Clinton Goes Off In Interview
In a primetime interview on Thursday with ABC News' Peter Jennings, former President Bill Clinton shares his thoughts on his impeachment and the investigation into his dealings.
The exchange came in an interview with ABC news anchor Peter Jennings that aired Thursday night, hours after Clinton opened his $165 million presidential library. Clinton blasted Starr and spoke disdainfully of a national media that he suggested was complicit in a scheme to ruin his presidency.
"No other president ever had to endure someone like Ken Starr," Clinton said. "No one ever had to try to save people from ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, and people in Haiti from a military dictator that was murdering them, and all the other problems I dealt with, while every day an entire apparatus was devoted to destroying him."
The former president said he would go to his grave at peace that, while he had personal failings, he never lied to the American people about his job as president.
Clinton added that he doesn't care about what his detractors think about him. Jennings then said it seemed to him that Clinton did care.
The former president responded, "You don't want to go here, Peter. You don't want to go here. Not after what you people did and the way you, your network, what you did with Kenneth Starr. The way your people repeated every, little sleazy thing he leaked. No one has any idea what that's like."
"You never had to live in a time when people you knew and cared about were being indicted, carted off to jail, bankrupted, ruined, because they were Democrats and because they would not lie," he said. "So, I think we showed a lot of moral fiber to stand up to that. To stand up to these constant investigations, to this constant bodyguard of lies, this avalanche that was thrown at all of us. And, yes, I failed once. And I sure paid for it. And I'm sorry. I'm sorry for the American people. And I'm sorry for the embarrassment they performed."
Still unable to grasp that all of this was his and his spouse's doings, Slick Willy doesn't get it. He lied to prosecutors and worse, he lied to the American people ("I did not have sexual relations with that woman"). He defaced the office of the President of the United States – period.
At least 14 persons were convicted in the Whitewater investigation for fraud or conspiracy involving bogus loans through public institutions, mail fraud and income-tax evasion, among others. Mr. Clinton himself agreed to a five-year suspension of his Arkansas law license as a means to end the Lewinsky inquiry and head off an Arkansas court move to punish him for misleading answers in a deposition taken during the Paula Jones sexual-harassment suit.