The Relationship

2. Lord Byron's Account
Brought to You Personally by Kenneth Starr
In her Starr Chamber testimony, the Prime Minister relied heavily on a particular interpretation of "sexual relations" as defined in the Jones deposition. Beyond insisting that her conduct did not fall within the Jones definition, she refused to answer prurient questions about specific details of her physical contact with Lord Byron, thus placing the Starr Chamber in the position of either accepting her conclusion or finding a way to argue the necessity of continuing to ask sexually explicit questions of others.
By accusing the PM of designing this strategy to force the Inquisitors into asking more sexual questions of others and to interpret the PMs motives as designed to let her account for possible traces of the Prime Minister's fluid/s on Lord Byron's clothing without undermining her position that she did not lie in the Jones deposition, the Inquisitors found a way to blame the sexually explicit nature of their investigator on the PM. She made them do it.
The Inquisitors now assert that in light of the Prime Minister's testimony, Lord Byron's accounts of his sexual exploits are essential to their investigation for two reasons. First, the detail and consistency of these accounts tend to bolster Lord Byron's credibility as a writer who can quote and requote himself after one initial draft. Second, and particularly important, Lord Byron contradicts the Prime Minister on a key issue. According to Lord Byron, the Prime Minister touched his breasts and genitalia -- which means that her conduct met the Jones definition of sexual relations even under her theory. On these matters, the evidence of the Prime Minister's perjury cannot be presented without specific, explicit, and possibly offensive tales that LB tells about his sexual exploits!

Warning: If you are under 18, skip the next few paragraphs....

Lord Byron tells a tale of ten sexual exploits, eight while he worked at the 10 Downing Street and two thereafter.(35) The setting for these tales is usually in or near the private study off the 10 Downing Street Chambers -- most often in the windowless hallway outside the study or in the romanitcally appointed bathroom.(36) The PM is often depicted as leaning against the doorway of the bathroom across from the study, which, she told Lord Byron, eased her sore back.
Lord Byron complained that his physical relationship with the Prime Minister included oral sex but not sexual intercourse.(38) According to Lord Byron, he performed oral sex on the Prime Minister; she never performed oral sex on him. Initially, according to Lord Byron, the Prime Minister would not let him perform oral sex to completion. In Lord Byron's understanding, her refusal was related to "trust and not knowing me well enough." His tale ends with two last encounters, set in 1997, when he finally was able to sexually satisfy the PM.
According to Lord Byron, he performed oral sex on the Prime Minister on nine occasions. In Byron's tales, on all nine of those occasions, the Prime Minister fondled and kissed his bare breasts. Adding some spice, he added that the PM touched his genitals, both through his underwear and directly, allowing him to orgasm on two occasions. Lord Byron claims the PM once inserted a cigar into him. On another occasion, Lord Byron claims he was able to physically initiate and engineer brief genital-to-genital contact by forcing the PM's genitals to touch his own.
Whereas the Prime Minister testified that "what began as a friendship came to include [intimate contact]," Lord Byron explained that he had to pursue the PM sexually before he could get any other kind of attention from her, i.e. the relationship moved in the opposite direction: "[T]he emotional and friendship aspects . . . developed after the sex."

