Jonathan Broder

One lawyer who was involved in the strategy shift told Salon that, in the face of overwhelming evidence in Starr’s report that Clinton and Lewinsky had a relationship involving oral sex and mutual fondling, the president’s earlier claims that he didn’t have a sexual relationship with her were “too legalistic and unbelievable to work.” Ultimately, this attorney said, such arguments would hurt the president in his campaign to avoid impeachment.

“I think there’s a strong belief that we’ve got to get out of legalisms and we’ve got to get out of the attack mode,” said the Clinton attorney, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Unfortunately, lawyers tend to think like lawyers, and we’re not in a courtroom. In a court, you can win with a technical legal defense and be acquitted, but not in this process. People just aren’t going to react the same way to legalistic arguments. We’ve got to pick up on what the president is saying, which is ‘I messed up. Forgive me’ — not ‘I really didn’t mess up because you’ll never prove it because of some technical defense.’ That’s not going to wash with the Democrats on Capitol Hill, and it’s not going to wash with the American people.”

The shift in strategy came as Rep. Henry Hyde, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, the congressional panel that will take up Clinton’s case, announced that he believed impeachment hearings were now warranted. Hyde told the Associated Press he still must sound out the other members of the committee, but in view of the strong ideological posture of its majority Republican members, there seemed little doubt that hearings would happen.

The change in strategy also occurred as public opinion surveys showed that despite the Lewinsky scandal, support for Clinton still remains high. Clinton’s political and legal strategists hope those numbers remain steady so Congress will have to think twice before impeaching the president.

Among White House political advisors, there is also recognition that Clinton will have to suffer some form of penalty for his offenses, and talk has been revived of accepting a congressional motion of censure. Former Clinton advisor George Stephanopoulos, speaking Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” suggested Clinton eventually may have to admit to perjury in order to secure a “plea bargain,” under which Congress would agree to censure the president instead of impeaching him. Until now, there have been no indications from Republicans that they would be willing to let the president off with a censure vote. For now, Republicans are stressing the need for Clinton to admit perjury and consider resignation before the impeachment process begins.

“I think he has got to come to terms with the seriousness of this matter and decide what he can do to help all of us get through it,” Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott told Fox News Sunday.

One of Clinton’s lawyers also held out the possibility of a perjury admission, but he said, “The time isn’t right yet.” For now, he said, Clinton’s legal strategy will avoid “quibbling about legalities” and focus on the theme that the president’s offenses, as regrettable as they were, are still not enough to warrant impeachment.

The push for a less legalistic approach to Clinton’s problems emerged in a series of emergency strategy sessions Friday and Saturday at the White House where Clinton’s legal and political advisors met to discuss how to respond on a number of fronts to Starr’s report to Congress on the Lewinsky affair. The report, which was posted on the Internet last Friday, cites “substantial and credible” evidence that Clinton perjured himself, obstructed justice, tampered with witnesses and abused his power in trying to hide his 18-month relationship with Lewinsky.

On Saturday, in a 42-page response to the Starr Report, Kendall went on the offensive, attacking the report as “a hit-and-run smear campaign,” laden with “pornographic” details meant to embarrass Clinton but so weak legally that it could not withstand the scrutiny of a jury.

Yet despite Kendall’s return salvo, some of Clinton’s lawyers privately admit that the president is most vulnerable to charges of perjury. Clinton’s legal exposure stems in part from his Jan. 17 deposition in the Paula Jones civil sexual misconduct suit, in which he swore under oath that he did not have sexual relations with Lewinsky. Clinton based his answer on a definition of sexual relations put forward by Jones’ lawyers, which spoke of “contact with the genitalia, anus, groin, breast, inner thigh or buttocks of any person with an intent to arouse or gratify the sexual desire of any person.”

In his Aug. 17 appearance before Starr’s grand jury, Clinton admitted to having “inappropriate intimate contact” with Lewinsky, but he insisted his denial of a sexual relationship with her was “legally accurate,” based on the earlier definition of sex. Starr’s report to Congress, which contains Lewinsky’s descriptions of 10 encounters in which she performed oral sex on Clinton, argues that oral sex falls within the definition of sexual relations and that the president therefore lied.

Responding to Starr’s argument, Kendall wrote that “it is, however, the President’s good faith and reasonable interpretation that oral sex was outside the special definition of sexual relations provided to him.” Kendall also argues that “dictionary definitions of sexual relations support the president’s interpretations.” He goes on to note that “literally true statements cannot be the basis for a perjury prosecution even if a witness intends to mislead a questioner. Likewise, answers to inherently ambiguous questions cannot constitute perjury. And, normally, a perjury prosecution may not rest on the testimony of a single witness.”

Expressing his concern about this legalistic approach, another lawyer involved in Clinton’s defense said the president’s legal team was losing sight of the fact that Clinton’s explanations must convince Congress and the American people, who will be the ones to decide whether he can survive this scandal. And any argument that asks this audience to accept that oral sex is not sex is doomed, he said. “Try that on your wife,” the lawyer dared.

