Los Angeles Times legal reporter David Savage and his newspaper are playing coy with Bill Clinton’s sexual offenses again. Savage struck a mystified tone when Donald Trump’s lawyers tried the Clinton vs Paula Jones defense to dismiss a lawsuit filed on January 17 where former Apprentice contestant Summer Zervos claimed Trump kissed and touched her inappropriately.
Savage dismissed the legal tactic, since, as we all know, Clinton lost that battle, and later had to settle with Jones for $850,000. But guess what? Savage and the Times didn’t include that telling detail. They cutely played dumb with the voters who were wee tots in the Clinton years by saying Clinton’s “Kiss it” sexual harassment was “alleged.” After all, when the Clintons settle for almost a million dollars, they never admit guilt:
Paula Jones, an Arkansas state employee, had sued Clinton for alleged sexual harassment during an encounter in a Little Rock hotel room when he was the state’s governor. The justices said President Clinton could be forced to answer questions under oath.
But this week, Trump’s lawyers cited the Clinton vs. Jones case in a legal filing in New York and contended that it “immunizes President Trump from being sued in this action while he is in office.”
But Savage wasn’t done. At the end of the article, the A-word emerges again. Bill Clinton was impeached by the House Republicans for “allegedly lying under oath.”
Gloria Allred, the Los Angeles lawyer representing Zervos, issued a statement saying Trump is not shielded from her claim. “The U.S. Supreme Court addressed this legal immunity issue in Clinton vs. Jones and determined unanimously that no man is above the law and that includes the president of the United States.”
The high court’s decision in Clinton’s case gave attorneys for Jones the opportunity to question the president about a White House intern named Monica Lewinsky. Her name was revealed a few days later, and the scandal led to House Republicans voting in favor of impeaching the president for allegedly lying under oath.
Clinton told the Jones legal team -- and later the country -- that he didn't have a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky. This was false. But even as the physical evidence emerged and he admitted on national television that he had "misled" everyone, he and his lawyers claimed it was "legally accurate." That shows you just how elastically Savage stretches to get to "alleged" lying. He's just like the many deconstructionist Democrats who voted to acquit Clinton because of how you define "what is is."
Of course, back then, David Savage didn't use "alleged" when he accused conservatives of "rabid" opposition to Clinton and their alleged "vilification" -- that is, daring to say Clinton was a sexual harasser and adulterer. From our Best of Notable Quotables 1998 edition: "[Richard Mellon] Scaife’s money also has poured into the rabidly anti-Clinton American Spectator magazine. Editor R. Emmett Tyrell [sic] Jr. relentlessly derided the new President in 1993, a vilification campaign that won Scaife’s support."
