25 years later, looking for lessons in the Clinton scandal

2016 photo of Bill Clinton. (Image by Hayden Schiff via Wikimedia Commons CC 2.0)

The story was as tawdry as they come: The president of the United States had been having sex with a former White House intern in the space off the Oval Office and now was being investigated for lying under oath and obstructing justice to cover it up.

The newspaper that landed on doorsteps around Washington that morning, 25 years ago Saturday, kicked off a furor that led to the first presidential impeachment trial in 130 years and transformed politics in the capital as President Bill Clinton battled for survival. A quarter-century later, the lessons are still being debated with each successive scandal.

The current White House imbroglio, while hardly as titillating or politically dangerous, is a case study in what today’s political actors took away from that unseemly-but-can’t-look-away episode. Some Democrats complain that President Joe Biden’s team, now confronting a federal investigation, failed to heed the best practices drawn from the Clinton experience while others insist that it is, in critical ways, following the playbook.

The discovery of classified documents at Biden’s home and private office prompted his own attorney general, Merrick Garland, to appoint a special counsel to look into the matter, much as Clinton’s attorney general, Janet Reno, felt compelled to authorize independent counsel Ken Starr to investigate her president’s efforts to hide his encounters with Monica Lewinsky, the former intern. No one thinks the two are equivalent, but in the post-Clinton-and-Starr Washington, every such moment is measured against the history of that turn-of-the-century spectacle.

“The investigation of President Clinton sparked by the explosive news of his affair with Monica Lewinsky ushered in a new era,” said Ken Gormley, president of Duquesne University and author of “The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr.” Although the affair had nothing to do with the original Whitewater real estate allegations being investigated by Starr, “opponents in Washington began connecting dots that didn’t connect. Ever since, presidents can face danger around every corner.”

With the virtue of hindsight, the episode has been reevaluated repeatedly over the years. After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, many felt the obsession with Clinton’s sex life and legal misconduct had been ludicrously misdirected. In a later era, with another president accused of instigating an insurrection to overturn an election, lying about extramarital romps in the West Wing hardly seems serious.

Yet, in light of the #MeToo movement, neither is it taken as lightly. Although Lewinsky was a willing partner, the power differential between a president and a former intern 27 years his junior looks different today. And given other women’s accusations of sexual assault by Clinton (allegations he denies), some Democrats have concluded they should not have defended him at the time.

Clinton and Lewinsky, of course, were not the only ones whose reputations were marred as a result. Starr, who died last year, was reviled by many as a sex-obsessed Inspector Javert who took the whole matter too far. Some of the Republican congressional leaders who pursued Clinton had their own adultery revealed and in some cases were forced from office. Few emerged unscathed, and this weekend’s 25-year anniversary is going largely unmarked.

But not forgotten. The Clinton case proved the template for the no-holds-barred style of political scandal warfare that has dominated Washington ever since, one that has no patience for waiting until an investigation can determine the facts before attacks and counterattacks are mounted.

“If you’re the opposition and the other party has committed a foul, pre-Clinton there was a hesitation to rush to judgment — the innocent-until-proven guilty sort of thing,” said C. Stewart Verdery Jr., a lawyer for the Senate Republican leadership during the Clinton impeachment trial. “And post-Clinton, everyone goes right to Defcon 1.”

Although many of today’s political operatives in Washington were in elementary school at the time of the Clinton scandal — perhaps shielded from it by parents leery of all the talk of thongs, cigars and a sullied blue dress — some of the veterans of that era are still around and at the center of the current investigation.

Bob Bauer, Biden’s top personal lawyer, advised the House and Senate Democratic leaders during the impeachment and trial of Clinton. Ron Klain, Biden’s White House chief of staff (although he is expected to step down in coming weeks), served in the same role for Vice President Al Gore back then. Steven Ricchetti, now Biden’s counselor, was Clinton’s deputy chief of staff.

Some fellow Democrats complain that they have not applied the lessons of the Clinton era. Lanny Davis, who served as a White House lawyer for Clinton and a vocal defender, said the Biden White House should have proactively disclosed the discovery of papers in the president’s garage in Wilmington, Delaware, rather than waiting until the media reported it.

“Been there, done that,” Davis said Saturday. He expressed sympathy for the Biden team, saying he did not want to be an outside kibitzer and understood the arguments of lawyers who opposed premature public disclosure. “But they don’t counter the political damage if it’s coming out anyway.”

Others took different lessons from the Clinton case, though. Paul Begala, who was Clinton’s White House counselor, said Biden should remember that Clinton had made a point of leaving it to others to talk about the investigation while he appeared to focus on policy issues that were important to the public.

“Biden’s following a lot of the lessons of Clinton,” Begala said. “The most important lesson is the voters, the people, want someone focused on their problems, not their own. What sustained Clinton, what got him to 71% in the polls, was not that people approved of having an affair with a young woman in the office. It’s that they were appalled that Republicans tried to derail this young president who seemed to be working for them.”

In this regard, having a special counsel inquiry actually can be a benefit because it allows Biden’s aides to deflect questions by saying that they cannot talk extensively about the matter in public while investigators are looking into it. No law, of course, prevents them from explaining to the public what happened, but it provides what Begala called “a shield” against media inquiries.

Solomon Wisenberg saw that from the other side. As a deputy independent counsel under Starr, he said the lesson that subsequent presidents have learned from Clinton is to exploit the investigation to avoid public accountability.

“Use the investigation to your advantage by saying that you can’t comment because it’s an ongoing investigation when, in fact, you could comment,” he said. “That definitely started with Whitewater.”

In one important sense, Biden’s team, for the moment at least, is diverging sharply from Clinton’s approach. Although Clinton’s lawyers worked relatively cooperatively with the first Whitewater independent counsel, Robert Fiske Jr., they took a far more aggressive posture with Starr, who was perceived as partisan.

Although Clinton generally maintained his public focus on policy, his team vilified Starr, undercutting his credibility and focused attention on the investigator’s conduct rather than the president’s. That was a strategy adopted by President Donald Trump, who went to war with Robert Mueller, the special counsel in the Russia investigation, although unlike Clinton he led the attacks personally.

Biden and his advisers, by contrast, have offered no criticism of Robert Hur, the new special counsel appointed by Garland and a former Trump-appointed U.S. attorney. But some legal veterans warned that hands-off approach could change depending on where the inquiry goes.

“The lesson from a special counsel’s perspective,” said Wisenberg, “is you’ve got to be tough from the beginning and you’ve got to be above suspicion yourself, because you’re going to be attacked.”

(Author: Peter Baker)/(c.2021 The New York Times Company)