Clinton–Lewinsky scandal
A sex scandal involving Bill Clinton, the president of the United States, and Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern, erupted in 1998. Their sexual relationship began in 1995—when Clinton was 49 years old and Lewinsky was 22 years old—and lasted 18 months, ending in 1997. Clinton ended televised remarks on January 26, 1998, with the later infamous statement: "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky." Further investigation led to charges of perjury and to the impeachment of Clinton in 1998 by the U.S. House of Representatives. He was subsequently acquitted on both impeachment charges, of perjury and obstruction of justice in a 21-day U.S. Senate trial.
Clinton was held in civil contempt of court by Judge Susan Webber Wright for giving misleading testimony in the Paula Jones case regarding Lewinsky, and was also fined $90,000 by Wright. His license to practice law was suspended in Arkansas for five years; shortly thereafter, he was disbarred from presenting cases in front of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Lewinsky was a graduate of Lewis & Clark College. She was hired during Clinton's first term in 1995 as an intern at the White House through the White House Internship Program and was later an employee of the White House Office of Legislative Affairs. It is believed that Clinton began a personal relationship with her while she worked at the White House, the details of which she later confided to Linda Tripp, her Defense Department co-worker who secretly recorded their telephone conversations.
In January 1998, Tripp discovered that Lewinsky had sworn an affidavit in the Paula Jones case, denying a relationship with Clinton. She delivered tapes to Ken Starr, the independent counsel who was investigating Clinton on other matters, including the Whitewater controversy, the White House FBI files controversy, and the White House travel office controversy. During the grand jury testimony, Clinton's responses were carefully worded, and he argued "it depends on what the meaning of the word is is", with regard to the truthfulness of his statement that "there is not a sexual relationship, an improper sexual relationship or any other kind of improper relationship".
This scandal has sometimes been referred to as "Monicagate", "Lewinskygate", "Tailgate", "Sexgate", and "Zippergate", following the "-gate" construction that has been used since the Watergate scandal.
Allegations of sexual contact
Lewinsky said she had sexual encounters with Bill Clinton on nine occasions from November 1995 to March 1997. According to her published schedule, First Lady Hillary Clinton was at the White House for at least some portion of seven of those days.In April 1996, Lewinsky's superiors relocated her job to the Pentagon, because they felt she was spending too much time around Clinton. According to his autobiography, then-United Nations Ambassador Bill Richardson was asked by the White House in 1997 to interview Lewinsky for a job on his staff at the United Nations. Richardson did so, and offered her a position, which she declined. The American Spectator alleged that Richardson knew more about the Lewinsky affair than he declared to the grand jury.
Lewinsky confided in Linda Tripp about her relationship with Clinton. Tripp persuaded Lewinsky to save the gifts Clinton had given her, and not to dry clean a semen-stained blue dress to keep it as an "insurance policy." Tripp reported their conversations to literary agent Lucianne Goldberg, who advised her to secretly record them, which Tripp began doing in September 1997. Goldberg also urged Tripp to take the tapes to Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr and bring them to the attention of people working on the Paula Jones case. In the fall of 1997, Goldberg began speaking to reporters about the tapes.
In the Paula Jones case, Lewinsky had submitted an affidavit that denied any physical relationship with Clinton. In January 1998, she attempted to persuade Tripp to commit perjury in the Jones case. Instead, Tripp gave the tapes to Starr, who was investigating the Whitewater controversy and other matters. Starr was now armed with evidence of Lewinsky's admission of a physical relationship with Clinton, and he broadened the investigation to include Lewinsky and her possible perjury in the Jones case.
