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The Clinton–Lewinsky scandal was a sex scandal involving Bill Clinton, the president of the United States, and Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern. 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. [1] 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 all impeachment charges of perjury and obstruction of justice in a 21-day U.S. Senate trial. [2]
Clinton was held in civil contempt of court by Judge Susan Webber Wright for giving misleading testimony in the Paula Jones case regarding Lewinsky, [3] and was also fined $90,000 by Wright. [4] 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. [5]
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. [6]
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", [7] 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". [8]
This scandal has sometimes been referred to as "Monicagate", [9] "Lewinskygate", [10] "Tailgate", [11] "Sexgate", [12] and "Zippergate", [12] following the "-gate" construction that has been used since the Watergate scandal.
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. [13]
In April 1996, Lewinsky's superiors relocated her job to the Pentagon, because they felt she was spending too much time around Clinton. [14] 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. [15] The American Spectator alleged that Richardson knew more about the Lewinsky affair than he declared to the grand jury. [16]
Lewinsky confided in Linda Tripp about her relationship with Clinton. [17] Tripp persuaded Lewinsky to save the gifts Clinton had given her, and not to dry clean a semen-stained blue dress in order to keep it as an "insurance policy." [17] Tripp reported their conversations to literary agent Lucianne Goldberg, who advised her to secretly record them, [18] 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. [19] In the fall of 1997, Goldberg began speaking to reporters (including Michael Isikoff of Newsweek ) about the tapes. [20]
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.
News of the scandal first broke on January 17, 1998, on the Drudge Report , [21] 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 . [22] 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: [23]
Now, I have to go back to work on my State of the Union speech. And I worked on it until pretty late last night. But I want to say one thing to the American people. I want you to listen to me. I'm going to say this again: I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time; never. These allegations are false. And I need to go back to work for the American people. Thank you. [24]
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. [25] 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." [26]
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. [27] She also turned over a semen-stained blue dress (which Tripp had encouraged her to save without dry cleaning) to the Starr investigators. The FBI tested the dress and matched the semen stains to a blood sample from Clinton, thereby providing unambiguous DNA evidence that could prove the relationship despite Clinton's official denials. [28]
Clinton admitted in 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". [29] [30]
On August 20, 1998, three days after Clinton testified on the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Operation Infinite Reach launched missiles 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. [31] Some countries, media outlets, protesters, and Republicans accused Clinton of ordering the attacks as a diversion. [32] [33] 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. [34] [35] Administration officials denied any connection between the missile strikes and the ongoing scandal, [36] [37] and 9/11 Commission investigators found no reason to dispute those statements. [38] The missile strikes also caused anti-Semitic canards to spread in the Middle East that Lewinsky was a Jewish agent sent to influence Clinton against aiding Palestine. This conspiracy theory would influence Mohamed Atta, the ringleader of al-Qaeda's Hamburg cell and the September 11 attacks. [39]
In his deposition for the Jones lawsuit, Clinton denied having sexual relations with Lewinsky. Based on the evidence—a blue dress with Clinton's semen that Lewinsky provided—Starr concluded that the president's sworn testimony was false and perjurious.
During the deposition, Clinton was asked "Have you ever had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky, as that term is defined in Deposition Exhibit 1?" The judge ordered that Clinton be given an opportunity to review the agreed definition. Afterwards, based on the definition created by the Independent Counsel's Office, Clinton answered, "I have never had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky." Clinton later said, "I thought the definition included any activity by [me], where [I] was the actor and came in contact with those parts of the bodies" which had been explicitly listed (and "with an intent to gratify or arouse the sexual desire of any person"). 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. [40]
Two months after the Senate failed to convict him, President Clinton was held in civil contempt of court by Judge Susan Webber Wright for giving misleading testimony regarding his sexual relationship with Lewinsky, and was also fined $90,000 by Wright. [3] [4] Clinton declined to appeal the civil contempt of court ruling, citing financial problems, [3] but still maintained that his testimony complied with Wright's earlier definition of sexual relations. [3] In 2001, his license to practice law was suspended in Arkansas for five years and later by the United States Supreme Court. [5]
In December 1998, Clinton's Democratic political party was in the minority in both chambers of Congress. A few Democratic members of Congress, and most in the opposition Republican Party, claimed that Clinton's giving false testimony and allegedly influencing Lewinsky's testimony were crimes of obstruction of justice and perjury and thus impeachable offenses. After a delay due to a brief bombing campaign in Iraq, the House of Representatives voted to issue two Articles of Impeachment against him which was followed by a 21-day trial in the Senate.
