Revolt Against The Prosecutors

by Alexander Cockburn

One poll taken after the broadcast of the president's testimony showed that the approval for Clinton's job performance actually jumped from 59 percent to 68 percent, a register of the disgust felt by ordinary Americans -- in sharp contrast to the opinion-forming elites -- at what Clinton has been forced to go through. Ordinary people don't like the intrusions into his personal life. They think his misbehavior in this area is irrelevant to the performance of his job.

And increasingly, I suspect, Americans are registering a larger disgust at prosecutorial techniques. There's a useful parallel to be made here with the last great judicial spectacle -- the O.J. Simpson trial. Many whites raged at widespread black support for Simpson and tried to establish a false solidarity with the poor by denouncing "rich man's justice." It didn't wash with blacks, the vast majority of whom had family members, friends or acquaintances mashed in the wheels of the justice system and rooted for O.J. on the grounds that with all his resources he at least might beat the system that had blighted so many lives.

Ditto with Clinton, with whom blacks in particular overwhelmingly sympathize in his present troubles. Here's the president, the leader of the free world, and just as that Hispanic store owner said, he's being put through the same old wringer. And so they're cheering for him, just as blacks cheered for O.J.

This same wringer is bleakly displayed in the grand jury session. The unwanted release of the videotape, prompted by vehement Republicans (maybe suckered by a White House pretending to dread the broadcast), was an important event. For many years now, defense lawyers have fought for release of grand jury testimony, arguing that only raw transcripts would show how prosecutors mischaracterize testimony and draw up indictments on the basis of outrageous perversions of statements made behind those closed doors.

Clinton's and Lewinsky's testimony entirely ratifies such attacks on grand juries as presently used by prosecutors. Lewinsky, for example, emerged from Kenneth Starr's report to Congress as scheming and manipulative. On Starr's account, one could almost build a case against her as a shakedown artist.

From the transcript of the actual session in the grand jury room, a very different and far more sympathetic picture of Lewinsky emerges, one that prompted many of the jurors to muster heartfelt expressions of sympathy and support.

Lewinsky told the grand jury several times she was never encouraged to lie about her relationship with Clinton. Starr's report omits these denials and says, deceptively, "Ms. Lewinsky has stated that the president never explicitly told her to lie. Instead, as she explained, they both understood from their conversations that they would continue their pattern of covering up and lying about the relationship."

Nor did Starr reflect in his report Lewinsky's statement to the grand jury that she'd told "a whole bunch of lies" to Linda Tripp, including the statement that she'd told Vernon Jordan that she wouldn't sign an affidavit saying she'd not had sex with the president until he, Jordan, got her fixed up with a job. This directly refutes a core claim of Starr, that the hunt for Monica's job was part of a larger pattern of obstruction of justice, just like the famous "talking points" that were used to form a large part of Starr's leaks and proclamations and that have now dropped from view.

A friend of mine who recently served on a grand jury said that the accused always did better if they appeared before the jury. In retrospect, she found that the only accused whose cases the jurors threw out were those who came to testify. Their presence made the all-important human counter-balance to the alleged victim or the cops. So it turned out with Clinton. There he was, flesh and blood (insofar as video can be flesh and blood) and thus a human being facing the often bizarre innuendoes of Starr's inquisition.

Clinton's always been a fake populist, so it's a wonderful irony that he may owe his survival in office to genuine populism expressed in the revolt of ordinary, popular opinion against the hypocrisy and cruelty of the justice system and the posturings and hypocritical moralizings of the elites. How long can one watch a million- dollar- a- year network anchor with a divorce or two under his belt or a Henry Hyde with (at age 41) his "youthful indiscretion" grandstanding about moral credentials? Not long.