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Response:
I think your approach is eminently reasonable and it would
certainly be consistent with the idea that the grand jury was in charge of that
investigation. The problem, of course, is that the grand jury was not--Starr simply used
this grand jury as the vehicle for investigating Clinton's conduct (and that of Lewinsky,
et al.) and for gathering evidence that could be turned over to the House Judiciary
Committee, in hopes of triggering an impeachment inquiry.
As far as I can tell, the
grand jurors played no decision making role in this investigation, aside from, perhaps,
deciding to ask certain questions of some witnesses. But in terms of controlling the
overall process, I do not think they had any input into that, or certainly no decisive
input into that.
It is true that grand juries are supposed to investigate to determine whether someone
should be indicted for committing crimes. It is generally understood to be an abuse of the
grand jury to use it to gather evidence for use in a civil proceeding (which an
impeachment is). The problem, of course, is that one cannot prove Starr was not using the
grand jury to investigate the possibility that various persons committed crimes. If
charged with that, I suspect he'd say:
(1) we were doing that but didn't find enough to indict anyone; or
(2) we were/are doing that and will be indicting some people in the near future. |