Clinton was acquitted on both counts as neither received the necessary two-thirds majority vote of the senators present. Between 45 and 50 senators voted to convict, depending on the charge, short of the 67 votes needed for conviction and removal from office. [41] All the Democrats in the Senate voted for acquittal on both the perjury and the obstruction of justice charges. Ten Republicans voted for acquittal for perjury: John Chafee (Rhode Island), Susan Collins (Maine), Slade Gorton (Washington), Jim Jeffords (Vermont), Richard Shelby (Alabama), Olympia Snowe (Maine), Arlen Specter (Pennsylvania), Ted Stevens (Alaska), Fred Thompson (Tennessee), and John Warner (Virginia). Five Republicans voted for acquittal for obstruction of justice: Chafee, Collins, Jeffords, Snowe, and Specter.
President Clinton was thereby acquitted of all charges and remained in office. There were attempts to censure the president by the House of Representatives, but those attempts failed.
The scandal arguably affected the 2000 U.S. presidential election in two quite different ways. Democratic Party candidate and sitting vice president Al Gore said that Clinton's scandal had been "a drag" that deflated the enthusiasm of their party's base, and had the effect of reducing Democratic votes. Clinton said the scandal had made Gore's campaign too cautious, and that if Clinton had been allowed to campaign for Gore in Arkansas and New Hampshire, either state would have delivered Gore's needed electoral votes regardless of the effects of the Florida recount controversy. [42]
Political analysts have supported both views. Before and after the 2000 election, John Cochran of ABC News connected the Lewinsky scandal with a voter phenomenon he called "Clinton fatigue". [43] Polling showed that the scandal continued to affect Clinton's low personal approval ratings through the election, [44] and analysts such as Vanderbilt University's John G. Geer later concluded "Clinton fatigue or a kind of moral retrospective voting had a significant impact on Gore's chances". [45] Other analysts sided with Clinton's argument, and argued that Gore's refusal to have Clinton campaign with him damaged his appeal. [46] [47] [48]
During the scandal, supporters of former president Clinton alleged that the matter should remain private, and called some supporting Clinton's impeachment hypocritical. A highly publicized investigation campaign actively sought information that might embarrass politicians who supported impeachment. According to the British newspaper The Guardian ,
Larry Flynt ... the publisher of Hustler magazine, offered a $1 million reward ... Flynt was a sworn enemy of the Republican party [and] sought to dig up dirt on the Republican members of Congress who were leading the impeachment campaign against President Clinton. [... Although] Flynt claimed at the time to have the goods on up to a dozen prominent Republicans, the ad campaign helped to bring down only one. Robert Livingston—a congressman from Louisiana ... abruptly retired after learning that Mr. Flynt was about to reveal that he had also had an affair. [49]
Henry Hyde, Republican chair of the House Judiciary Committee and lead House manager, also had an affair while in office as a state legislator. Hyde, aged 70 during the Lewinsky hearings, dismissed it as a "youthful indiscretion" (he had been 41). [50]
Republican congressman Bob Livingston had been widely expected to become Speaker of the United States House of Representatives in the next Congressional session. [51] Then just weeks away after Flynt revealed the affair, Livingston resigned and challenged Clinton to do the same.
Bob Barr (R-GA) another Republican House manager, had an affair while married. Barr had been the first lawmaker in either chamber to call for Clinton's resignation due to the Lewinsky affair. Barr lost a primary challenge less than three years after the impeachment proceedings. [52]
Dan Burton (R-IN) said, "No one, regardless of what party they serve, no one, regardless of what branch of government they serve, should be allowed to get away with these alleged sexual improprieties ..." [53] In 1998, Burton admitted that he himself had had an affair in 1983 which produced a child. [54]
Newt Gingrich (R-GA) US Representative, Speaker of the House and leader of the Republican Revolution of 1994, [55] admitted in 1998 to having had an affair with then House Agriculture Committee staffer Callista Bisek while he was still married to his second wife, [56] at the same time as he was leading the impeachment of Bill Clinton for perjury regarding an affair with intern Monica Lewinsky. [57] [58]
Steven C. LaTourette (R-OH) US Representative, voted to impeach Bill Clinton for the Lewinsky scandal while he was having a long-term affair with his chief of staff, Jennifer Laptook. [59]
Republican Helen Chenoweth-Hage from Idaho aggressively called for the resignation of President Clinton and then admitted to her own six-year affair with a married rancher during the 1980s. [60]
Historian Taylor Branch implied that Clinton had requested changes to Branch's 2009 Clinton biography, The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President , regarding Clinton's revelation that the Lewinsky affair began because "I cracked; I just cracked." Branch writes that Clinton had felt "beleaguered, unappreciated, and open to a liaison with Lewinsky" following "the Democrats' loss of Congress in the November 1994 elections, the death of his mother the previous January, and the ongoing Whitewater investigation". [61] Publicly, Clinton had previously blamed the affair on "a terrible moral error" and on anger at Republicans, stating, "if people have unresolved anger, it makes them do non-rational, destructive things". [62]
The Clinton-Lewinsky scandal was subject to widespread media coverage, resulting in considerable difficulties for Monica Lewinsky later in life as she attempted to find employment. In 2014, she publicly re-emerged as an activist against cyberbullying and public shaming after writing the essay Shame and Survival for Vanity Fair . [63] Subsequently, several prominent media figures who had covered and/or mocked Lewinsky during the scandal expressed regret at their role in it. David Letterman remarked "I feel bad about my role in helping push the humiliation to the point of suffocation. [64]
Monica Samille Lewinsky is an American activist. Lewinsky became internationally known in the late 1990s after U.S. President Bill Clinton admitted to having had an affair with her during her days as a White House intern between 1995 and 1997. The affair and its repercussions became known as the Clinton–Lewinsky scandal.