Meanwhile, in another sign of White House concern, some of the president’s political advisors are counseling hard-core Clinton loyalists against making further veiled threats against the president’s political enemies. These advisors believe tactics like invoking the specter of a “Doomsday scenario,” in which any move to impeach Clinton over his sexual indiscretions with Lewinsky will result in the inevitable media exposure of similar sexual indiscretions by Republicans, are sending a mixed message that also will undermine the president’s prospects for survival.

“On one side of the split screen, you’ve got Clinton calling himself a sinner, apologizing and asking for the country’s forgiveness, and on the other side of the screen, you’ve got people allied with the president who are warning that anybody who goes down the path toward impeachment may get wasted himself. That’s not a good message,” one Clinton associate told Salon. Asked to sum up the message, the associate thought for a moment and then replied: “Forgive me or else.”

Even though media scrutiny of the private lives of Clinton’s critics has produced admissions of extramarital affairs by Republican Reps. Dan Burton of Indiana and Helen Chenoweth of Idaho, senior White House aides Paul Begala, Rahm Emmanuel and Lanny Breuer are said to believe that any further White House revelations of sexual improprieties by Republicans will be seen as vindictive and will boomerang on Clinton’s bid for survival. Last week, Begala and Breuer warned one hard-core loyalist to “cool his jets,” a White House source said.

Whether those loyalists listen is another question. “There is definitely more and more of a split” in the White House, this source said. “Those who are motivated by their hatred of Starr have an any-means-necessary attitude. And then there are those who look at all the lying and say, ‘Maybe we’re going too far here. This is all getting too disgusting.’”

Starr’s report mentions no impeachable offenses by Clinton as a result of the investigation into the Whitewater land deal, which took up the bulk of Starr’s four-year, $40 million inquiry into the president. Indeed, in the entire 445-page report, Starr alludes only once to the Whitewater investigation, citing suspicious parallels between Vernon Jordan’s efforts to help convicted Whitewater figure Webster Hubbell financially and to find Lewinsky a job, presumably to buy their silence.

Starr’s investigators “recognized parallels between Mr. Jordan’s relationship with Ms. Lewinsky and his earlier relationship with a pivotal Whitewater-Madison (Guarantee) figure, Webster L. Hubbell,” the independent counsel’s report states. “Prior to January 1998, the OIC possessed evidence that Vernon Jordan — along with other high-level associates of the President and the First Lady — helped Mr. Hubbell obtain lucrative consulting contracts while he was a potential witness and/or subject in the OIC’s ongoing investigation.” Starr’s office “also possessed evidence that the President and the First Lady knew and approved of the Hubbell-focused assistance,” the report says.

Citing these parallels, Starr won Attorney General Janet Reno’s recommendation in January to expand his Whitewater investigation into the Lewinsky affair. For several months, Starr’s investigation ran two grand juries — one in Little Rock, Ark., to continue its probe into Whitewater, and another in Washington to investigate the Lewinsky affair. In May, after 30 months, the Arkansas grand jury wrapped up its investigation with a contempt indictment of Susan McDougal, one of the Clintons’ partners in the failed Whitewater land deal and an operator of the Madison Guarantee Savings & Loan, which was involved in the land deal.

All in all, Starr’s Whitewater investigation produced only a handful of convictions for fraud and other charges. Those convicted included former Arkansas Gov. Jim Guy Tucker; Susan McDougal’s husband, James, who also operated Madison Guarantee; and David Hale, a former municipal judge. Hale, a convicted felon, emerged as a central figure in the Whitewater investigation, alleging that Clinton pressured him to obtain an illegal $300,000 loan for Susan McDougal, which she then used to help bail out the failing Whitewater project. Clinton has always denied Hale’s allegations, and the expiration of the Arkansas grand jury without an immediate report of any wrongdoing by Clinton strongly suggested that Starr was unable to make a case against the president.

“Where’s Whitewater?” Kendall asked in a 73-page preliminary rebuttal that was released just minutes before Starr’s report went up on the Web. “The Office of the Independent Counsel’s allegations reportedly include no suggestion of wrongdoing by the President in any of the areas which Mr. Starr spent four years investigating: Whitewater, the FBI files and the White House travel office. What began as an inquiry into a 24-year-old land deal in Arkansas has ended in an inquest into brief, improper personal encounters between the President and Monica Lewinsky.”

While Kendall was clearly trying to highlight the time and money Starr wasted on his fruitless Whitewater investigation, Richard Benveniste, the former minority counsel on the Senate Whitewater Committee, said it came as no surprise to him that Starr’s report included no Whitewater evidence.

“It didn’t surprise me because there was nothing illegal, much less noteworthy, about Whitewater after four years,” Benvenisti told Salon. “Secondly, they had long ago leaked that there wouldn’t be anything about Whitewater.”

Indeed, on April 20, two weeks before the Arkansas grand jury expired, New York Times reporters Jeff Gerth and Stephen Labaton wrote that it would be “difficult, if not impossible” for Starr’s prosecutor’s to build a case against President Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton because so much of the case rested on the testimony and credibility of witnesses like Hale. A month before the Arkansas grand jury expired, Salon published allegations that Hale had received payments and other assistance from right-wing enemies of President Clinton. The allegations, which Hale has denied, are now the subject of a separate investigation headed by former senior Justice Department investigator Michael E. Shaheen Jr..

