"Starr.Remarks" - читать интересную книгу автора (impeachment)

testimony of the sworn law enforcement officers of the Secret Service.

In asserting executive privilege, the president was plowing headlong
into the Supreme Court's unanimous decision 24 years ago in United
States v. Nixon. There, the Supreme Court ruled that executive
privilege was overcome by the need for relevant evidence in criminal
proceedings. And thus, it came as no surprise that Chief Judge Norma
Holloway Johnson rejected President Clinton's effort to use executive
privilege to prevent disclosure of relevant evidence.

In asserting protective function and government attorney-client
privileges, the administration was asking the federal courts to make
up one new privilege out of whole cloth and to apply another privilege
in a context in which no federal court had ever applied it before. And
thus it again came as little surprise that the federal courts rejected
the administration's claims. Indeed, as to the government
attorney-client claim, the D.C. Circuit and the District Court, like
the Eighth Circuit a year ago, stated that the president's position
not only was wrong but would authorize a "gross misuse of public
assets." The Supreme Court refused to grant review of the cases
notwithstanding the administration's two strongly worded petitions.

This point bears emphasis: The administration justified its many
privilege claims by claiming an interest in protecting the presidency,
not the president personally. But that justification is dubious for
two reasons. First, Presidents Carter and Reagan waived all government
privileges at the outset of criminal investigations in which they were
involved. The examples set by those two presidents demonstrate that
such privilege claims in criminal investigations are manifestly
unnecessary to protect the presidency. Second, these novel privilege
claims were quite weak as a matter of law.

And that raises a question: What was it about the Monica Lewinsky
matter that generated the administration's particularly aggressive
approach to privileges? The circumstantial evidence suggests an
answer: delay. Indeed, when this office sought to have the Supreme
Court decide all three privilege claims at once this past June, the
Administration opposed expedited consideration.

Not only did the administration invoke these three losing privileges,
but the president publicly suggested that he had not invoked executive
privilege when in fact he had. On March 24, 1998, while traveling in
Africa, the president was asked about executive privilege. He stated
in response: "You should ask someone who knows. I haven't discussed
that with the lawyers. I don't know." But White House Counsel Charles
Ruff had filed an affidavit in federal court only seven days earlier
in which he swore that he had discussed the assertion of executive
privilege with the president and the president had approved its
invocation.