Kenneth Winston Starr was an American lawyer and judge who as independent counsel authored the Starr Report, which served as the basis of the impeachment of Bill Clinton. He headed an investigation of members of the Clinton administration, known as the Whitewater controversy, from 1994 to 1998. Starr previously served as a federal appellate judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit from 1983 to 1989 and as the U.S. solicitor general from 1989 to 1993 during the presidency of George H. W. Bush.
The Starr Report, officially the Referral from Independent Counsel Kenneth W. Starr in Conformity with the Requirement of Title 28, United States Code, Section 595(c), is a United States federal government report by Independent Counsel Ken Starr concerning his investigation of President Bill Clinton. Delivered to the United States Congress on September 9, 1998, the allegations in the report led to the impeachment of Bill Clinton and the five-year suspension of Clinton's law license.
Paula Corbin Jones is an American civil servant. A former Arkansas state employee, Jones sued United States President Bill Clinton for sexual harassment in 1994. In the initial lawsuit, Jones cited Clinton for sexual harassment at the Excelsior Hotel in Little Rock, Arkansas on May 8, 1991. Following a series of civil suits and appeals through the U.S. District Court and the U.S. Court of Appeals from May 1994 to January 1996, Clinton v. Jones eventually reached the United States Supreme Court on May 27, 1997. The case was later settled on November 13, 1998.
Robert Linlithgow Livingston Jr. is an American lobbyist and politician who served as a U.S. Representative from Louisiana from 1977 to 1999. A Republican, he was chosen as Newt Gingrich's successor as Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, a position he declined following revelations of an extramarital affair. He served as a U.S. Representative from Louisiana from 1977 to 1999 and as the Chairman of the Appropriations Committee from 1995 to 1999. During his final years in Congress, Livingston was a strong supporter of Bill Clinton's impeachment. He is currently a Washington, D.C.-based lobbyist. Livingston's memoir, The Windmill Chaser: Triumphs and Less in American Politics, was published in September 2018.
Linda Rose Tripp was an American civil servant who played a prominent role in the Clinton–Lewinsky scandal of 1998. Tripp's action in illegally and secretly recording Monica Lewinsky's confidential phone calls about her relationship with President Bill Clinton caused a sensation with their links to the earlier Clinton v. Jones lawsuit and with the disclosing of intimate details. Tripp claimed that her motives were purely patriotic, and she avoided a wiretap charge by agreeing to hand over the tapes.
"Vast right-wing conspiracy" is a phrase popularized by a 1995 memo by political opposition researcher Chris Lehane and then referenced in 1998 by the then First Lady of the United States Hillary Rodham Clinton, in defense of her husband, President Bill Clinton, characterizing the continued allegations of scandal against her and her husband, including the Lewinsky scandal, as part of a conspiracy by Clinton's political enemies. The term has been used since, including in a question posed to Bill Clinton in 2009 to describe verbal attacks on Barack Obama during his early presidency. Hillary Clinton mentioned it again during her 2016 presidential campaign.
Bill Clinton, the 42nd president of the United States, was impeached by the United States House of Representatives of the 105th United States Congress on December 19, 1998, for "high crimes and misdemeanors". The House adopted two articles of impeachment against Clinton, with the specific charges against Clinton being lying under oath and obstruction of justice. Two other articles had been considered but were rejected by the House vote.