Until then, however, Starr’s Whitewater probe dominated the media, providing Clinton’s hard-core political foes with a focus around which they concentrated their attacks. Emboldened by Starr’s investigation, Clinton’s political enemies leveled other charges against the president, including wild and unsubstantiated allegations that Clinton had murdered his friend, White House Counsel Vince Foster, smuggled drugs into Arkansas and used cocaine. These charges all proved to be spurious. Both Starr and his predecessor, Robert Fiske, ruled Foster’s death a suicide, and two congressional committees investigated the drug charges and found them false.

But one charge did stick. In December 1993, the American Spectator, a conservative magazine, published a story in which former members of Clinton’s Arkansas security detail alleged that he had extramarital affairs while he was governor. One of those with whom Clinton was linked was a woman identified only as “Paula.”

Out of that article came the Paula Jones sexual misconduct suit against the president, which the Supreme Court, in a controversial decision, ruled could proceed while the president was in office. By then, Clinton had had a sexual affair with Lewinsky, a former White House intern who confided her trysts with the president to Linda Tripp, a disgruntled Pentagon employee. The president’s lawyer for the Jones case, Robert Bennett, had publicly said Tripp was “not to be believed” when she told Newsweek that she had seen another woman, White House volunteer Kathleen Willey, emerge from the Oval Office with her clothing askew and claiming that Clinton had groped her.

To protect herself against further assaults on her credibility, Tripp has claimed, she tape-recorded Lewinsky’s account of her affair with the president, turned the evidence over to Starr, taped Lewinsky again wearing an FBI wire, and then shared Lewinsky’s story with Jones’ lawyers. On Jan. 17, when Clinton was deposed by Jones’ lawyers, he was asked if he had ever had a sexual relationship with Lewinsky and he said no. That denial, repeated before Starr’s grand jury, is now the basis of Starr’s allegations of perjury against the president.

But the Whitewater saga isn’t over. Under the law, Starr still must submit a report on his investigation of the land deal to the three-judge panel that appointed him. Only then will the public get to see if the results merited the political and media frenzy that surrounded the affair for so long. But it is widely believed the report, when it is delivered, will include no evidence of impeachable offenses by the president or Hillary Clinton.

Asked to reflect on the absence of Whitewater material in Starr’s report, the New York Times’ Gerth, who broke the first Whitewater story in March 1992, politely declined. “I don’t have emotional attachments to my stories,” he said in an interview. “I haven’t stayed on Whitewater as a crusade … I’ve written about a thousand different things in the last six years. I don’t have any books. I don’t go on TV. I don’t have anything invested in my stories.”

Gerth recalled that his first Whitewater story was written at a time when the country was still reeling from the Saving & Loan scandal and keenly interested in the connections between those banking institutions and politicians. “And Bill Clinton was a presidential candidate of whom the American people knew nothing,” he said. “I was writing for the first time about his associations and business dealings and regulatory dealings with a questionable S&L character. That was the context of that story.”

“But where things go is not anything that I have any control over,” he added. “Did I expect when I wrote the piece six years ago that there’d be some independent counsel six years later filing a report for possible impeachment over sex activities? Of course not. I couldn’t have contemplated that. But neither could have anybody else.”

Benveniste, the former minority White House counsel, takes it a step further, blaming Clinton for turning Whitewater into a drowning pool. “Clearly, on the eve of Starr’s closing down of his failed investigation after $40 million of taxpayer money, Clinton provided him with at least the basis to charge impropriety and make it stick. Whether it’s illegal or criminal or an impeachable offense is another issue, but you could say about Clinton that he snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.”

Another crucial component of any White House political strategy, aides say, is Clinton’s dependence upon moderate Republicans’ distaste for impeachment proceedings and the political damage it could cause to the GOP.

But with more Democrats publicly venting their anger at Clinton over the Lewinsky affair, these sources admit the strategy is risky and could collapse under the impact of Starr’s report. If that happens, one hard-core Clinton ally warned, Washington had better prepare for the so-called Doomsday scenario — the dreaded sexual Armageddon in which the personal peccadilloes of everyone — Republicans, Democrats, journalists — are exposed if Clinton’s infidelities are dragged into the open. Starr sent Congress his report Wednesday along with 36 large boxes of what an aide called “substantial and credible” evidence of offenses allegedly committed by President Clinton, launching the first presidential impeachment process since Watergate.

Under heavy security, two jeeps carrying the report and the evidence arrived at a congressional office building on Capitol Hill, where the material will remain locked away and guarded from all eyes until Congress passes legislation on how lawmakers will handle the report.

Many lawmakers, both Republicans and Democrats, want to make the report public while keeping secret grand jury testimony and other evidence that could harm innocent people. House Speaker Newt Gingrich said he expects the House to vote Friday on how the materials will be reviewed. Even after the legislation is passed, House sources said, it could be weeks before the report is made public.

