19 December 2015

1998: President Clinton impeached

History.com has this for 19 December:


In November of 1995, President Bill Clinton began an affair with Monica Lewinsky, an 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 of 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 to secretly record conversations with Lewinsky in which Lewinsky gave Tripp details about the affair.
In December of 1995, lawyers for Paula Jones, who was suing the President on sexual harassment charges, subpoenaed Lewinsky. In January of 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 16 January 1996, Lewinsky was taken by FBI agents and US 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 of 1996, 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 6 August 1996, Lewinsky appeared before the grand jury to begin her testimony, and on 17 August 1996, 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 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 9 September 1996, Kenneth Starr submitted his report and eighteen 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 eleven 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 Lewinsky. On 8 October, the House authorized a wide-ranging impeachment inquiry, and, on 11 December, the House Judiciary Committee approved three articles of impeachment. On 19 December, the House impeached Clinton.
On 7 January 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 Constitution, the chief justice of the Supreme Court (William Rehnquist, at this time) was sworn in to preside, and the senators were sworn in as jurors.
After nearly fourteen hours of debate, the House of Representatives approved two articles of impeachment against President 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.
Five weeks later, on 12 February, 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, Clinton said he was “profoundly sorry” for the burden his behavior imposed on Congress and the American people.
Rico says that, worse yet, instead of fucking her,  he left us to be fucked by Hillary...

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