Posted on 12/19/2008 4:54:13 AM PST by abb
After nearly 14 hours of debate, the House of Representatives approves two articles of impeachment against President Bill Clinton, charging him with lying under oath to a federal grand jury and obstructing justice. Clinton, the second president in American history to be impeached, vowed to finish his term.
In November 1995, Clinton began an affair with Monica Lewinsky, a 21-year-old unpaid intern. Over the course of a year and a half, the president and Lewinsky had nearly a dozen sexual encounters in the White House. In April 1996, Lewinsky was transferred to the Pentagon. That summer, she first confided in Pentagon co-worker Linda Tripp about her sexual relationship with the president. In 1997, with the relationship over, Tripp began secretly to record conversations with Lewinsky, in which Lewinsky gave Tripp details about the affair.
In December, lawyers for Paula Jones, who was suing the president on sexual harassment charges, subpoenaed Lewinsky. In January 1998, allegedly under the recommendation of the president, Lewinsky filed an affidavit in which she denied ever having had a sexual relationship with him. Five days later, Tripp contacted the office of Kenneth Starr, the Whitewater independent counsel, to talk about Lewinsky and the tapes she made of their conversations. Tripp, wired by FBI agents working with Starr, met with Lewinsky again, and on January 16, Lewinsky was taken by FBI agents and U.S. attorneys to a hotel room where she was questioned and offered immunity if she cooperated with the prosecution. A few days later, the story broke, and Clinton publicly denied the allegations, saying, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky."
In late July, lawyers for Lewinsky and Starr worked out a full-immunity agreement covering both Lewinsky and her parents, all of whom Starr had threatened with prosecution. On August 6, Lewinsky appeared before the grand jury to begin her testimony, and on August 17 President Clinton testified. Contrary to his testimony in the Paula Jones sexual-harassment case, President Clinton acknowledged to prosecutors from the office of the independent counsel that he had had an extramarital affair with Ms. Lewinsky.
In four hours of closed-door testimony, conducted in the Map Room of the White House, Clinton spoke live via closed-circuit television to a grand jury in a nearby federal courthouse. He was the first sitting president ever to testify before a grand jury investigating his conduct. That evening, President Clinton also gave a four-minute televised address to the nation in which he admitted he had engaged in an inappropriate relationship with Lewinsky. In the brief speech, which was wrought with legalisms, the word "sex" was never spoken, and the word "regret" was used only in reference to his admission that he misled the public and his family.
Less than a month later, on September 9, Kenneth Starr submitted his report and 18 boxes of supporting documents to the House of Representatives. Released to the public two days later, the Starr Report outlined a case for impeaching Clinton on 11 grounds, including perjury, obstruction of justice, witness-tampering, and abuse of power, and also provided explicit details of the sexual relationship between the president and Ms. Lewinsky. On October 8, the House authorized a wide-ranging impeachment inquiry, and on December 11, the House Judiciary Committee approved three articles of impeachment. On December 19, the House impeached Clinton.
On January 7, 1999, in a congressional procedure not seen since the 1868 impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson, the trial of President Clinton got underway in the Senate. As instructed in Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution, the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (William Rehnquist at this time) was sworn in to preside, and the senators were sworn in as jurors.
Five weeks later, on February 12, the Senate voted on whether to remove Clinton from office. The president was acquitted on both articles of impeachment. The prosecution needed a two-thirds majority to convict but failed to achieve even a bare majority. Rejecting the first charge of perjury, 45 Democrats and 10 Republicans voted "not guilty," and on the charge of obstruction of justice the Senate was split 50-50. After the trial concluded, President Clinton said he was "profoundly sorry" for the burden his behavior imposed on Congress and the American people.
ping
This should be a national holiday! I could go golfing to celebrate.
One more “Conspiracy theory” conservatives should have left alone. [/sarc]
10 Year Anniversary bump. I’m getting old.
Happy Impeachment Day!
and 6 paragraphs to get to Perjury, Obstruction of Justice, etc .. Had to dig, and fight thru 5 paragraphs of “President Horney Clinton” ...
Thank youk, Slick Willy, for 10 years of JOKES and Embarassment!
AMEN ! waiting patiently for the CommieMSM to reference this glorious day in history...
? ? Hello ? Hello ? Karl! Joe! Shep!
Instead, like Ringo Starr, he's one of the luckiest men ever to live.
Bill Clinton, the president who, among other dispicable things, made it possible for 13 year olds to ask what oral sex was. What a guy.
That gutless slug almost got his due. He came within an inch of slammer time because of his involvement with his scummy brother-in-law Dickie Scruggs. I'll bet the rent his resignation from the senate was in lieu of indictment.
What ever happened to the sink?
If you're referring something in the article, I'm sorry, I didn't read it since it's history I already know about. I'm just celebrating the event :)
“What ever happened to the sink?”
It went to the “Massage Parlor” library in Little Rock.
Exactly what I was thinking. It was a shameful time for the GOP as well as for Billy Bentpecker. I've despised Trent "Bendsa" Lott ever since.
Let us never forget this day in history. Historical revisionism will certainly try massive spin to minimize this stain on our history. In fact, it has already begun.
Happy 10th anniversary of the impeachment of William Jefferson Blythe Clinton IV!
And now the wife of an impeached President (who takes money from the Middle East for his Presidential Library) is poised to become Sec. Of State. Oh joy.
If he’d been convicted, let us remember, Gore would have become president, and would be president today.
“the president who, among other dispicable things, made it possible for 13 year olds to ask what oral sex was. What a guy.”
even worse, the POTUS who gave 13 year olds the license to engage in it since it really wasn’t “sex”.
This happened because a group of wavering Republicans went to the Ford building and learned about Juanita Broaddrick. It caused them to vote in favor of two of the articles.
Think about it. For eight years, we had a sexual predator in the White House who treated it as his whorehouse. He was a rockstar, not a leader.
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