Tag Archives: Bill Clinton

The Presidential Precedent We Need to Be Talking About

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Following the New York grand jury indictment of Donald Trump in March on false business records and campaign finance violations I was not alone detecting a sour wisp of anti-climax. A felony nexus with a misdemeanor does not feel proportionate to dealing justice to a president who has been, inter multi alia, impeached for incitement to insurrection.

But the impeachment is critical to understanding what kind of precedent we are setting with this case and how criminal law applies to the chief executive of the United States. The New York indictment is naming a former president—that is, a private American citizen—for allegations that predate his term in office.  This sidesteps, uneasily, a still-unanswered question in more than 200 years of American jurisprudence: whether the President of the United States can face criminal charges for actions taken while in office.

The Trump indictment is unique: no person who has held the executive office has faced criminal prosecution.  That is true. But there is an extensive legal history behind this unresolved question that explains in part why the New York case may be the best one to bring against Trump—and why other cases, such as the Georgia election tampering investigation, pose extremely problematic questions we may not want to resolve.

The New York Trump case is not complicated. As a candidate for president, regulated by federal election law, Donald Trump made payments to three separate parties to assure their silence about alleged infidelities he committed.  These payments were then hidden as business expenses rather than campaign contributions.  All of these actions took place before Trump assumed the presidency on Jan. 20, 2017, that is, when he was still a private citizen.

The fact pattern is important because they distinguish the case from other scandals, crimes, and misdemeanors allegedly committed by Trump and past presidents.

The urtext for modern presidential corruption is, of course, Watergate.  The Justice Department Special Prosecutor, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Judiciary Committee of both House and Senate all asserted jurisdiction of one kind or another as the break-in and cover-up were investigated.  The government charged 69 former government officials with crimes involving Watergate resulting in 48 guilty verdicts.  Archibald Cox won a crucial case in the Supreme Court forcing the president to release the infamous tapes recorded inside the Oval Office.

But, importantly, the Watergate grand jury named President Richard Nixon an unindicted co-conspirator, recognizing Nixon’s role in the crime without actually charging him.  That left the question about indicting a sitting president unanswered.  Wanting to avoid a lengthy high-profile court fight to settle the issue, Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski (replacing Cox after the Saturday Night Massacre) determined that the only recognized constitutional authority in the case of alleged criminal conduct by the president was the House of Representatives exercising its impeachment powers.  He surrendered his case and its evidence to the House Judiciary Committee which proceeded with an impeachment vote that destroyed Nixon’s political support and forced him to resign.

In the Monica Lewinsky affair, Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr, while investigating allegations of sexual harassment that predated Bill Clinton’s presidency, stumbled across evidence Clinton had allegedly committed subornation of perjury while in the Oval Office. Starr, too, referred the lurid case to the House of Representatives, essentially affirming in practice the Watergate precedent, which resulted in Clinton’s impeachment followed by acquittal in the Senate trial.

The now-established norm of referring criminal investigations of the chief executive to the Congress was extended by Special Counsel Robert Muller to include pre-inauguration actions involving Russian collusion.  Trump’s alleged actions, taken as a presidential candidate and private citizen, implicated a sitting president.  Muller’s referral of the case to the House, which did not result in impeachment, again implicitly leans against indictment of a sitting president—even for alleged crimes committed before taking office.

Muller cited Justice Department guidelines—and they are just that, they are not federal  law or regulation—dictating that a federal prosecutor may not charge a sitting president as his reason for not indicting Donald Trump.  This decision unintentionally widened the scope of presumed immunity for the president: once in office, the chief executive is safe from criminal prosecution for actions committed before taking office.

These cases, which serve as political or historical rather than legal precedent, very deliberately side-step an uncomfortable, and undecided, question in U.S. law: How do we hold legally accountable a president who has committed a crime?  Implicit in this question are two more that we may not want to answer: Can a president be indicted for actions they took while in office? And, is the president immune from criminal indictment while serving in the office?

These are serious questions nobody should be in a rush to answer because the potential answers are at least as unsettling as leaving crimes unprosecuted.  Nonetheless, there is an historical analogue to the New York case that suggests a way for justice to prevail.

That is the case of Spiro Agnew, vice president under Richard Nixon.  In 1972, the U.S. Attorney in Maryland developed a powerful case documenting extensive corruption by Agnew as governor of Maryland—that is, prior to his vice presidency.  Agnew protested his innocence and asserted he could not be prosecuted as a sitting vice president. The only alternative, under those circumstances, was to refer the case to the House of Representatives for impeachment proceedings.  At this time, Watergate was in full saprophytic bloom and the White House did not want to give Congress any practice with impeachment.  So the U.S. Attorney struck a deal with Agnew: he would resign, appear in court as a private citizen, and plead nolo contendere to a single felony charge. He paid a fine of $10,000 and was placed on three years’ probation.

In other words, a criminal case was successfully brought against a former vice president for actions taken before he assumed federal office. That is very much what we are contemplating now with Trump in New York.

This has several implications. First is what it says about the other investigations around Trump, particularly the Georgia election tampering case that allegedly occurred while Trump was President. Prosecuting a former president for actions taken while president opens up a potentially huge space for litigation of all kinds which may be in the best interest of the country to avoid.  This was an essential element of the Watergate Special Prosecutor’s reasoned decision not to indict Nixon while he served.

The second House impeachment affirms this practice because it included Trump’s alleged Georgia election tampering in the charging document.  The Georgia state case would find it difficult to avoid an unwanted court fight over the question of whether impeachment or prosecution is the most Constitutional remedy for criminal actions taken by the president while in office.

