Bipartisan "Lynch Mob" Preparing Senate Trial

President Clinton is now faced with a bipartisan lynch 
mob in the United States Senate, where the only difference 
between the Republicans and most Democrats is that the 
Republicans would prefer a longer, drawn-out lynching, and 
Tom Daschle and the Senate Democrats want a cleaner, 
quicker lynching. The President is the odd man out in this 
arrangement, with almost no consultation going on between 
the White House and the Senate Democrats led by Daschle. 
Apparently Daschle is too busy crawling under the KKK 
sheets with Trent Lott, to bother talking to the 
President's own defense team. 

Therefore, the only option the White House has at 
this moment, is take the rope that the Senate is preparing 
for the President's neck, and to use that very same rope 
to hoist the Senate on their own scaffold--by demanding 
a full trial in which the entire ``Get Clinton'' cabal is 
put on trial, with Kenneth Starr and Richard Mellon Scaife 
as the defendants-in-chief. 

There are many reports and rumors circulating 
around Washington to the effect that Starr either has 
already obtained sealed indictments of the President and 
others, or that he is preparing to indict the President 
and probably the First Lady as soon as Clinton leaves 
office. 

The threat of prosecution is the blackmail threat 
being used by Senate Republicans--with the complicity of 
Daschle and other Democrats--to force the President into 
accepting a censure ``plea bargain.'' The way this is being 
conducted by Daschle and the Republicans reminds us of 
the way most public defenders work out plea bargains for 
their indigent clients: The lawyer first works out the 
deal with the prosecutor, and then tells the defendant, 
``This is the best you can do; you better take the deal.'' 

The only good sign, is that President Clinton appears 
to have rejected any deal which would leave him vulnerable 
to prosecution, and which would force him to run up huge 
legal bills defending himself for years after he leaves 
office. 

Under the arrangement voted up by the Senate on 
Jan. 8, the threat of prosecution is looming in the 
background. After three days of presentations each by the 
House managers, and then by the President's lawyers, and 
two days of questioning, ``dispositive'' motions, such as a 
motion to dismiss the Articles of Impeachment, will be 
considered. It is at that point that the ``censure'' deal 
will be posed--admit to wrongdoing, accept censure, and 
the trial will be stopped. 

Any ``censure'' acceptable to the bipartisan lynch mob 
in the Senate would have to contain an admission of 
perjury by the President. But all indications are that 
Clinton will never make such admission--because he does 
not believe he committed perjury, and because it would 
leave him vulnerable to prosecution by independent counsel 
Starr the minute he leaves office. And if anyone thinks 
that any such ``deal'' will bring the campaign to topple 
President Clinton to an end, he simply hasn't been paying 
attention to what has been going on for the past five 
years.@s1 


      - Back-stabbing Democrats - 

While one would not be surprised that White Citizens 
Council-sympathizer Trent Lott would be in the forefront 
of the Senate lynch mob, the most treacherous role is 
being play by the Democratic leadership, who pretend to be 
supporting the President, while delivering him up to his 
enemies. 

Prior to the opening of Congress, Daschle was 
running around asserting that ``we already know the facts,'' 
and that therefore no trial with witnesses is needed. The 
``facts'' to which Daschle refers, are Kenneth Starr's 
``facts''--concocted during Starr's prosecutorial holy war 
which has been riddled with prosecutorial misconduct, 
abuse, and violations of constitutional rights. 

Then, as the 106th Congress convened on Jan. 6, 
Daschle came out of the Democratic caucus meeting and 
declared that ``there is universal opposition to 
witnesses.'' Daschle has spent most of his time huddled 
with Lott and the Republican leadership, working out a 
``bipartisan'' trial procedure which scoffs at the U.S. 
Constitution's guarantees of due process. 

The role which would be played by Senate Democrats 
was signalled during appearances on the Sunday talk shows 
on Jan. 3.  Three Democratic Senators appearing on 
NBC's ``Meet the Press'' on Sunday, Jan. 3, already made it 
very clear that President Clinton has almost as much to 
fear from his ``friends'' as from his avowed enemies in the 
Senate. 

