President Clinton and Independent Counsel Robert Ray agreed Friday to settle the seven-year Whitewater probe. The president admitted that he gave misleading testimony in the 1998 Paula Jones case about his affair with Monica Lewinsky, accepted a five-year suspension of his Arkansas law license, and promised to cover $25,000 in legal fees related to disbarment proceedings against him in Arkansas. In exchange, Ray agreed not to indict Clinton on perjury charges. What kind of agreement is this?
It's not your everyday legal agreement. It's not a declination, in which a prosecutor drops a criminal investigation because the case isn't solid enough to indict. Nor is it a plea bargain, in which a prosecutor accepts a guilty plea from the indicted in exchange for a lenient sentence (because, of course Clinton was never indicted). Nor is it a referral of a criminal case to civil authorities for resolution (such as when a criminal antitrust case is referred to civil prosecutors). The most unusual aspect of the deal is that Clinton reached a civil resolution with a criminal prosecutor.
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Independent counsel Robert Ray's non-plea plea bargain with President Clinton may be a salutary contribution to decriminalizing our politics. Never mind that it was completely unconstitutional.
The substance of the plea bargain, in broad outline, seems fair enough. Ray agreed to decline prosecution "with prejudice" in effect forever immunizing Clinton from any Lewinsky-related federal criminal liability. In exchange, Clinton agreed to give up his Arkansas law license for five years and to pay yet another fine, and finally admitted that he "knowingly violated" judicial orders with deposition answers that were "evasive" and "misleading" and attimes downright "false." Better still would have been a forthright admission in person, and not just on paper that "I lied." Clinton's lies were brazen, yet his confession was not equally blunt. He lied with his own lips, and it would have been better for him to confess in the same way, righting his earlier wrong in the most symmetrical way. Instead, Clinton's legalistic "confession" was read aloud by a press secretary. I confess he did it. Mistakes were made.
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Thanks, I forgot about that.