The Day the Impeachment Case Came to Congress
On November 19, 1998, independent counsel Ken Starr testified before the House Judiciary Committee, bringing the impeachment case against Bill Clinton to Congress in a dramatic public hearing.
The case arrived at Congress in a box. On September 9, 1998, independent counsel Kenneth Starr delivered a 445-page referral to the House of Representatives, the product of a four-year investigation, urging lawmakers to consider impeaching the president. A month later, the House voted to authorize its Judiciary Committee to investigate whether sufficient grounds existed for the impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton. On November 19, 1998, that inquiry opened in public — with Starr himself as the star witness.
Before the committee and the television cameras, Starr presented his case against the president, declaring that Clinton had repeatedly chosen "deception" and engaged in an "unlawful effort to thwart the judicial process." Democrats on the committee spent the day pressing Starr on his investigative methods, turning the hearing into a duel between the prosecutor's conclusions and the White House's defenders. White House counsel Charles Ruff appeared that same day to cross-examine the independent counsel on the president's behalf.
The inquiry was unfolding in the lame-duck session of the 105th Congress, weeks after the midterm elections — in which the Republicans had lost seats despite predictions of victory, and House Speaker Newt Gingrich had announced he would resign. Starr was the sole witness to present factual evidence before the committee, and after the public session the members met behind closed doors to approve subpoenas for depositions and documents. It was the first presidential impeachment proceeding the Judiciary Committee had held since the Watergate-era inquiry into Richard Nixon a quarter-century earlier. Ten days before Starr's appearance, a House subcommittee had heard constitutional scholars on the background and history of impeachment; nine days after, Clinton would deliver written answers to 81 questions from the committee.
The pace was brisk by design — fewer than five days of hearings in all, followed by about two and a half days of committee debate. When Clinton submitted his written answers to 81 committee questions on November 28, Republicans called them evasive, incomplete, and legalistic. On December 19, 1998, the full House voted to impeach Clinton, only the second president in American history to be impeached. Early the next year the Senate tried the case and acquitted him, and he served out his term.
Whatever one thinks of the outcome, November 19 was the day the Starr investigation became Congress's case — the moment a prosecutor's report turned into the people's branch weighing whether a president should stand trial.
Photo: Rebecca Roth, public domain via the Library of Congress (via Wikimedia Commons).
