(3 of 8)
The volume of sexual detail represents an enormous danger to the White House; everything whispered, rumored and wondered about this story now goes directly into the public consciousness about Clinton. He is immune to filters now. And so the details themselves needed to be turned into a weapon against Starr, which is exactly what presidential advisers began to do even before his report was released. White House aides charged that Starr had gone way too far in including so much embarrassing detail, all designed to do nothing less than force the President from office one way or another. Including all those blue footnotes, the Clinton team argues, was simply "part of a hit-and-run smear campaign." The President, they argued in their rebuttal on Saturday, had already admitted that he had had an improper relationship and apologized repeatedly for it. That may have been a sin, but it was no crime. "The referral is so loaded with irrelevant and unnecessary graphic and salacious allegations that only one conclusion is possible: its principal purpose is to damage the President."
Starr, in turn, has had his response to this charge ready and waiting for weeks: the President's evasive testimony made the detail essential to proving the case for perjury. Though the President promised at his Friday-morning prayer breakfast not to hide behind legalisms, that is precisely what his lawyers put forward at a news conference that very afternoon, when they tried to argue--once again--that lying did not necessarily constitute perjury. Monica's recollections of their activities would clearly fall under the definition of sexual relations, which the President denied having in his deposition for the Paula Jones case. So the President's lawyer, David Kendall, offered this explanation last week: "It may well be that people's recollections differ. That does not necessarily mean that one is lying."
The other pillar of Starr's case has to do with the whole attempt to cover up the behavior Starr chronicles in Part 1. Americans may be troubled by the amount of time and energy Clinton spent last winter helping Lewinsky find a job, return gifts he had given her and prepare for her testimony in the Jones case. Clinton's lawyers maintain that in each case these were innocent activities. But Starr's report argues that with each effort, Clinton was working to conceal the affair from lawyers in the Jones case and thereby derail their lawsuit, and then derail Starr's own investigation when it got under way in January.
Clinton could not have pulled off this deception alone. In fact, given all the people in a position to see Monica coming and going delivering papers, pizza and presents, Clinton appears to have been surrounded by the most supine courtiers since Claudius. Until last week his secretary, Betty Currie, was portrayed as a warm-hearted yet harmless bystander in the Oval Office; the Starr report suggests that she was something more than that. Currie, as much as Vernon Jordan, emerges as the President's co-conspirator in covering up the affair, which may help explain why she testified five times. Clinton denied putting Currie up to these chores; and Currie could not, almost without exception, recall if he did.