Tuesday, December 01, 1998

If I read the London Times correctly, the House Judiciary Committee heard testimony today from someone convicted of perjury for lying about going to a lesbian bar. Now we're really getting somewhere!

Part of the Wye accord was to be a prisoner release, but it seems that Israel, supposed to release 750 Palestinian, um, freedom fighters, is actually counting towards that number car thieves and violators of the pass laws.

New book: The Complete Idiot's Guide to Impeaching the President.

The news that scientists insist that breast implants cause no illness whatsoever is greeted by the rep of the women plaintiffs as "terrible news". That's a lawyer for you!

Followup on my Turner prize articles: the elephant dung artist won.

I have a couple of comments about the Tony Lewis NYT piece:
the real question is why they felt obligated to swoop on Monica then rather than a couple of days later.

Lewis is concentrating on Starr's people "wanting a crime", but we knew that. This is actually less egregious than using Tripp to convince Monica to try to blackmail the president into getting her a job and obstructing justice. I think the key item in this piece is that any immunity agreement they were dangling in front of her was a fraud in that it wouldn't be valid without the presence of her lawyers. So what they clearly had in mind was wheedling a statement out of her while pretending to give her immunity. This accords with their later conduct when they spent months negotiating with her lawyers over testimony and immunity. If you are just trying to get at the truth, you don't need to negotiate, you just give her immunity and issue a subpoena. The only reason to 1) get a statement without a valid immunity, and then later to 2) negotiate, would be to use the threat of jail to get her to testify the way they wanted her to, true or not. If they were afraid of her lying, she could always be prosecuted for perjury, immunity deal or not. The only reason to try and keep a bigger legal stick in reserve is to get her to lie.

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