Clinton Impeachment Trials

The trial that I am going to tell you about is very different than most other trials. In a way it is 3 or 4 different trials. First there was the Paula Jones case in which Paula Jones sued President Clinton for sexual harassment, and Clinton ended up paying an out of court settlement of $850,000. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paula_Jones) Then there was the Monica Lewinski scandal with the infamous blue dress. Based on these two scandals The House of Representatives voted to impeach Clinton on 4 articles of impeachment, 2 of them passed. Then there was the Senate trial, where most of the normal trial things the I will be talking about took place. In the end the Senate fall 17 votes short of removing Mr. William Jefferson Clinton from office (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impeachment_of_Bill_Clinton). This was only the second time that a president has ever been impeached, the other president to be impeached was Andrew Johnson and he was only one vote short of being removed from office. Contrary to popular belief Richard Nixon was not impeached because of the Watergate Scandal, but he knew he faced near certain impeachment and most likely would also be removed from office, so he resigned before he was impeached. It is still not certain when he found out about the scandal. Since the only other time a president was impeached was in 1868 (http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/impeach/impeachmt.htm), the Congress was in a very difficult situation because nothing this had ever happened so the had very few guidlines to base everything off of. The Paula Jones Case took place in 1994. Paula Jones was a former Arkansas state employee and she filed a sexual harassment suit against then president Bill Clinton and former Arkansas State Police Officer Danny Ferguson. She said that “on May 8, 1991, Clinton, then Governor of Arkansas, crudely propositioned her” (Propositioned meaning an informal offer to have sex with someone that you are not sexually involved with). Paula