Clinton Team Mounts Fierce Defense, Calls Charges Trivial

WASHINGTON — The White House aggressively struck back at the impeachment case against President Clinton on Wednesday with a fierce defense that sought to shatter the prosecution’s “often immaterial and always insubstantial” allegations.

Delving into the details, White House lawyers Gregory Craig and Cheryl Mills painted the perjury and obstruction of justice charges as an assemblage of trivial “he said, she said” disputes, misstatements of the record and false deductions by 13 overeager House prosecutors, or managers.

“The House managers have dramatically shortchanged the truth,” Mills declared flatly, saying that their case resembled a sausage more than, as they had described it, a finely tuned Swiss watch.

Knocking the notion that Clinton had violated Paula Corbin Jones’ civil rights, the young African American attorney launched a spirited defense of the president’s record on the subject, placing him in the same league as Presidents Lincoln and Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

“They were not perfect men,” she said. “They made human errors. But they struggled to do humanity good.”

Senators, even some of those most critical of the president’s actions, acknowledged that the White House pitch had succeeded in poking holes in some of the charges presented last week by prosecutors.

“Both presenters did a very good job,” said Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah). “But they do have some really tough facts to overcome.”

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said that she now believes the case ought to be quickly dismissed.

“I think it’s over,” she said in an evening appearance on CNN’s “Crossfire.” “The case was pretty well debunked today from a legal point of view.”

Although forced to sit quietly in the Senate chamber as the White House lashed into its case, the prosecution team was fuming in the hallways during breaks in the action. Prosecutors issued a stack of written rebuttals to the White House case and rushed to microphones in the halls to denounce the defense.

“A mirage,” Rep. Bob Barr (R-Ga.) called the Clinton team’s effort.

“Diversionary, partisan tactics,” said Rep. Asa Hutchinson (R-Ark.).

Rep. James E. Rogan (R-Glendale), one of the prosecutors attacked by Craig, mocked the lawyer’s assertion that Clinton was denied due process because of the hazy nature of the charges against him.

“I don’t think an ostrich in this country could stick his head in the sand and not know what the charges were,” Rogan shot back. “For the president to suggest he didn’t know is about the most ridiculous thing I’ve heard since I was given a law license.”

In the see-saw dynamics of a trial, it is the last speaker who frequently has the momentum. That was certainly the case with the White House, which is using its defense this week to weaken prosecution arguments that senators had acknowledged were delivered with force.

Some Democrats See End to Trial

Although Republicans appear poised to call witnesses to testify behind closed doors, some Democratic senators said that they were so impressed by the White House presentation that they foresee an end to the trial by the middle of next week without additional testimony.

“I hope we can move now to an exit strategy that is fair and expeditious,” said Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.).

But Sen. John H. Chafee (R-R.I.) said he believes that additional testimony would help senators resolve disputes in the testimony.

“I still support witnesses,” he said. “But it doesn’t have to be a mob scene. We can narrow it down.”

At issue throughout the day was a reality that both sides acknowledge--the prosecution case appears strongest when viewed as a whole and not broken down to its component parts.

The White House, from the onset, started slicing and dicing.

Craig argued that the perjury allegations against Clinton were flawed on numerous counts. He said the House managers had incorporated misstatements Clinton made in the Jones deposition even though the House rejected an article of impeachment on that very point.

Craig also knocked the prosecutors for adding substantially to the perjury allegations first put forward by independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr.

“Apparently, the managers believe that Ken Starr and his prosecutors have been simply too soft on the president,” Craig said. “This should cause the members of the Senate some concern and some additional reason to give very careful scrutiny to these charges.”

Craig then launched, line by line, into the alleged misstatements by the president. He said it is trivial to accuse Clinton of committing perjury for saying that his intimate encounters with Lewinsky occurred “on certain occasions.”

He produced dictionary definitions for the word “occasional” to make the point that a few dozen meetings and telephone calls over 774 days were indeed occasional.

Videotape of Clinton Is Shown

Craig also disparaged the prosecution’s contention that Clinton lied when he said that he and Lewinsky had a friendship before their encounters began and when he said that their encounters began in 1996 instead of late 1995.

Craig showed a long videotape from Clinton’s deposition in the Jones case to illustrate the tortured discussion over a definition of what exactly constitutes sex.

