Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [452]
“What they should have been doing was investigating terrorism,” Merletti concluded, looking around his office at mementos of his quarter-century career with the U.S. Secret Service. “Chasing down Monica Lewinsky. A lot of good that did for us.”
ON Friday, January 19, President Bill Clinton was preparing to sign a final batch of orders as chief executive and packing up boxes for his new home in Chappaqua, New York, where he and his wife, Senator-elect Hillary Clinton, would be making their new home. As a house-warming gift, a deal had been struck that would give the former president a new lease on life.
Over the past ten days, David Kendall had been fighting off a nasty flu while flying to and from Arkansas. He had been secretly meeting with members of the Supreme Court of Arkansas’s Committee on Professional Conduct, the group weighing disbarment proceedings against its once-favorite son. Most of the Democrats and “Friends of Bill” on that committee had recused themselves, leaving Kendall with tough sledding. Its lead prosecutor was a former nun and hard-nosed lawyer, Marie-Bernarde Miller, who seemed unforgiving of Bill Clinton’s sins. Ordinarily, lawyers were only sanctioned for professional misconduct when they misrepresented clients or abused drugs or alcohol—indiscretions that impaired their functioning as attorneys. In this case, however, Kendall could read the tea leaves. Legal precedent seemed irrelevant to the Arkansas committee. Clinton was about to be slapped with a sanction based on a generic offense: “You’ve brought disrespect to the profession.”
With this likelihood floating in the wind, the president agreed to have his law license suspended for five years and to pay a $25,000 fine to the Arkansas Supreme Court’s Committee on Professional Conduct, to cover that group’s costs. Clinton also surrendered the right to seek even a penny’s worth of legal fees from OIC. In return, Ray agreed to close the books on all criminal investigations against the departing president. With one big caveat: Clinton was required to admit that he “knowingly gave evasive and misleading answers” in his Paula Jones deposition. Clinton reluctantly complied with that final condition. That same day, he issued a terse but painful statement: “I tried to walk a fine line between acting lawfully and testifying falsely, but I now recognize that I did not fully accomplish this goal and am certain my responses to questions about Ms. Lewinsky were false.”
Minutes after David Kendall released the president’s apologia to reporters, Robert Ray issued his own brief statement. “This matter is now concluded,” he stated. “May history and the American people judge that it has been concluded justly.”
President Bill Clinton later admitted that he was sickened by the final deal struck between his lawyer and Robert Ray. “Yes, I had reservations about accepting it, and no, I didn’t think it was fair,” Clinton said. “I took it because I thought the country ought to be able to get over this. I thought, you know, we were starting a new administration and I wanted to start a new life. And I took it. I don’t think there was anything fair about it.”
The former president further unburdened himself by confessing that he was especially “outraged” by the suspension of his bar license. This occurred, he insisted, only because the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette had “succeeded in intimidating every person off the Bar Committee who wasn’t anti-Clinton.” He didn’t mind swallowing some nasty-tasting medicine to remedy this malady that he had contracted from his own heedlessness. But the whole bottle seemed a bit much.
“So they did something