Only hours before the report was submitted, President Clinton delivered a fresh new apology for what he has termed his “inappropriate relationship” with former White House intern Lewinsky. “I let my family down and I let this country down, but I am trying to make it right,” Clinton told a Democratic crowd at a fund-raiser in Orlando, Fla. Without ever mentioning Lewinsky’s name, Clinton said he was “determined never to let anything like that happen again.” Clinton’s Florida remarks, which followed a private apology to congressional Democratic leaders at the White House earlier Wednesday, signaled the new White House plan for dealing with mounting political fallout from his affair with Lewinsky, his lies to cover it up and the widening clamor among Republicans, the media and a handful of Democrats for his impeachment. One aide said Clinton came away from his meeting with Democratic leaders with a new sense of focus and an eagerness for the report to be made public so he could begin addressing its accusations. “Let’s get on with it,” said one White House aide. “Let’s get it out.”

First lady Hillary Rodham Clinton was described by one White House aide as combative and confident. “There’s nothing in that report,” the aide quoted Mrs. Clinton as saying.

In additional to laying out evidence of possible obstruction of justice, abuse of power and witness tampering, Starr’s report also is expected to include seamy details of Clinton’s sexual encounters with Lewinsky to prove that Clinton perjured himself when he swore in a civil deposition, and later before Starr’s grand jury, that he did not have sexual relations with the former White House intern.

At his meeting with congressional Democratic leaders Wednesday morning, Clinton apologized for the pain his affair with Lewinsky had caused his family and the nation. Rep. David Bonior of Michigan, the second-ranking Democrat in the House, said afterward that the Democratic leaders who attended the meeting forgave Clinton. But Democratic sources said the party leaders were blunt with Clinton about the damage he had caused to his credibility and told him it was no longer clear he could be trusted. The party’s willingness to stand behind him would depend on what was in the Starr report, the sources quoted the leaders as warning Clinton. Meanwhile, Bonior said he advised the president he needs to convince the nation that he is sincere about his contrition and that “he needs to address it on a continual basis.”

Ever since last week, when Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, formerly a close friend of Clinton’s and a leading figure in the centrist wing of the Democratic Party, flayed the president on the Senate floor for his “immoral behavior,” a number of other Democratic senators, including Daniel Moynihan of New York, Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, Barbara Boxer of California and Ernest Hollings of South Carolina, have joined the chorus of criticism. Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia added his voice Wednesday, savaging Clinton for undermining family values but stopping short of calling for his impeachment.

In the Senate, only Moynihan has called for Clinton’s impeachment. In the House, a number of Democratic members have echoed the stern message from the Senate, but only four Democrats — House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt of Missouri, Paul McHale of Pennsylvania, James Moran of Virginia and Marcy Kaptur of Ohio — have spoken of Clinton’s impeachment. Under pressure from party leaders, Gephardt later softened his remarks.

Now that Starr’s report is in the hands of Congress, White House political advisors, who fought continuously with Clinton’s legal team about their close-to-the-chest handling of the scandal, believe they will have more say in how Clinton deals with the crisis. The public apologies that Clinton is now delivering, they say, are one sign that Clinton is listening to his political advisors, who urged the president to be more contrite and less defensive when he issued his first confession of his affair with Lewinsky on Aug. 17. That confession, a mixture of personal regret and aggressive attacks against Starr, was widely regarded as a failure.

White House and party strategists say Clinton is also hoping he can convince members of Congress to agree to censure him for his conduct, which would allow them to register their moral outrage and move on with the nation’s business. A number of hard-line Republican lawmakers and several Democrats have said it is too late for censure, but this part of Clinton’s strategy, these strategists say, depends on Republican moderates’ coming to the conclusion that the GOP also would suffer from an impeachment process that would inevitably be portrayed by Democrats as a partisan campaign.

“This is going to turn into a huge clown show if they take up impeachment,” said one Clinton ally. The ally noted that the Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee, which would handle any impeachment proceedings, include highly partisan figures like Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts, Maxine Waters of California, John Conyers of Michigan and Charles Schumer of New York.

“These are pretty solid Democrats,” the Clinton ally said. “We’re talking about the heart of the Democratic Party. The Republicans will get a war in there if they want to pursue this.”

For now, White House and party strategists appear unworried by the criticism they have heard from various Democratic senators and members of Congress. Rather than view the criticism as part of a mounting wave of disillusionment within the party, these strategists are weighing the authors of the criticism one by one: Moynihan and Kerrey, they say, have never liked Clinton, so their remarks are personal. Boxer and Hollings are in tough races for reelection, so their efforts to distance themselves from Clinton are, they say, understandable. Lieberman, some contend, is a combination of “heartfelt sincerity” — he really believes the president’s behavior was immoral — and “ambition” — he wants to be viewed as the moral voice of the Senate and position himself as a future vice presidential candidate. Moran and Kaptur are running in marginal districts, and McHale is not running for reelection at all, so his remarks constitute a political “freebie.” And so on.

Moreover, several party strategists say that the nervousness among Democratic lawmakers is not borne out by recent internal polls — taken before the report was submitted — which show Democratic support in their districts to be strong. “After a few days, they’ll realize Clinton is their only life raft,” said one member of the Clinton camp. “Clinton’s job approval rating numbers are still high, even though he’s in political trouble. The only hope that Democrats have is to keep Clinton’s number high. When they abandon him and start shooting at him, they’re shooting holes in the bottom of their own lifeboat.”