Denial and subsequent admission
News of the scandal first broke on January 17, 1998, on the Drudge Report, which reported that Newsweek editors were sitting on a story by investigative reporter Michael Isikoff exposing the affair. The story broke in the mainstream press on January 21 in The Washington Post. The story swirled for several days and, despite swift denials from Clinton, the clamor for answers from the White House grew louder. On January 26, President Clinton, standing with his wife, spoke at a White House press conference, and issued a denial in which he said:Pundits debated whether Clinton would address the allegations in his State of the Union Address. Ultimately, he chose not to mention them. Hillary Clinton remained supportive of her husband throughout the scandal. On January 27, in an appearance on NBC's Today she said, "The great story here for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president."
For the next several months and through the summer, the media debated whether or not an affair had occurred and whether or not Clinton had lied or obstructed justice, but nothing could be definitively established beyond the taped recordings because Lewinsky was unwilling to discuss the affair or testify about it. On July 28, 1998, a substantial delay after the public break of the scandal, Lewinsky received transactional immunity in exchange for grand jury testimony concerning her relationship with Clinton. She also turned over a semen-stained blue dress to the Starr investigators. The FBI tested the dress and matched the semen stains to a blood sample from Clinton, thereby providing unambiguous circumstantial evidence that proved the relationship despite Clinton's official denials.
Clinton admitted in a taped grand jury testimony on August 17, 1998, that he had engaged in an "improper physical relationship" with Lewinsky. That evening he gave a nationally televised statement admitting that his relationship with Lewinsky was "not appropriate".
On August 20, 1998, three days after Clinton testified on the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Operation Infinite Reach launched missile attacks against al-Qaeda bases in Khost, Afghanistan, and the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum, Sudan, in retaliation for the 1998 United States embassy bombings. Some countries, media outlets, protesters, and Republicans accused Clinton of ordering the attacks as a diversion. The attacks also drew parallels to the then-recently released movie Wag the Dog, which features a fictional president faking a war in Albania to distract attention from a sex scandal. Administration officials denied any connection between the missile strikes and the ongoing scandal, and 9/11 Commission investigators found no reason to dispute those statements. The missile strikes also caused Antisemitic canards to spread in the Middle East that Lewinsky was a Jewish agent sent to influence Clinton against supporting the Palestinians. This conspiracy theory would influence Mohamed Atta, the ringleader of al-Qaeda's Hamburg cell and the September 11 attacks.
Perjury charges
In his deposition for the Jones lawsuit, Clinton denied having had sexual relations with Lewinsky. Based on the evidence—a blue dress with Clinton's semen, and confirmed by DNA testing, that Lewinsky provided—Starr concluded that the president's sworn testimony was perjurious. There were multiple sworn statements that Starr considered to be lies, but two statements have become particularly famous because of Clinton's very technical defense of them.Defining sexual relations
During the deposition, Clinton was asked "Have you ever had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky, as that term is defined in Deposition Exhibit1?" The judge let Clinton review the definition, which stated,Afterwards, based on the definition of "sexual relations" as provided by the Independent Counsel's Office, Clinton answered, "I have never had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky." Clinton later said,
a person engages in ‘‘sexual relations’’ when the person knowingly engages in or causes 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
"I thought the definition included any activity by , where was the actor and came in contact with those parts of the bodies" which had been explicitly listed.
In other words, Clinton denied that he had ever contacted Lewinsky's "genitalia, anus, groin, breast, inner thigh, or buttocks", and effectively claimed that the agreed-upon definition of "sexual relations" included giving oral sex but excluded receiving oral sex.
The meaning of the word 'is'
In the deposition, Clinton's lawyer had quoted Lewinsky's statement that "there is absolutely no sex of any kind in any manner, shape or form, with President Clinton". Clinton later defended this as true because,
It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is. If the—if he—if ‘is’ means is and never has been, that is not—that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement. Now, if someone had asked me on that day, are you having any kind of sexual relations with Ms. Lewinsky, that is, asked me a question in the present tense, I would have said no. And it would have been completely true.
The Starr report did not consider this particular statement perjurious, but gave it as an example of how Clinton "construes some words narrowly", and one journalist highlighted it as a "defining moment" showing Clinton's slickness.