The 1998 United States House of Representatives elections were held on November 3, 1998, to elect U.S. Representatives to serve in the 106th United States Congress. They were part of the midterm elections held during President Bill Clinton's second term. They were a major disappointment for the Republicans, who were expecting to gain seats due to the embarrassment Clinton suffered during the Monica Lewinsky scandal and the "six-year itch" effect observed in most second-term midterm elections. However, the Republicans lost five seats to the Democrats, although they retained a narrow majority in the House. A wave of Republican discontent with Speaker Newt Gingrich prompted him to resign shortly after the election; he was replaced by Congressman Dennis Hastert of Illinois.
Kathleen Willey is a former White House volunteer aide who, on March 15, 1998, alleged on the TV news program 60 Minutes that Bill Clinton had sexually assaulted her on November 29, 1993, during his first term as President. She had been subpoenaed to testify in the Paula Jones sexual harassment case.
Betty Grace Currie is an American government official who served as the personal secretary for Bill Clinton during his tenure as president of the United States. She became well known as a figure in the Lewinsky scandal for her alleged handling of gifts given to Monica Lewinsky by President Clinton.
Lucianne Goldberg, also known as Lucianne Cummings, was an American literary agent and author. She was named as one of the "key players" in the 1998 impeachment of President Clinton, as it was she who controversially advised Monica Lewinsky's confidante Linda Tripp to tape Lewinsky's phone calls about their affair. The 20-hour recording became crucial to the Starr investigation. She was the mother of Jonah Goldberg, a conservative political commentator, and Joshua Goldberg, a Republican nominee for the New York City Council.
Clinton v. Jones, 520 U.S. 681 (1997), was a landmark United States Supreme Court case establishing that a sitting President of the United States has no immunity from civil law litigation, in federal court, for acts done before taking office and unrelated to the office. In particular, there is no temporary immunity and thus no delay of federal cases until the President leaves office.
Former U.S. President Bill Clinton's public image is most notably characterized by high public approval ratings, aided by his youthful appearance, as well as his charismatic, and soundbite-ready style of speech. His personal background and lifestyle led to Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison to call him the first "black president". Clinton was also dogged by investigations throughout his presidency, particularly of sexual misconduct, damaging the public's beliefs of his trustworthiness, though his approval ratings remained high, even as his impeachment trial continued.
The 1998 United States elections were held on November 3, 1998, in the middle of Democratic President Bill Clinton's second term and during impeachment proceedings against the president as a result of the Clinton–Lewinsky scandal. Though Republicans retained control of both chambers of Congress, the elections were unusual because this is the first midterm since 1934 that the president's party gained seats in the House of Representatives.
Bill Clinton, the 42nd president of the United States (1993–2001), has been publicly accused of sexual misconduct, including rape, harassment, and sexual assault. Additionally, some commentators have characterized Clinton's sexual relationship with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky as predatory or non-consensual, despite the fact that Lewinsky called the relationship consensual at the time. These allegations have been revisited and lent more credence in 2018, in light of the #MeToo movement, with many commentators and Democratic leaders now saying Clinton should have been compelled to resign after the Lewinsky scandal.
Clinton: The Musical is a satiric musical with music and lyrics by Paul Hodge, and a book by Paul Hodge and Michael Hodge. The musical is based on the presidency of Bill Clinton. After success in various festivals, the show played Off-Broadway in the spring of 2015.
The impeachment trial of Bill Clinton, the 42nd president of the United States, began in the U.S. Senate on January 7, 1999, and concluded with his acquittal on February 12. After an inquiry between October and December 1998, President Clinton was impeached by the U.S. House of Representatives on December 19, 1998; the articles of impeachment charged him with perjury and obstruction of justice. It was the second impeachment trial of a U.S. president, preceded by that of Andrew Johnson.
The impeachment inquiry against Bill Clinton, the 42nd president of the United States, was initiated by a vote of the United States House of Representatives on October 8, 1998, roughly a month after the release of the Starr Report. The United States House of Representatives, led by Republican Speaker Newt Gingrich, voted to authorize a broad impeachment inquiry against President Clinton. The inquiry was conducted by the House Committee on the Judiciary.
During his presidency, Bill Clinton, the 42nd president of the United States, saw multiple efforts to impeach him.
In January, Tripp gave Starr the tapes. She made the recordings secretly at her home at the urging of her friend Lucianne Goldberg, a New York literary agent.
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: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)John Cochran on ABC described this phenomenon as "Clinton fatigue." He said voters were happy with the policy agenda and direction of the country but were tired of Clinton and wanted to forget him. Casting their votes for Bush and not for Clinton's surrogate, Gore, was one way to bring about this preferred change, Cochran concluded.