Until the details of the report become known, of course, it remains to be seen whether the new White House strategy of contrition and control will work, or if it will resonate like the captain of the Titanic saying, “There’s no need for alarm, ladies and gentlemen. We’re only stopping briefly to take on some ice.” Democratic strategists admit that any new disclosures could be highly damaging, and Clinton’s high approval ratings could plummet, emboldening Congress to move down the path toward impeachment. That, a Clinton ally warned, could trigger the “Doomsday scenario.”

“I think there is a possibility that everything slides and all bets are off,” this ally threatened. “And if everything slides, everyone will be punished — everyone, including the press. It will be a total meltdown.”

“What this case is about is sex,” one senior White House advisor argues. “Of course, Starr will try to prove that it’s more than sex, that it’s about obstruction, perjury and God knows what else. But this is not a legal case. This is about two people who had consensual sex. Now, that in itself is not very appropriate, but it’s not illegal. There’s nothing here that’s impeachable.”

As David Kendall, the president’s lawyer, gathers information for a rebuttal that might be presented as an answer to Starr’s report, Clinton’s legal and senior political advisors are confident they can knock down whatever evidence Starr produces about Clinton’s alleged crimes. As a sign of their willingness to fight, the president’s men have reconstituted the legendary “War Room,” where Clinton’s campaign and policy teams responded quickly to crises and criticism. The White House is also considering the hiring of new staffers to bolster the president’s defense team.

On the expected evidence of perjury, Clinton’s advisors are sticking to the line that despite his Aug. 17 admission of having had an “inappropriate” relationship with Lewinsky, the president’s insistence that they had no “sexual relationship” is still, as the president phrased it, “legally accurate.” With regard to Starr’s efforts to prove obstruction of justice, Salon has learned that Kendall has devised a new, if questionable, timeline to show that Lewinsky returned the gifts she had received from Clinton before the gifts were subpoenaed by Paula Jones’ attorneys. And on the issue of abuse of power, the president’s legal team snorts at the notion that Clinton’s use of White House lawyers to fight Starr’s subpoenas constituted a crime.

But legal experts, including lawyers familiar with the president’s strategy, say his defense plan is far too dependent on legalisms and linguistic hair-splitting to protect Clinton from possible impeachment. They note that once Starr submits his report to the House Judiciary Committee, the Lewinsky affair becomes a legal and political hybrid. Which is to say that what might work for Clinton in a court of law may not work before Congress, where members will be responding as much to public disgust with Clinton’s admitted behavior as they will to the law.

“His defenses to all of these charges seem to be very legalistic,” says Michael Zeldin, a former independent counsel who has frequently spoken in defense of the president on television talk shows. “They’re not based on innocence so much as they are on nuance and parsing of language.

“In the court of public opinion, that’s very bad for Clinton because now that he’s admitted to being a liar, it’s harder for him to ask for people to bear with him on these other explanations, which are highly legalistic to begin with,” Zeldin told Salon. “He seems to be ignoring the reality that once you’ve lied about one thing, there’s almost a presumption that you’re lying about something else.”

Starr’s office has given no indication of what kind of evidence will be included in his report, but among White House officials, the president’s legal advisors and independent legal experts, it is widely believed that the report will focus on three major criminal areas: perjury, obstruction of justice and abuse of power.

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On the question of perjury, Clinton’s legal advisers are assuming Starr will argue in his report that the relationship between Clinton and Lewinsky meets the definition of sex set forth by Judge Susan Webber Wright during Clinton’s Jan. 17 deposition for the Paula Jones sexual misconduct trial. That definition included “contact with genitalia, anus, groin, breast, inner thigh or buttocks of any person with the intent to arouse or gratify the sexual desire of any person.” Recent news reports say Lewinsky provided Starr with the details of at least six encounters with the president that meet Judge Wright’s definition of sex. In the now-dismissed Jones civil case, Clinton denied under oath that he had a sexual relationship with Lewinsky, and therefore Starr is expected to claim that the president perjured himself.

Legal experts say Clinton’s insistence that his denial was “legally accurate” is based on an extremely narrow reading of Judge Wright’s definition of sex. Jeffrey Rosen, a law professor at George Washington University and another commentator who has been sympathetic to the president, notes that Clinton’s perjury defense centers on his claimed passivity during his sexual encounters with Lewinsky.

“According to Judge Wright’s definition of sex, Clinton had to have engaged or caused contact with Lewinsky’s private parts — in other words, he had to be active,” Rosen says. “Clinton’s defense is essentially that she gave him oral sex, which means he was passive.” Rosen also notes that if Starr produces evidence confirming reports that Clinton masturbated while Lewinsky stimulated herself in front of him with a cigar, the president again could argue he was passive.

“If it’s true that Clinton had the amazing self-restraint and legalistic discipline to spend the entire time masturbating, then maybe he’s in the clear,” Rosen says, his voice laden with skepticism. “But it seems very implausible. All Starr has to show is that Monica claimed that he touched her private parts, and that defense collapses. Politically, the perjury stuff is going to be really embarrassing. I don’t know if it would make sense to put all their eggs in that particular basket.”