Even as he argued that Clinton had committed no crimes, Craig told senators that any alleged offenses would be better litigated in a regular courtroom after the president leaves office in 2001.

“If you convict and remove President Clinton, then no president of the United States will ever be safe from impeachment hearings,” he said. “People will look back and say we should have stopped it. Don’t let this happen.”

‘Rule of Law’ Argued in Clinton’s Favor

Mills picked up with the two central tenets of the obstruction of justice charge--that Clinton directed his personal secretary, Betty Currie, to hide gifts he had given to Lewinsky and that he had attempted to influence Currie’s testimony by calling her into his office.

Both charges, she asserted, were false.

Mills used some of the very rhetorical flourishes employed by the prosecution to shoot down its case.

“The rule of law”--the oft-repeated core of the prosecution case--was what Mills called the very reason Clinton should be acquitted.

“We cannot uphold the rule of law only when it is consistent with our beliefs,” she said. “We must uphold it even when it protects behavior that we don’t like or is unattractive or is not admirable or that might even be hurtful.”

And she took issue with the notion that Clinton had violated Jones’ civil rights, a point the prosecution had stressed as the underpinning of its case.

On that particular point, Mills strayed considerably from the facts of the case.

“Bill Clinton’s grandfather owned a store,” she told the senators. “His store catered primarily to African Americans. Apparently his grandfather was one of only four white people in town who would do business with African Americans. . . . The president has taken his grandfather’s teachings to heart and he has worked every day to give all of us a better deal, an equal deal.”

Outside the chamber, the president’s camp received a bounce from Clinton’s well-received State of the Union address Tuesday night.

House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) said that he believes Clinton is likely to survive the impeachment charges. “We need to move forward,” he said in a television interview. “We can’t leave these wounds open.”

A leader from the Republican Party’s right flank voiced the same theme. Religious broadcaster and former presidential candidate Pat Robertson said that Clinton had “hit a home run” in the speech and had dashed any possibility that he would be ousted.

“They might as well dismiss this impeachment hearing and get on with something else, because it’s over as far as I’m concerned,” Robertson said on “The 700 Club” television show.

Another to speak up was former President Bush. He lectured the senators after the trial had ended for the evening in a special appearance in the Old Senate Chamber.

Although he did not weigh in directly on the impeachment debate, he bemoaned the “lack of civility” and “excessive intrusion into private lives” that has come to characterize Washington.

And Bush advised his former colleagues to find a way to come together: “It’s a small town in many respects--too small for the bitter rancor that sometimes divides us.”

But just how the Senate will proceed in the days ahead remains unclear. Democrats will likely offer a motion to dismiss the case next week. While that is expected to fail, senators realize that allowing the prosecution to call even a few witnesses probably would prompt the White House to request live testimony in Clinton’s defense.

With the president’s private attorney, David E. Kendall, and one of his longtime political supporters, recently retired Sen. Dale Bumpers (D-Ark.), set to close the White House case today, senators were taking the trial day by day.

“Its never over till it’s over,” said Sen. John B. Breaux (D-La.), a Clinton ally.

Times staff writers Janet Hook and Heidi Sherman contributed to this story.

Live video coverage of the Senate impeachment trial continues today at 10 a.m. PST on The Times’ Web site: http://pyxis.nohib.com/impeach

STATE OF MIND: In California, people work, prune roses and remind themselves that this too will pass. B1

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Trial Dates: January

All times PST; some presentations may end sooner than estimated.

January

THURSDAY, 14: House presentation

FRIDAY, 15: House presentation

SATURDAY, 16: House presentation

SUNDAY, 17: No session

MONDAY, 18: No session ( Martin Luther King Jr. Day)

TUESDAY, 19: White House presentation

WEDNESDAY, 20: White House presentation

THURSDAY, 21: White House presentation continues, 10 a.m.

FRIDAY, 22: Senate questions both sides, 10 a.m.

SATURDAY, 23: Senate questions both sides

SUNDAY, 24: No session

MONDAY, 25: Senate considers witnesses, motions to dismiss

TUESDAY through SATURDAY, 26-30: Remainder of trial could go two ways: If a motion to dismiss passes, trial would be over. But if senators decide to call witnesses or hear further evidence, Senate could adjourn to depose witnesses and then decide later whether to call them in for live testimony. That could prolong the trial for several weeks or more.