Monday, February 23, 1998 Published at 17:34 GMT
Has the Grand Jury become a Starr Chamber?
Letter from America, Alistaire Cooke. There are two and only two topics that absorb our days - and some of our nights.
It seemed a few days ago we were close to an American-sponsored attack,
an aerial attack on Iraq and something close to a confession from Mr. Clinton
about the nature of his odd relationship
with a young White House woman intern (one, by the way, of two hundred and fifty
lowly White House aides.)
That was less than a week ago. Today - although as I speak both the United States
Air Force and Monica Lewinsky
might well have blown their stack overnight - as I speak, we seem neither
quite on the verge of war in the
Middle East nor of a confession from the White House.
Since I last talked about the White House personal scandal,
I've tracked through the daily steps taken to protect one or other
witness or potential witness in the Clinton/Lewinsky matter -
and I find that over fifty lawyers are involved doing what
American lawyers are meant to do: either belligerently protecting
somebody from prosecution or blocking the threatening legal moves
of other lawyers, or defying the opposition counsel, or examining
the law as it now stands and wondering how to bend it.
And now, we have lawyers both inside and outside the game
threatening to prosecute the independent prosecutor, Mr. Kenneth Starr,
for his rough tactics in collecting evidence - such as wiring people
so as to record their conversation with unwitting second persons.
(The original taping of Monica Lewinsky without her knowledge was
done in Maryland, where such a tactic is illegal.) Nobody seems
to have bothered much about that, since the ensuing tapes were
so hot as to attract the attention of Mr. Starr - the Special Counsel or Prosecutor.
I might as well repeat now, that this institution of a
Special Prosecutor is only a quarter of a century old -
one was appointed, with great resistance from President Nixon,
to look into the murky business of Watergate -
the midnight raid on Democratic headquarters inspired by Nixon,
covered up by him - whose actual involvement from the beginning
took over two years to expose and had him resign in disgrace
to avoid trial for impeachment and certain conviction.
Well, after Nixon's going, Congress passed an Act setting up
the institution of a Special Counsel in cases where
there might be a suspicion of crime in the executive,
that is, the Presidential branch of government.
The idea was admirable in the beginning, based on the sensible old Roman question -
who shall police the policemen? In serious matters -
like Watergate - better not have the President's resident Prosecutor, the Attorney General.
So we got used to the idea of a Special Counsel or Prosecutor.
He was called upon when that land deal the Clintons were involved in,
in their Arkansas days, turned fishy - and I believe that investigation
is still not closed. Anyway, two people at least have gone to jail over it.
Then there was the even fishier story of the missing FBI files
which turned up in the White House. Somebody better look into that.
And then, the Attorney General denied a Prosecutor over a scandal
that called for a Senate investigation - the contribution of millions
of dollars, many from Asia, to President Clinton's re-election campaign.
Much of that has been proved and subpoenas have gone flying -
some suspects have got lost, either here or abroad - and
Mr. Clinton and Vice President Gore have used a flock of lawyers
to maintain that none of these millions were solicited expressly for Mr. Clinton,
even if that's where they wound up.
However, win one, lose one. Since the Special Prosecutor
can poke his nose into any corner of the Presidency -
the White House, the Cabinet, federal judges, embassies,
I assume - anywhere that gives off a suspicious smell -
Mr. Starr has been free to move into the Paula Jones case.
She's the young lady who accused the President of a gross sexual approach in a hotel room in Little Rock when he was Governor.
Mr. Starr's association with Ms. Lewinsky is very slender indeed -
he heard about, and heard her secret taping and what it was alleged
to contain and thought she might be a useful character witness in the
Paula Jones case. So he subpoenaed her to appear before the grand jury
that's sitting on the Jones case.
I take a deep breath at this point - a breath of disbelief in a sentence
I've just read in a Washington dispatch from an English correspondent
saying that most Americans probably don't know what a Special Prosecutor
is or even a grand jury. Well, Americans have now had twenty-five years
daily experience of the sleuthing of Special Prosecutors
(six in Reagan's time, four already in Clinton's) and there can hardly be an American over eighteen who has not been called or sat on a grand jury.
On the other hand, I doubt any of my listeners in Britain has ever sat
on a grand jury. (I don't know about the Commonwealth.)
Which immediately urges me to sketch out the fascinating
history of the grand jury, of the brilliant, arrogant English lawyer
who alone mounted a devastating attack on it and got it abandoned eighty-four years ago
