Trump’s Alleged Perjury to Mueller Is Way Worse Than That Which Got Bill Clinton Impeached

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Of all the overt and impossible to even parody examples of hypocrisy that elected Republicans have humiliated themselves with in their never-ending effort to clean up the messes of their king, one stands out above all of the others. That is how the Republican Party of 1998 reacted to President Bill Clinton lying under oath, in comparison to how the 2019 Party, made of many of the very same people, has responded to President Donald Trump effectively doing the very same thing — under way worse circumstances.

To review, Bill Clinton was properly impeached (with a handful of Democratic votes) for perjury and obstruction of justice. The perjury charge dealt with his grand jury testimony in the Monica Lewinsky matter, after he had already, far more clearly, lied under oath about Lewinsky in a civil deposition in the Paula Jones lawsuit against him.

While Clinton’s perjury in the civil deposition was much more obvious than his lying in the federal grand jury investigation, the House of Representatives only voted in favor the latter article of impeachment. The thinking, at least for some, was that a civil deposition was simply not an important enough venue to justify the impeachment of the president of the United States.

So, essentially, one of the two counts for which Clinton was impeached, a movement literally led by now Trump super-sycophant Senator Lindsay Graham, was for the president lying under oath about how he had previously lied under a seemingly less serious oath. Oh, and the subject matter was all related to him having had a highly inappropriate, but probably not impeachable (at least prior to #MeToo), affair with a White House intern.

As one of what seems like only a few dozen people who strongly supported the impeachment of both Clinton and Trump, I am the first to admit that, as far as perjury goes, what Clinton got impeached for (and then acquitted in the Senate on a mostly party-line vote) was pretty small potatoes. Back in the previous millennium, however, some of us still honestly believed that it was totally unacceptable for a president to lie under any oath, and that the person who holds that once-esteemed office should be held to the very highest standards, not the lowest.

It is in this context that it has been particularly frustrating and baffling to see Trump somehow completely sidestep the issue of perjury not only among fraudulent Republicans, but even by Democrats and members of the usually very liberal mainstream media. Inexplicably, only yesterday was it finally announced that House Democrats are investigating Trump for having lied in his written responses to Robert Mueller in the Russia investigation.

In my view, what Trump has gotten away with regarding his handling of that subject is far more pernicious, and worthy of impeachment, than anything that Bill Clinton did in this realm. In fact, it is not even close.

Trump originally promised, “100%,” that would give Mueller in an in-person interview. That was a lie.

Then, after strategically delaying for many months, playing Mueller like the naïf he turned out to be, and having his lawyers negotiate the scope of the questioning to a pathetically narrow series of subjects, Trump finally provided heavily screened written answers to Mueller. Mueller, who, it turns out gave Trump every possible benefit of the doubt during what was the exact opposite of a “witch hunt,” declared them to be “inadequate,” which effectively means that Trump lied then as well.

First off, lying in written answers, vetted via his lawyers with unlimited time to do his homework for him, is inherently more offensive than making a false statement which could have been, at least theoretically, partially the result of speaking live. This is why a school teacher naturally grades a take-home test more harshly than one which is administered in the classroom with a strict time limit.

Secondly, the subject matter of the president’s alleged lies were of exponentially more consequence with Trump than with Clinton. And, unlike with Clinton, there were at least three key areas in which Trump clearly did not tell the truth when he claimed to Mueller, over 30 times, that he, a man who has often bragged about having a world-class memory, did not recall very memorable events.

• Trump claiming that was not informed of the infamous Trump Tower meeting in June 2016, a meeting which included his son, son-in-law, and campaign chairman, on a day when Trump was apparently in the building, and soon after which he bragged about coming dirt on Hillary Clinton, has always been laughably absurd.
• Trump telling Mueller that he has no recollection or knowledge of how or why his personal lawyer would get the idea to lie to Congress about when the Trump Tower Moscow project had been abandoned. This has been accepted by the media because Mueller bizarrely made a public statement tamping down speculation on the topic. However, there is still no other logical explanation for how Cohen knew to specifically lie that those attempts ended in January, unless of course he had been, just as he testified, effectively directed to do that by Trump.
• Trump saying in his written answers that he had no knowledge of, or interaction with, elements of his campaign coordinating with WikiLeaks has always been, given basic logic and his public statements (“Russia if you are listening…”) rather dubious. But now, after the testimony which led to Roger Stone’s convictions for lying about exactly that, the case that Trump lied to Mueller here is almost a slam dunk.

And yet, in classic Trump style, just a couple of days after what should have been a devastating verdict in the Stone case for him, he has the utter audacity to publicly claim that he may testify in his own impeachment hearing. This is yet another obvious lie and yet, the news media, like a scene from the Bill Murray classic Groundhog Day, seems to have a worse memory than Trump’s, and are falling for this same charade all over again.

It has never been more clear that one of the primary reasons Trump will not be removed from office is that he has committed so many obviously impeachable offenses that they are just too numerous for his enemies, and the general public, to properly focus on any of them.

John Ziegler is a senior columnist for Mediaite. He hosts a weekly podcast focusing on news media issues and is documentary filmmaker. You can follow him on Twitter at @ZigManFreud  or email him at johnz@mediaite.com

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.