A better defense, Rosen says, would be for Clinton’s lawyers to argue that lying under oath about sex in civil cases is the sort of thing that prosecutors ordinarily don’t pursue. “That’s a good argument,” he says. “That’s a better argument than ‘All I did was jack off.’” But even with this defense, Clinton would be in trouble politically. Asked on ABC’s “This Week” if presidential perjury in a civil case were an impeachable offense, Sen. Daniel Moynihan minced no words. “Yes,” the Democratic senator replied. The same was true, Moynihan added, if Starr produced evidence showing Clinton perjured himself during his Aug. 17 grand jury testimony.

Clinton’s next big worry is evidence pointing to obstruction of justice, another impeachable offense. Clinton’s legal advisers expect Starr’s report to focus on the president’s alleged efforts to retrieve a book of poems, a pin and other gifts he gave to Lewinsky and to conceal them from Jones’ attorneys, who had subpoenaed them.

“The president will have to come up with an innocent explanation why he would want a potential witness to return all gifts to the White House,” says Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University who has been highly critical of the president’s legal strategy. “Most people are not in the habit of calling around and collecting last year’s fruit cakes.”

Turley adds that Clinton’s confession to having had an “inappropriate” relationship with Lewinsky, which he then admittedly tried to cover up for seven months, will both strengthen Starr’s efforts to demonstrate obstruction and make any impeachment proceedings on that charge that much easier for Congress. “It is easier to make an obstruction or subornation case if you have an admission and therefore the basis for a criminal act,” Turley notes. “It gives motive and criminal context for the other theories of obstruction and subornation.”

In developing their response to the expected obstruction evidence, the president’s lawyers have built upon a major discrepancy about the return of the gifts reported between the grand jury testimony from Lewinsky and that of Betty Currie, the president’s personal secretary. Currie has reportedly testified that Lewinsky called her and asked her to come by Lewinsky’s Watergate apartment to retrieve a package. Lewinsky has reportedly told Starr’s investigators that Currie appeared uninvited at her apartment to collect the gifts after Lewinsky and Clinton had discussed the subpoena Lewinsky had received from Jones’ lawyers. In that conversation, it has been widely reported, Clinton told Lewinsky words to the effect of “You don’t have to turn over anything you don’t have.”

While acknowledging that Clinton and Lewinsky discussed the subpoena for the gifts, the president’s legal advisers flatly deny that Clinton ever made any such suggestion to her. Clinton’s lawyers plan to argue that the president, who gives gifts to many people, never regarded the mementos he gave Lewinsky as proof of an illicit relationship that needed to remain hidden, legal advisers told Salon. To strengthen this argument, Clinton’s lawyers will claim that even after the gifts were subpoenaed, Clinton gave Lewinsky other presents.

The president’s lawyers also will claim that Clinton did not know that Lewinsky turned over the gifts to Currie until he read about it in the newspaper. Clinton also will claim that he never gave Currie instructions to collect the gifts from Lewinsky or coached her on what to say to Starr’s grand jury. As further proof of Clinton’s honorable intentions, his lawyers will point out that once the gifts were subpoenaed, they were never destroyed, these advisers say.

Moreover, Salon has learned, Clinton lawyers are now preparing to argue that Lewinsky, on her own, returned the gifts to the president’s secretary before Lewinsky even received the subpoena for the gifts from Jones’ attorneys on Dec. 19 last year.

“My understanding is that Monica called Betty up out of the blue and asked if she could keep some things for her, and Betty agreed to do so,” a lawyer familiar with the president’s defense strategy told Salon. “Betty stops by Monica’s on her way home from work. Monica comes down with a gift box, on the outside of which is written, ‘Do not destroy,’ or something like that.”

The lawyer stressed this happened before Dec. 15, because on that day Currie received the news that her brother had been killed in an accident and took leave from work until after Christmas.

Resuming his account of Lewinsky’s hand-over of the gifts to Currie, the lawyer added: “I don’t know what their conversation was, but Betty knows Monica is moving to New York, understands that she’s going to safeguard these things for her, takes it home, puts the box under her bed and doesn’t open it. The box is opened only when it gets subpoenaed. Monica’s lawyers take it and produce everything that’s in the box.”

Asked to explain the discrepancy between this version of events and Lewinsky’s reported account, the lawyer said: “I’m not saying anybody acted in bad faith, but two people can understand a conversation, recall a conversation, differently. I think that’s what may be at work here.” Translation: Clinton’s and Currie’s word against Lewinsky’s.

As much as he’d like to, Zeldin, the former independent counsel, doesn’t buy it. “If his defense to the gifts is that he never intended to obstruct justice, it’s laughable,” he says. “As a prosecutor, I would say, ‘Right, you’ve lied about the relationship, and now you’ve got a motive to cover up that lie. That motive now manifests itself by your having a conversation with the only other person in the world who could possibly disprove the lie that you didn’t have an affair. You’re engaging in a conversation with her, in which you’re posing hypotheticals that deal with the question of whether she has to give over evidence that may corroborate the relationship, and you’re telling us that you didn’t have that intent? Then I would make an exasperated, disbelieving face that the jury can’t miss and I’d sit down. Then I’d let him get up and explain why he’s not lying about this as well. Very difficult.”