and abolished in Britain forever.
But that can wait. Best till the Paula Jones' grand jury has decided,
which is all grand juries have to do, whether there is a case.
From the massive, suffocating coverage that Ms. Lewinsky and her allegation has been given,
you'd think we were coming to the end of a trial. We have, in law,
not yet decided whether it's worth a trial. But the feeling -
that we're deep inside an unprecedented Presidential ordeal -
is due to two overlapping habits that have overwhelmed the press and
the other media in the past twenty-five years or so.
One is the decision of serious newspapers to fall into
the tabloid habit of printing and blowing up sexual allegations about public men.
And, in this country, the entirely new habit of leaking testimony given in a grand jury room. This is a criminal act - for a grand jury hearing is secret: the public prosecutor presents his case, the defendant, the accused is not even allowed a lawyer; (he may sit outside for consultation.)
How much more, then, is the grand jury Mr. Starr's special creature?
Mr. Starr may wander far and wide, peering into every cranny,
picking up anybody's tapes if they could serve his purpose and he can -
and has - put on the witness stand at the grand jury hearing
anybody he thinks could be a useful peripheral witness -
Ms. Lewinsky's mother, for instance. Who, from merely the
visible facial evidence of a drained woman coming out of the jury room -
the Lewinsky mother had a brutal two days or more under Mr. Starr's attentions.
The unrelieved harshness of these tactics has given Mr. Starr
the nickname of Inspector Javert the police inquisitor
who went so mercilessly after Jean Valjean.
His qualifications as a neutral, disinterested judge are
being questioned far and wide. He's an ardent Republican,
associated with the Right, and if there's one aim of his legal pursuit
that becomes more glaringly clear every day,
it is his determination to bring President Clinton down.
This has recruited a whole new band of Clinton sympathisers.
When the President was faced last weekend with the suggestion -
with the pleas of some of his friends that he come forward and tell us all -
to say what exactly was the nature of his attachment
to a very, very minor young woman aide he gave presents to,
he wrote to, he got his closest friend to procure a job for
when things went wrong in the White House and again at the Pentagon -
and who, once she was gone, was given access to the White House thirty-seven times.
The President's response to this plea has been to mobilise many of his old advisors,
Cabinet office and cronies - from Arkansas, from his first administration -
and barricade himself behind batteries of lawyers.
So it looks now as if the defence of the realm, the Clinton realm,
is deep in a last-ditch resistance to the special animus of
the Special Prosecutor. And knowledgeable people who were saying a month ago
that the President might go within the week are now predicting a long, hot summer.
And at the quickest, the passing of testimony and a report from Mr. Starr
(he can't prosecute) to the House Judiciary Committee,
which then would have to go all over everything and decide -
it then sitting as a grand jury - whether there is a case to be made for drafting
articles of impeachment - is there evidence of
high crimes and misdemeanours as the Constitution defines them? So that such articles
might then be passed on to the Senate, which then sits as a trial court, with the
President in the dock.
Just now, it looks like a long, long trail a-winding into the land
of our dreams and our fears. And how about Iraq? The administration took the brave step
last Tuesday of holding a sort of New England town meeting come one, come all in the
middle of the country in Ohio. Six hundred ordinary citizens gathered and posed questions
about the plans for Iraq. Secretary Albright and Defence Secretary Cohen got much more
than they bargained for. Sharp questions, shrewd questions, full of misgivings about what
aerial bombing would or could do a small riot outside; inside, a fractious booing mob that
wants peace at any price.
It was a bad omen, and in the following days turned out to be a
blurred reflection of a country not at all united on a policy toward Saddam, as it was
united and with the blessing of the United Nations and most of the Arab world on the
mission to get Saddam out of Kuwait. The fact is, or was, as United Nations Secretary
General Annan went to Baghdad the administration was beginning to fear it might have more
to lose at home as well as in the Arab world if it maintained its purpose of mounting war,
however limited, in Iraq.

After Our Starr Inquisitor presented the case for the prosecution to The Parliament,
he then did an interview that was televised on "20/20."
Please note, this is NOT the talk-show circuit.
In his stellar performance,
The Inquisitor rejected charges that this case against the Prime Minister is about sex.
[See Above]
Our Starr Inquisitor likened himself to a
modern-day Puritan in his
investigation.

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