Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [441]
Judge Wright’s contempt decision came at an awkward time, just as Bill Clinton was seeking to regain his footing as leader of the free world, immersing himself in a NATO-led air campaign against Yugo slavia in response to ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. As bombs were falling on Serbian military targets, the judge who had once been Bill Clinton’s law student ordered him to pay $90,000 to cover “reasonable expenses, including attorneys’ fees” and to repay the federal government $1,202 for her own travel costs to Washington. The no-nonsense Judge Wright also declared that she would refer this matter to the disciplinary committee of the Arkansas Supreme Court, to decide whether Clinton should be disbarred or sanctioned for violating the state’s rules of professional conduct.
President Clinton later expressed vigorous disapproval of Judge Wright’s postimpeachment sanctions. These, he felt, were clearly designed to heap insult atop injury like a belt-whipping after a child had already been publicly thrashed. “I thought it was wrong,” Clinton said of Wright’s contempt order. This was especially true because the judge had implied in a footnote in her earlier summary judgment opinion that the president would be off the hook if he settled the Jones case. Clinton especially felt aggrieved because the Jones team had “regularly and flagrantly flouted” Judge Wright’s orders by leaking material to the press—yet they were never sanctioned for their overt violations of the court’s directives. The political animal in Clinton believed that Judge Wright had felt pressured to wallop him one last time to save face with the “right-wingers,” after tossing out the Jones case. The former president mused, “So I guess, you know, by zapping me a little in the aftermath, it probably helped her restore her position with the dominant wing of her party.”
What President Clinton and his advisers in the White House would never fully appreciate, however, was that Judge Susan Webber Wright was the single person in the United States who could have ended his presidency with a stroke of the pen. Yet she refrained from signing that order.
One individual close to Judge Wright at the time, who would insist upon anonymity, confirmed that she weighed a number of options to deal with Bill Clinton’s blatant violations of her discovery orders. One option was to exercise the court’s “general contempt” powers, which were extremely broad when it came to controlling the court’s proceedings. An even more direct course of action was to cite Clinton for “criminal contempt”—a move that could have ended his political career in a nanosecond.
If Judge Wright had chosen the latter route to deal with Bill Clinton’s falsehoods under oath, while the congressional impeachment proceedings were still under way, she could have virtually guaranteed President Clinton’s conviction in the Senate. A judicial finding of “criminal contempt” would have handed the House managers the single missing ingredient that they lacked from the start—a finding of criminal conduct by a court of law. Among other things, it would have made Clinton’s case nearly indistinguishable from those of the three federal judges whom the Senate had removed from office in the late 1980s. Even a finding of civil contempt, if it had been issued by Judge Wright in the thick of the Senate impeachment trial, could have easily inflicted a mortal blow on Clinton.
It was only because Ken Starr had swept in with his investigation so early (before Clinton had even testified), and the House of Representatives had commenced impeachment action so swiftly (before there was a judicial finding of wrongdoing by Clinton) that the falsehoods uttered by Clinton in the Jones case