So the New York case sidesteps an unsettled question of American law that we may not want to answer, now or ever. If Trump is tried and convicted in New York it will significantly shrink the space of immunity surrounding the President of the United States, serving and former, while preserving freedom of action by the chief executive and Congressional impeachment powers.  As we approach our republic’s semiquincentennial, that may be the best outcome we could reasonably expect from this most unprecedented of presidents.  It may not be completely satisfying.  But it will be an important demarcation containing abusive or illegal executive power, testament that in the United States no individual is above the law and the Constitution.

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The Physicality of Politics

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President Barack Obama, on the stump in Maumee, Ohio, July 5. (AP via KATU)

Watching President Obama sweating out on campaign stops across Ohio last week, where temperatures hit the 90s, is a welcome reminder that politics is above all a physical endurance contest. It’s a hot early summer, we haven’t had the party nominating conventions and we haven’t hit Labor Day yet, the traditional beginning of the general campaign season.  But off they go to the hustings.

Politics is often called a “contact sport,” usually as a strained, overused metaphor for the battering politicians’ reputations take. Most commentators who use that old cliche have no idea ofthe sheer physicality of the campaign trail. It is not for nothing that John F. Kennedy holds the world record for handshakes.  “The handshake is the threshold act, the beginning of politics,” writes Anonymous (Joe Klein) in Primary Colors, the roman a clef of the 1992 presidential campaign. And no matter the concern about the “air war” and campaign organization, television advertisements and the Internet’s impact on fundraising, SuperPACS and voter turnout, candidates still need to get out into the country and meet the voters. The primary contests — this was most dramatically demonstrated during the 2008 race — particularly demand it.  In the early primary states especially, such as New Hampshire and Iowa, voters expect to meet all the candidates before casting their ballot.  This is democracy writ small and in the largest sense of the word.

Mitt Romney and his wife, Ann, enjoy an ice cream to cool off during a break from the campaign trail. (AP via ABC News)

But it places incredible physical, intellectual and psychic demands on the candidates.  Bill Clinton famously gained weight during his 1992 race and completely lost his voice in his dash to the finish.  I remember meeting him with a friend on the campaign trail during the summer of 1992.  At one o’clock in the morning at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee, he still stopped to meet every single person in the lobby. Obama, it is perhaps less well-known, lost weight on his spare physique in 2008.  Clinton’s propensity to eat on the campaign trail, and Obama’s commensurate ability to burn calories reminded me of a Senate colleague who, while running for the State Senate in Maryland, lost 40 pounds: politics plays havoc with the human frame.  Obama’s voice in Ohio already sounds raspy.  Even on vacation, you could see Romney’s magnificent coiffeur begin to wilt.  Just wait until he hits North Carolina in August.

The primary and general election campaign you see on television (whether you follow it intently or whether it forces itself on your consciousness occasionally) is mirrored all across the country in towns and cities and villages and counties, in congressional and state legislative districts, in cantons and parishes and townships, as thousands of people stand for office for mayor, city council, school board, county supervisor, state assembly, and dogcatcher. This is the real stuff of republicanism, far from the attention of national media and big money, and it is as physical and grueling and demanding as any national race for the candidates and families involved. For months, they will be running, their own names in contention against others, out in public, meeting people, asking for votes.

This can be great fun.  Local political campaigns are rooted in community, and running for office means working and knowing where you live better than probably any other time in your life.  My mother ran three times for local school board in my hometown in California (she won by expanding margins each time); the year before her first race she ran the campaign for a local referendum. Each race was different, of course, but at the local level they were always the same.  We gathered the same group of friends for the same activities: silk-screening campaign posters, folding and staple-gunning them to stakes which we then drove around the city to  pound with great mallets into willing families’ front yards to advertise the candidate.  We stuffed and licked envelopes for direct mail appeals (no computers necessary, my mother hand-addressed each one).  Sometimes I accompanied my mother to the print shop where she would submit, approve, and pick up her mailers.

Using a huge blueprint map of the city tacked up on our dining room wall, we “walked precincts,” literally and physically meeting people at their homes in neighborhoods all across the city, highlighting each block that we finished.  I watched my mother practice speeches in her bedroom mirror before going out to meet civic groups to win their endorsement and member support.  She attended public events (Fourth of July, Memorial Day, Labor Day), meeting people day after day.  My grandfather, a famously successful cookie salesman, donned a campaign hat and went door to door meeting people to ask them to vote for my mother.

All of this is to say, to reach voters, candidates have to be out and meeting people constantly.  My mother did advertise in the local newspaper, but just to raise the money to buy an advertisement she needed to meet and win over people and that meant getting out to where people are. That activity is tremendously physical and requires a hearty, friendly, outgoing, and generous constitution.

There is very little mention or literature about this aspect of politics.  The physical nature of it, the rootedness in family and community, the sheer fun.  Practically our entire family helped my mother, and an entire legion of my mother’s friends helped her too.  Often journalists on the campaign bus or plane will complain about the unrelenting pace of the trail, but they are only capturing a small aspect of the experience (they have deadlines; in politics the only deadline is election day and for the winner usually even that day restarts the clock).  I admired Primary Colors for its intimate look at the often-ignored aspects of small-time political organizations in the back-of-the-beyond before people are really paying attention, and the latter “West Wing” episodes captured some of this is-anybody-paying-attention feel to the race for the White House in chilly Iowa and New Hampshire.

Because politics is a contact sport. Americans have the right to meet their representatives, to look them in the eye, size them up, ask them questions, hear what they answer.  That’s a fundamental aspect of our representative democracy, and quite unlike many parliamentary systems, where there is very often no direct connection between that meeting and their vote. In America, you get to meet the man and woman in the arena. In fact, we insist on it.

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