspicion and innuendo about the motives behind the perjury.

And on it goes, each subsequent administration under the microscope, regardless of party, with special prosecutors misused as smart bombs, guaranteed to dig up actionable dirt, no matter its severity or relevence. I find the whole pattern, if there is such a pattern, ugly in the extreme, and things will only get uglier if such investigations are used primarily as a political tactic.