Much of the discussion revolved around the plan 
submitted by Senators Slade Gorton (R-Wa.), and Joseph 
Lieberman (D-Conn.) for a quick ``mini-trial'' which would 
then pave the way for a censure vote. This proposal was 
supported by Senators Joseph Biden (D-Del.) and Robert 
Torricelli (D-N.J.) who were appearing on the show along 
with Gorton, Lieberman, and others. 

Torricelli said that President Clinton is willing to 
stipulate to ``all five volumes, all facts'' in Kenneth 
Starr's referral to the House for purposes of what amounts 
to a ``motion to dismiss.'' When asked whether a vote not to 
proceed would exonerate the President, Torricelli said: 
``There's not going to be any exoneration. At the end of 
the day, this Senate is going to vote a censure. The 
President's conduct was inappropriate, it was 
reprehensible. We are going to be on the record saying so. 
It is simply a question of what the appropriate remedy is. 
Removal from office is not constitutionally proper as a 
definable offense, but a censure is, and I think at the 
end of the day, that's what we're going to do.'' 

Biden, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary 
Committee, described President Clinton as ``condemned in 
history for the acts he committed.'' 

(The sole Democrat in the Senate who has publicly 
declared that the President should forget about censure, 
and fight for a trial and full exoneration, is Sen. Tom 
Harkin of Iowa.) 

Torricelli's comments were even disputed by the White 
House the following day. When White House spokesman Joe 
Lockhart was asked about Torricelli's statement, Lockhart 
stated emphatically that this was not the President's 
position, and he added ``there are clearly facts and issues 
involved in this case that we've disputed before the House 
and, if appropriate, depending on the format which the 
Senate takes, we will do again.'' 

While all the Senators were meeting in private on the 
afternon of Jan. 7, the White House announced that it 
is willing to ``stipulate'' to the record that the House 
Judiciary Committee sent to the Senate, including the 
Starr referral and supporting materials. ``We will forego 
our rights to test, cross-examination, cross-examine,'' 
spokesman Joe Lockhart said.  The spokesman said that  the 
White House was doing this, because ``we think we can make 
a compelling case to the American public that there is no 
constitutional or legal foundation  to move forward with 
removing this President.''  Lockhart said that, while the 
record submitted by the House to the Senate is ``the most 
prejudicial record that could possibly exist,'' that the 
White House believes that ``even with this record we can 
effectively make our case.'' 

Lockhart made this offer after attacking the 
procedures being planned for the Senate trial. ``I think 
that whether you're in a trial in the Senate or you're in 
traffic court, the idea that when you go and start a 
proceeding that the rules and procedures, and evidence and 
witnesses, potential witnesses, are not clear to you at 
the beginning of the process is not fair.'' Lockhart added 
that it is inherently unfair ``where the rules get made up 
as you go.'' 

The ``stipulation'' offer was probably somewhat 
tongue-in-cheek, made out of frustration with the 
back-room dealing going on in the Senate. At the same 
time, the White House was saying that if witnesses are 
going to be called, ``all bets are off,'' and that this will 
require all manner of pre-trial motions, pre-trial 
discovery, and depositions, which could drag on for weeks 
if not months. It is known that the White House is in fact 
preparing a thorough and aggressive defense if a trial is 
started. 

The plan that was approved by the full Senate on 
Friday, Jan. 8, requires a vote of the full Senate for 
each and every witness to be called. This is perhaps the 
worst option from the standpoint of the White House; it 
means that the Senate can veto the President's witnesses, 
and the President's lawyers may not know until the last 
minute who are to be the prosecution's witnesses, with no 
chance for preparation. 

What the Senators fear, is exactly what may occur: 
that once a trial starts and witnesses start testifying, 
the process can become unpredictable and uncontrollable. 
The longer the trial goes on, the more angry and outraged 
the population is likely to become toward the President's 
persecutors, and under those conditions, anything can 
happen. 


