The following article by J.M Rieger was posted on the Washington Post website May 4, 2018:
According to Congress, a president can obstruct justice. Just as long as that president is a member of the opposite political party. (JM Rieger/The Washington Post)
On April 27, 1998, House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) laid out what would soon become one of the four articles of impeachment against President Bill Clinton.
“What you have lived through, for two-and-a-half long years, is the most systematic, deliberate obstruction of justice, coverup and effort to avoid the truth, we have ever seen in American history,” he said.
Gingrich joined 220 other House members in voting to impeach Clinton for obstruction of justice eight months later, but as special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into Russian election interference expands into whether President Trump obstructed justice, Gingrich has been singing a different tune.
“Technically, the president of the United States cannot obstruct justice,” Gingrich said in June 2017. “The president of the United States is the chief executive officer of the United States. If he wants to fire the FBI director, all he’s got to do is fire him.”
But even as the Mueller investigation continues, there is considerable debate over whether a president can, in fact, obstruct justice and whether obstruction of justice is even an impeachable offense.
Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) told reporters in November 1998 that presidents who obstruct justice can be indicted in court, “but it is not an impeachable offense.”
Other Democrats struck a similar tone in dismissing the Clinton impeachment proceedings.
Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) called it a “Republican coup d’état,” and Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Republicans were “paralyzed with hatred of President Clinton.”
Now, under Trump, some Democrats have not shied away from talk of impeachment, even as the special counsel’s investigation continues.
“I hope he’s not there for four years,” Waters said Feb. 3, 2017. “My greatest desire is to lead him right into impeachment.”
Two of the 13 Republican “managers” of Clinton’s impeachment trial also have staked out strikingly different positions now that a Republican is in the Oval Office.
Rep. Steve Chabot (R-Ohio) accused Clinton in 1998 of “demonizing” independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr and “anybody who gets in [his] way.” In December 2017, Chabot called Mueller’s team of investigators a “group of Democrat partisans.”
And Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), who told CNN in January that he would not speak ill of Trump because he wants to “keep talking to the president,” told reporters in December 1998 that Clinton committed criminal acts by perjuring himself and obstructing justice.
“If a Republican president had done these things, would a Republican delegation .. tell him to get out of town? I hope so. I would like to think that we would have done that,” Graham said in 1998. “Only time will tell what happens here, but I do believe that the president’s fate is in his own hands.”