Free High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton by Ann Coulter Page A

that people who commit crimes can walk away scot free if they turn state’s evidence. Generally, the most they can hope for is leniency in a plea bargain.
    That was the closest Ginsburg was ever going to get to “full immunity,” and he wasn’t likely to get it after spending eighteen hours a day on TV denouncing Starr. Starr didn’t need Lewinsky or her loopy publicity-seeking attorney. So why wasn’t Lewinsky’s lawyer finding out what Starr’s favorite chocolates and flowers were, rather than criticizing Starr on national television?
    Until the Beverly Hills 90210 girl figured out that her lawyer was yet another older man in her life willing to sell her down the river, Lewinsky was in trouble. On the basis of just the evidence Newsweek had, to say nothing of what Starr had—the dress, the brooch, the hair pin, the twenty-plus hours of tape, the talking points, the testimony of Linda Tripp, Ashley Raines (a White House staffer who heard Lewinsky describe her relationship with the president), Secret Service agents, and her mother—Lewinsky’s own statements before a grand jury were not going to make or break any criminal case against her—or the Big Creep.
    Remember: Lewinsky was alleged to be on tape, first, babbling to Linda Tripp about Lewinsky’s affair with the president and, second, pleading with Tripp not to tell Jones’s lawyers about those earlier conversations. That is suborning perjury. Lewinsky was the one who handed off the “Points to Make in an Affidavit” document to Linda Tripp. That is witness tampering. Lewinsky, according to press leaks, had taken gifts given to her by the president to Betty Currie—so that they were not in her possession when Jones’s lawyers requested them. That is concealing evidence. Three felonies, even if she were fantasizing an oral-sex-only affair with the president.
    No wonder the president was “depressed” when she got rid of Ginsburg.

Chapter Ten
     
    A Cancer on the Country
     
    John Dean warned President Nixon of a “cancer” growing on his presidency on account of some bad apples who had worked their way to positions of influence in the Nixon administration. This time around it’s a little difficult to conceive of the cloud following Clinton from Little Rock to Washington as a staffing problem. Trouble follows Clinton whether he is in the Excelsior Hotel or the Oval Office, whether his associates are James and Susan McDougal (his Whitewater partners) or Vernon Jordan and Betty Currie, or whether his subordinates are Arkansas State Troopers or former bar bouncer Craig Livingstone. It’s hard to explain this as a coincidence.
    Clinton’s defense is essentially that he is not impeachable because his conduct is so disreputable that the framers could not have conceived of it. This is the important part of the incessant claim that the president is not subject to impeachment or indictment and that “no one cares” because his offenses are only “about sex.”
    The framers never expected a man like Clinton to become president. Rather, they anticipated, with “great probability,” that any man elevated to the presidency would have certain characteristics; he would be “a man of abilities, at least respectable.” The office of the president—and to some extent the Senate—would require men of “character” notable for their “wisdom” and “integrity.” 1 But they also assumed that the office would elevate the man; it would “naturally beget a livelier sense of duty and a more exact regard to reputation.” This was, in fact, one of Hamilton’s arguments for a single president in opposition to a populace fearful of getting another king. Vesting all the executive power in a single man, Hamilton argued, would cause him to “feel himself under stronger obligations.” 2
    The “stronger obligations” and “lively sense of duty” the framers counted upon were obligations and duties to the entire country. In this regard, the president was