Zeldin also terms as “ridiculous” the claim by Clinton’s lawyers that only the destruction of the gifts qualifies as obstruction of justice. And as for the president’s insistence that he never asked anyone to lie, Zeldin recites a piece of advice from Earl Long, the famously elusive governor of Louisiana: “Don’t write anything you can phone; don’t phone anything you can talk face-to-face; don’t talk face-to-face anything you can smile; don’t smile anything you can wink, and don’t wink anything you can nod.”

“It doesn’t happen very often that people write down, ‘Remember to tell Monica Lewinsky and Betty Currie to obstruct justice,’” Zeldin said. “Much more frequently, it’s done with winks and nods. As I try to be neutral and detached, yet as supportive of the president as I can be, I don’t have an easy explanation or even a rationalized answer for how the return of the gifts came to pass,” he said. “But frankly, the president’s defense defies common sense.”

Rosen goes even further. Referring to the claim that Lewinsky returned the gifts before she received her subpoena from Jones’ lawyers, he says: “That makes no sense at all. Regardless of whether Monica contacted Betty Currie, or whether Betty Currie just showed up at Monica’s door, why on earth would Monica have any interest in returning the gifts and saying, ‘Do not Destroy’ before she was served with a subpoena? It’s an absurd story. It’s like the 18-minute gap [in the Nixon Watergate tapes]. No one is going to buy that.”

Legal experts say Clinton’s defense team also may have a hard time convincing Congress that he didn’t abuse the power of his office in fighting Starr’s investigation. Calling the abuse-of-power charge “vaporous,” one of the president’s lawyers told Salon that he cannot see how “defending the White House from overbroad and invasive subpoenas and going to court and legally litigating executive and attorney-client privileges can possibly be an abuse of power.”

It can become abuse of power, however, if Starr can present strong evidence that Clinton perjured himself when he said he never had sexual relations with Lewinsky and then used official resources — White House lawyers, aides and taxpayer money — to interfere with Starr’s investigation, dragging it out for seven months. Once again, legal experts say, Clinton’s admission of an inappropriate relationship with Lewinsky undermines his defense.

“When there is compelling evidence of crimes against a president, those allegations tend to carry collateral charges like abuse of office,” says Turley. “If Clinton can defeat substantive charges of perjury and obstruction, it’s unlikely he will be in serious jeopardy for abuse of power. But if any central charges can be proved, abuse of office charges tend to have more traction. It all depends on the mood in Congress,” which will weigh Starr’s report and decide whether Clinton should be impeached and on what charges.

On Capitol Hill, with midterm elections only nine weeks away, the mood is about as dark as it gets. Last week’s speech on the floor of the Senate by Sen. Joseph Lieberman, in which the Connecticut Democrat flayed Clinton for his “immoral” behavior, prompted other prominent Democrats to publicly distance themselves from Clinton. Maryland’s Democratic Gov. Parris Glendening announced he had canceled a fund-raiser with Clinton on Oct. 2. Moynihan told ABC’s “This Week” that the country should not fear Clinton’s impeachment.

But even amid such angry political currents, Starr’s report and Clinton’s defense still will be viewed through a legal prism. “The judiciary committee, composed of lawyers, will look at this as a threshold matter in legal terms,” says Zeldin. “The question will be: Does the president’s conduct violate the criminal laws of the United States, or is it so close to violating the criminal laws as to corrupt the office of the presidency?”

Such confidence was absent in Asia and Russia, where market slides reflected continued political uncertainty. In Russia, the government blocked trading the ruble for the fifth straight day, undercutting Russian stocks even further. Despite a slight gain by Japanese stocks, Tachi Sakaiya, the country’s chief economic planner, dismissed any suggestion of an extended recovery and warned that Japan’s economy is “now going through one of its darkest stages.”

As Asia and Russia reel and the U.S. market reacts nervously, the direction of the global economy has provoked intense speculation lately, with some analysts predicting massive international dislocations made all the worse because of the apparent lack of any leadership. To assess these predictions, Salon spoke to David DeRosa, a former banker, investment counselor and foreign exchange expert who now teaches finance at Yale University’s School of Management.

Are we, as has been suggested, on the verge of massive international dislocations?

We’re already suffering them. The Russian economy has collapsed. The economies of Asia and South Korea have literally imploded. The latest from Asia is that last night, Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia imposed capital controls on his currency. That means that if you’re not a Malaysian national, you now have to apply for permission to buy the ringgit. So Mahatir has effectively suspended trading in his currency. Meanwhile, the Korean economy has collapsed, and Japan appears to be falling ever deeper into a recession that won’t go away.

What are the ripple effects of these problems?

All this has caused second-order effects on the commodities markets, which have put countries like Canada and Australia into the tank. Australia and Canada are both major natural resource and commodities export nations, selling everything from metals and minerals to timber and energy. The worldwide market for commodities is showing a drop in demand, and as a result the price of commodities is dropping. So the dislocations have already occurred. The question is whether more will occur. In the meantime, the feeling here in the United States is that the good times are over.

We’ve read a lot about the so-called global economic contagion. How does that work? How do events in Thailand and Japan affect markets in Russia and Eastern Europe and Latin America? How does it spread?

