President Bill Clinton's Impeachment
The 42nd President of the United Sates, William Jefferson Clinton, is considered the most investigated President in U.S. history. The first scandal, Travelgate, involved the White House travel office and the firing of seven employees who were replaced by Clinton's Arkansas friends in 1993, and was followed a few months later by the Whitewater controversy (Presidential). In 1994, around the same time that Paula C. Jones publicly alleged that Clinton, while Governor of Arkansas, had sexual harassed her, Clinton began an eighteen-month affair with Monica Lewinsky, a 22 year-old White House intern (Presidential). Lewinsky's name was first included on a list of potential witnesses prepared by Jones' attorneys that was submitted to Clinton's legal team (Clinton).In 1996, Lewinsky was transferred to a position at the Pentagon, where she became friends with Linda Tripp, also transferred from the White House, who began to secretly tape-record Lewinsky's telephone conversations in which she confided to Tripp her affair with the President (Presidential). Tripp provided more than twenty hours of tape recordings to Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr, who received permission from the U.S. Justice Department to expand his Whitewater investi
There, her conversation with Tripp was secretly recorded pursuant to a court order. Article I charged that the President "willfully provided perjurious, false and misleading testimony to the grand jury" and made ". Starr's investigation had now expanded to include whether President Clinton had lied under oath in his own deposition taken in the Jones' litigation (Clinton). gation to include Clinton's close friend Vernon Jordan, believing he had encouraged Lewinsky to deny her affair with Clinton during a sworn affidavit (Presidential). Then in August, Clinton testified before Starr's grand jury and admitted that he did have a sexual relationship with Lewinsky, but denied perjuring himself in the Jones' deposition, claiming that he did not interpret the conduct as constituting sexual relations, since it did not include sexual intercourse. On September 9, in a report to Congress, Starr claimed that there was "substantial and credible information that President William Jefferson Clinton committed acts that may constitute grounds for an impeachment" (Clinton). On Article I, Clinton was found not guilty with 45 Senators voting for his removal from office, and 55 against (Clinton). In July 1998, Lewinsky received immunity from prosecution and testified that she did indeed have sexual relationship with Clinton but denied that he or anyone else had encouraged her to lie (Clinton). Since the necessary two-thirds majority was not achieved, President Clinton was acquitted on both charges and served the remainder of his office term through January 20, 2001 (Presidential). President Andrew Johnson, who was impeached by the House in 1868 and later acquitted, had become president following Lincoln's assassination, thus he had not been an elected President (Presidential). The following day, Clinton denied having sexual relations with Lewinsky, and by January 21, the media was reporting that Starr's investigation had expanded to include the Lewinsky allegations (Clinton). This was only the second impeachment trail in the history of the United States, however it was the first time an elected President was faced with possible removal from office (Presidential). President Clinton publicly apologized for the events that had imposed such a burden on the Congress and on the American people. On January 26, the President appeared before the White House press corps and again denied any sexual relations with Lewinsky and also denied urging her to lie.
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