        - Confederate Justice - 

It was fitting that the commencement of the formal 
impeachment proceedings against President Clinton in the 
Senate were presided over by Sen. Strom Thurmond 
(R-S.C.), the President pro tem of the Senate, and an old 
Dixiecrat who ran for President in 1948 as a ``States' 
Rights Democrat.'' When Thurmond swore in Chief Justice 
William Rehnquist, to preside over the trial of the 
impeachment charges on evidence developed by Kenneth 
Starr, all three of them must have all enjoyed a quiet 
chuckle. 

Recall that Kenneth Starr's surprise appointment as 
Whitewater independent counsel in August 1994 was made by 
the special three-judge panel, the ``Special Division for 
the Purpose of Appointing Independent Counsels'' which is 
headed by Appeals Court judge David Sentelle. It is 
Rehnquist which appoints the members of that panel; 
Rehnquist's appointment of Sentelle to that panel in 1992 
raised a number of eyebrows, since it was the intention of 
Congress that the panel would be composed of senior 
appeals court judges or retired Federal judges; Sentelle 
was neither, only having been appointed to the appeals 
court for five years, and only having been a Federal judge 
for two years before that. But Sentelle had other 
qualifications. He was a Republican party activist, he was 
and is a luminary in the so-called ``Federalist Society'' 
which Rehnquist played a role in founding, and in which 
Kenneth Starr and others of his circle are also active. 
Plus, as author Jeffrey Rosen points out in an article in 
the Jan. 11 {New Yorker}, for more than a decade, 
Rehnquist and Sentelle have been part of a small, 
penny-ante, poker game that meets monthly in Washington. 

Sentelle's nomination to the Federal appeals court in 
1987 was held up for months because of controversy over 
Sentelle's membership in a segregated lodge of the Southern 
Jurisdiction of Scottish Rite Freemasons. During the 
debate, Thurmond, then the chairman of the Senate 
Judiciary Committee, boasted that he himself was a 33rd 
degree mason of the Southern Jurisdiction, and he declared 
himself ``astounded'' that the question of masonic 
affiliation was even raised in the Judiciary Committee. 

To round out the picture, it is worth recalling that 
in 1986, Rehnquist himself went through a stormy 
confirmation process in the Judiciary Committee, when 
Democrats raised the issues of Rehnquist's openly 
segregationist views, and his intimidation of black and 
hiSpanic voters at the polls in Arizona in the early 
1960s. Nevertheless, under Strom Thurmond's guiding hand, 
Rehnquist was confirmed as the Chief Justice. 

It was really rather appropriate, then, what happened 
on the afternoon of Jan. 7, when the cable television 
network C-SPAN made its usual switch to viewer call-ins 
once it had concluded its live coverage of the swearing-in 
ceremonies in the Senate. The very first caller described, 
in a deadly serious tone of voice, that as he watched the 13 
managers from the House march into the Senate to present 
the Articles of Impeachment, ``all I could think of was the 
Ku Klux Klan; they just needed some sheets and hoods over 
their heads.'' 


         - A useful reminder - 

Even as the Senate proceedings were getting under way, 
two other events occurred which serve as a useful reminder 
of both the fact that Kenneth Starr is still lurking in 
the background, waiting to pounce, but also that Starr is 
enormously vulnerable, because of the manner in which he 
has conducted his investigation of the President. 

First of all, on Jan. 7, Starr's grand jury in the 
Eastern District of Virginia (sitting in Alexandria), 
issued a four-count indictment against Julie Hiatt Steele, 
a former friend of Kathleen Willey, who accused Willey of 
lying about an incident in which Willey claimed she was 
groped by President Clinton in July of 1993. Steele said 
that Willey had asked her to lie about the incident when 
Steele was contacted by {Newsweek} reporter Michael 
Isikoff in 1997.@s2 

Hiatt is charged with three counts of obstruction of 
justice and one count of making a false statement to 
Federal investigators. This is the first criminal 
indictment to arise out of the expansion of Starr's 
investigation last January into the Paula Jones civil 
suit, which gave Starr the pretext to launch a full-scale 
investigation into the President's personal 
life--something Starr had already been doing on the sly 
since shortly after the 1996 elections. (See ``Kenneth 
Starr's Four-Year Quest to Seize the Paula Jones Case,'' 
{EIR,} Oct. 23, 1998.) 