It spreads in one of two ways. The first is that preconditions exist in these countries that create inherently risky situations, such as fixed exchange rates or current account deficits or huge foreign debts. So for the contagion to spread, there have to be identical or near-identical preconditions. That’s why Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Korea and the Philippines all got hit at the same time. The second factor is the sudden withdrawal of investment in those countries from Americans, Europeans and Asians. When trouble hits one country, investors tend to take their money out of the entire region, so you get clustering of selling, which aggravates the crash.

How did the dislocation in Asia spread to Russia?

I don’t think this is like smallpox that spreads from one place to another. The Asian countries had nearly identical economies, all built on credit, all with current account deficits, all with enormous borrowing in dollars. So as these currencies fell, the size of the debt in local terms magnified. And you had either fixed or controlled exchange rates, and all of those broke.

One year later, we have a situation in Russia that really began when the Russian authorities found themselves unable to collect taxes. Yet they had enormous borrowing in dollars and a fixed exchange rate. On top of that, you’ve got Russia’s long history of war, revolution and repression, as well as the fact that the country is flat broke. So Russia was a totally separate pathology.

I don’t believe that the Asian economic crisis caused the Russian economy to collapse. If that were true, it would have happened a year ago, not now. What I do believe is that these regional economies were powder kegs, ready to blow.

Why was there such a frightened reaction in U.S. markets to Russia’s economic collapse?

Many people here had invested in emerging market funds or hedge funds that took leveraged bets on these emerging markets, and they got clobbered by the devaluation of the ruble. The other thing that happened was the Russians effectively defaulted on government bonds, which are now worth no more than 10 cents on the dollar, if they’re worth anything. Their stock market is now totally worthless as well. On top of all that, Russia has experienced a soft coup. We don’t know who is going to run Russia now. So there is an element of political risk that now may transcend the economic risk. That’s a combination of factors that markets don’t like. As far as the exposure of U.S. banks is concerned, it’s going to hurt but it’s not enough to sink banks like Bank of America and J.P Morgan. But you have to ask yourself: What’s going to happen to the peace dividend?

How so?

If you believe, as I do, that capitalism and freedom go together, and that command economies and repression go together, then Russia may solve its problems by returning to a command economy and a dictatorship. That’s the fear right now. Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, we’ve been living in a fantasy world that the big, bad evil empire is gone. Well, it may come back. Indeed, Russia has every possible condition for that to happen. There is a power vacuum, there’s an economic vacuum. You have to assume that someone strong is going to step in there and take over. It affects the peace dividend because suddenly we will have to spend more money on defense and security.

How much are these problems aggravated by the quality of leadership worldwide?

I think the problems are big and the leaders are weak. We don’t have any world leaders right now that I can spot. [Japanese Prime Minister Keizo] Obuchi is a disaster, and all the guys before him were disasters. It’s not clear whether Clinton can recover. The Starr report could be fatal. Now there are questions of campaign finance clouding Gore’s future. Russia’s in total turmoil, and Germany may be about to lose [Chancellor Helmut] Kohl. On the leadership front, I must say that it doesn’t look too good.

We’ve heard warnings of the global contagion spreading to our backyard in Latin America. How might that scenario play out?

The theory is that the crisis will spread to Latin America because there is heavy investment by Asian nations in the region. The idea is that the Asians will pull all the money out, aggravating pre-existing conditions in Latin America, which include a shaky currency in Brazil and a fixed exchange rate in Argentina. But primarily the fear is that if emerging markets become so thoroughly discredited that no one wants to invest in them, then the same people who are pulling out of Asia, Eastern Europe and Russia will yank their money out of Latin America as well.

At one point does all of this begin to lap up on American shores?

The growth rate in the United States may be down right now, but I must say that it looks like we have an internally robust economy and that we are our own biggest customer.

How can you be so optimistic when exports make up 20 percent of the U.S. economy?

That’s true, but there’s still Europe. Western Europe, where the wealth, the production and the consumers are, is in very good shape economically. It would be possible to sell United States exports just on European trade. How much do you think the Japanese bought from us? Wasn’t that the big American complaint? We primarily import from Japan and the rest of Asia. Sure, all the stock markets are off because of the cumulative effect of Asia’s troubles and the Russian default, but it’s not at all clear to me that the story is over for the U.S. and Western European economies.

Let’s say these massive global economic dislocations spread to Latin America, where U.S. banks and businesses are heavily invested. At that point, might not Americans begin to feel the shock waves?

Obviously we would be better off if none of these crises occurred. But let’s not forget that we already went through one major crisis in Latin America in 1994. All those markets collapsed, and here we are today, stronger than ever. Troubles in Latin America, Asia and Russia are not going to cause the U.S. economy to collapse. It looks pretty robust to me. In fact, I have to say, as [Federal Reserve Chairman Alan] Greenspan did, this is a remarkable performance. There’s solid growth, there’s no inflation and there’s low interest rates. What’s the problem?

It’s true there are problems elsewhere in the world, but I see the latest market correction as healthy for us. I worry about bubbles, and this process of growth and correction is a sustainable solution for some time. I don’t believe the American economy is about to keel over like Thailand, Korea or Russia. In fact, I agree with those who say the market will come back. It’s already climbing today. The bottom line is that we’re in much better shape to weather these kinds of global crises because our economy is basically sound.