Republican takes the stand against impeachment

IN THEIR last-ditch effort to save President Bill Clinton from impeachment, the White House yesterday fielded five former prosecutors to argue that the evidence against Mr Clinton was insufficient to support a conviction for perjury, let alone impeachment.

Among the five was the Clinton camp's trump card: the former Massachusetts governor William Weld, the first senior Republican to testify to the judiciary committee for the President.

Mr Weld's appearance was a crucial element in the White House strategy of trying to sway so-called "moderate" Republicans in the House of Representatives whose votes could determine Mr Clinton's fate.

While the judiciary committee is polarised along party lines and a vote for impeachment is taken for granted here, the division in the full House is more fluid, with up to 40 Republicans regarded as moderates in search of a reason not to vote for impeachment.

Yesterday, Mr Weld -who resigned as governor last year to focus on an ill-fated attempt to become ambassador to Mexico and later returned to his law practice - set out a five-point compromise designed to satisfy calls for the President to be punished without subjecting him to a trial in the Senate.

In order to "preserve the dignity of the country", Mr Weld said, "the most appropriate result is something other than removing this person from his office". But that dignity also required more than a vote of censure. He proposed in addition a written report on Mr Clinton's conduct in the Monica Lewinsky affair, a written admission of wrongdoing by the President, a fine, and a decision to leave open the possibility of prosecution once Mr Clinton leaves office.

Mr Weld's suggested "deal" coincided with statements by two other prominent Republicans, both New Yorkers - the recently defeated senator Alfonse d'Amato and the Representative Amo Houghton - rejecting the impeachment option.

Mr Houghton drew on his industrial experience to argue in The New York Times for a punishment to fit the crime and said he would vote for a "strong rebuke", but not to remove the President from office.

But even as the White House was able to mobilise its first Republicans in the President's defence, the party majority on the House judiciary committee was finalising the draft of three articles of impeachment, the formal charges that would form the basis of a Senate trial. Those articles, which include perjury and abuse of power, are likely to be debated by the committee this week and, if approved, forwarded to a vote in the full House.

There was widespread praise, even from diehard Republicans on the committee, yesterday for the skill with which the White House had defended the President's cause, both in yesterday's discussion of prosecution practice and the previous day's panels on perjury and Watergate.

But the burden of the arguments - that Mr Clinton had come close to perjuring himself but had not actually done so - was dismissed by a majority as irrelevant. If an elected official could commit a crime but not be liable for impeachment, they argued, was the converse not also true, that an offence could be impeachable while not being a crime.

The hardliner Lindsey Graham said that he - as a lawyer - disputed the view that there was insufficient evidence for a perjury conviction. Another complained that Mr Clinton was "playing word games in his deposition [in the sexual harassment case brought by Paula Jones]".