Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [254]
An unfair twist to this civil deposition, as Clinton saw it, was that the Supreme Court’s precedent and the decision in Clinton v. Jones itself only permitted him to be sued as “Bill Clinton, private citizen.” The Constitution and age-old concepts relating to executive privilege protected a president from being sued in his official capacity. Now, his opponents were trying to have their cake and eat it, too. They were going after him as a private citizen, yet holding him to a higher standard. “The only reason I was sued is because I was president,” Clinton would explain. In an ordinary civil case, he stressed, a judge would have tossed out this entire lawsuit early on as “lacking merit.” Clinton felt he was being subjected to a double standard; he believed this proceeding was all about shaming him and doing political damage.
“They would leak it if it were embarrassing, and I would be hurt that way,” he explained. “Or they could, you know, bludgeon me into paying everything I’d worked to save and Hillary had worked to save and apologizing for something I didn’t do.… That was what this is about.”
Paula Jones arrived at the deposition, in the capital city of Washington, with a Pollyannaish view that Bill Clinton would be forced to fess up. “I did,” Jones would later acknowledge, “only because of how the law works. You’re supposed to go under oath.… I thought, ‘Okay, he sure wouldn’t commit perjury.’ But he did, anyway.” Jones added, having lost the sparkle of optimism after that deposition, “I guess I’m at the point now I think he could do anything. I think he didn’t care. He’d lie, cheat, steal, anything. He stole the furniture from the White House. So he’s lied, he’s cheated, he stole, he’s committed adultery. Let’s see, what else. There’s a lot of confessing to do.”
Jim Fisher, the soft-spoken litigator from Dallas who would conduct the deposition, had arrived at the Hyatt Regency in Washington a day early, framing questions that he would pose to the president. Fisher had handled hundreds of depositions as a litigator. But this was different from others. “I had the strong sense,” Fisher said, “that this was going to be a deposition that people were going to read and comb through and look at line for line.” He had to make the questions “extremely simple and clear and plain.”
“To win the case, the thing I had to do was to destroy [Clinton’s] credibility,” explained Fisher. “We were going to provide ample evidence that he had done many times exactly what Paula Jones said he did to her.”
Fisher was not enthralled with the prospect of digging into the sexual predilections of the president of the United States. At the same time, he said, “I felt that there needed to be some recognition of how low our standards had fallen. As a Christian, it bothered me that this man who purports to be a Christian would so sully our faith by his hypocrisy and his pretext. I believed at the time and still believe that he used his alleged faith as a mere tool for political gain. And that bothered me.”
Fisher also spent time in his hotel room tinkering with a definition of “sexual relations.” He planned to spring this definition on the president so that there was no room for the Arkansas two-step. Fisher had extracted this language from the Violence Against Women’s Act, a federal law that Clinton himself had signed into existence. “And I thought that at trial, I could exploit the fact that it was his law. He signed it. And if he said he didn’t know what it meant or it’s not clear, then