Jones Suit Reaches High Court Clinton Argues For Immunity From Allegation Of Lewd Advances

The Supreme Court will hear arguments Monday in a case fraught with political peril and potential personal humiliation for President Clinton - the sexual-harassment suit filed in 1994 by Paula Corbin Jones, a former state government employee in Arkansas.

It is a situation unprecedented in American legal history. No one has ever before filed a civil suit against a sitting president involving his private behavior. This one could force Clinton to answer questions about his sexual conduct, either in open court or in a written deposition, or it could give rise to a new form of legal protection for presidents while in office.

The court is to consider not the question of whether then-Gov. Clinton asked Jones on May 8, 1991 to perform a sex act, as she alleges. It is to weigh a broader legal question: Can a sitting president, any sitting president, be brought to trial while in office, or must the resolution of any civil suit related to private behavior await his term’s end in this case, presumably, 2001.

Jones’ name may not even be uttered by the lawyers Monday. The proceedings are sure to be formal and dust-dry. But of all Clinton’s manifold legal troubles, none has a greater potential than the Jones case to complicate, even to discredit, his second term, which begins Jan. 20.

Clinton’s reputation as a womanizer is already an important element in the relatively poor showing he makes in the polls on “the character issue.”

But the Jones case has the potential to amplify whispers of scandal into shouts. In a media age, that would damage Clinton and the presidency.

The whole issue is suffused with politics. On the advice of Cliff Jackson, a Little Rock political operative with a long history of hostility to the president, Jones first aired her charges in February 1994 at a Washington news conference sponsored by the Conservative Political Action Conference.

Clinton’s backers have worked feverishly to discredit Jones and her lawsuit. James Carville, the president’s former campaign consultant, told a reporter, “Drag a hundred dollars through a trailer park and there’s no telling what you’ll find.”

Whatever the merits of Jones’ case - and an article in The American Lawyer and a cover story in Newsweek have argued that her charges deserve to be taken seriously - the legal history of the case to date suggests that the Supreme Court could allow the case to go forward before 2001. Even if it does not allow the trial to take place while Clinton remains in the White House, it could allow pretrial examination now, with the trial postponed.

A federal judge in Arkansas ruled in December 1994 that a trial, in which Jones seeks $700,000 in damages for alleged violations of her civil rights, should be delayed until Clinton leaves office, but said pretrial testimony could begin sooner. Clinton appealed, and in January 1996, an appeals panel gave a ruling even more unfavorable to Clinton, saying the case could go to trial.

In a 1982 whistle-blowing case, Nixon vs. Fitzgerald, the Supreme Court ruled that no sitting president could ever be sued for official acts but said nothing about private acts.

Clinton’s lawyers have argued that permitting any phase of the litigation to take place before he leaves office would not only disrupt his conduct of the presidency but would also open the gates for a flood of frivolous civil suits against himself and his successors.

Attorney General Janet Reno said recently, “The Justice Department’s position is not that there be immunity, but considering the tremendous burdens on the presidency, the matter should be delayed until after the service as president.”

Susan Estrich, a professor at the University of Southern California Law School who managed 1988 presidential campaign of Michael Dukakis, said in a debate in the on-line magazine Slate, “This is just one more political assault on the president, politically motivated and politically pursued.”

Estrich said she doubted that Jones really had a case under the civil rights statutes, because by her own account Jones rejected Clinton’s overtures and he backed off. But putting that aside, she argued as follows on the question that will go before the court this week:

“A rule that says that if you want to sue the president, do it before he gets elected or wait till his term is done, is one that encourages valid claims to be brought before the election, when they can be considered by the electorate, not afterward.”