Steele's lawyer, Nancy Luque of Washington, said that 
the indictment ``is a glaring example of Mr. Starr's gross 
abuse of his prosecutorial power,'' and that Starr timed 
the indictment ``to unfairly influence the pending 
impeachment proceeding.''  Luque charged that this is a 
``backdoor attempt'' to put Willey's claims before the 
public, which Starr ``was afraid to do in his referral to 
Congress.'' Indeed, there are number of reports in the news 
media, that the House managers now want to call Willey as 
a witness in the impeachment trial. 


         - The `leaks' probe - 

The second, collateral event, was that on Jan. 6, 
court documents were unsealed which showed that 
Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr had lost two motions in 
recent months in the court proceeding which is under way 
regarding leaks to the news media from his office. Last 
July, Chief Judge Norma Holloway Johnson had issued an 
order July, directing Starr to show cause why he should 
not be found in contempt of court for violations of grand 
jury secrecy. 

Then, on Sept. 25, Judge Johnson issued an order in 
which she said she had determined that there were 24 news 
articles which provided {prima facie} evidence of illegal 
disclosure of grand jury information by Starr's office, 
and she ordered the appointment of a ``Special Master'' to 
take testimony and gather evidence concerning the leaks. 
In her order, Judge Holloway expressed the preference that 
the Special Master, who has been identified as John W. 
Kern III, a senior judge with the D.C. Court of Appeals, 
would have submitted a final report by the end of 
November--although there is no public indication yet as to 
whether the report was filed. 

After the judge filed her Sept. 25 order, the 
newly disclosed documents show, Starr filed a motion for 
reconsideration, seeking to have more than half of the 
articles excluded from the investigation, claiming, for 
example, that stories about immunity negotiations with 
Monica Lewinsky, or stories about the stained dress, were 
not matters before the grand jury. Judge Johnson denied 
that motion. 

Starr also had wanted Judge Johnson's entire order 
directing the leaks investigation to go ahead, to be kept 
under seal. That motion was also denied, and most of the 
judge's order was made public at the end of October. 

The consequences for Starr could be quite severe: If 
he and some of his deputies were found in contempt of 
court, they could be subject to court-ordered disciple and 
sanctions, which could include fines and jailing or 
disbarment. 

This is the type of issue which should have been 
taken up in the House impeachment proceedings and should 
still be taken up in the Senate pre-trial proceedings. 
Such prosecutorial misconduct can be grounds for 
suppressing evidence, or dismissing an indictment, and 
this is only one of many areas of prosecutorial abuse 
which would be the first and major topic of a Senate 
trial--if that body were seriously interested in pursuing 
truth and attaining justice. 


1. See Lyndon LaRouche's article in this 
issue, ``To Defeat Impeachment You Must Defeat the New 
Confederacy,'' in which LaRouche explains why there is no 
deal that the President could accept, which would appease 
the lynch mob which is chasing him, and why the President 
must fight to the bitter end. See also, ``It Didn't Start 
with Monica: The Five-Year Campaign to Bring Down 
President Clinton,'' {EIR,} Jan. 1, 1999. 

2. The background is provided in an 
article on the Willey case in the Nov. 13 issue of {EIR,} 
which began: ``Rumors are rife that Kenneth Starr is about 
to issue indictments out of his grand jury now meeting in 
Alexandria, Virginia, which will center around charges of 
obstruction of justice and witness-tampering in the 
Kathleen Willey case. Should Starr be reckless enough to 
do this, it will provide an unwelcome glimpse into one 
aspect of the seamy underside of Starr's $50 million 
attack on the Presidency.'' The article describes 
Starr's brutal targetting of Steele and her family and 
associates, and also provides some insight into Kathleen 
Willey's legal vulnerability, which likely was used to 
induce her to become a witness for Kenneth Starr against 
about the President.