Word: argumentation
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...presidential life-span. (Cut to the Zapruder film, released this month in video stores everywhere.) But in the White House, there were serious doubts all along that any court would uphold a protective privilege. Administration sources tell TIME that last week, even as the White House's argument was bumping painfully and vainly through the courts, Justice Department officials were telling the Treasury Department, which oversees the Secret Service, that chances of prevailing in the matter were virtually nil. But Treasury officials, led by Robert Rubin--who spoke by telephone from Africa, where he was traveling--opted to go ahead...
Justice was right, of course. The privilege argument was rejected by judges over and over last week. On Friday, Chief Justice William Rehnquist dealt it a decisive blow. But for the White House, going to court may have been worth the trouble. Starr's legal vindication could be another of his Pyrrhic victories, a p.r. stumble that compares with his squeezing testimony from Monica Lewinsky's mother. Sworn to sacrifice their life to save the President's, plainclothes agents see themselves as the ultimate shield. By dragging them before his grand jury, Starr risks treating them like human bugging devices...
...Bennett during their January limo ride back from the Paula Jones deposition. But Starr's spokesman, Charles Bakaly, rejected White House assertions that the independent counsel wants to intrude on a lawyer-client moment, using Cockell as the back door. Watching the Administration's doomed attempt to push its argument through the courts was like witnessing a man spending a week falling down a flight of stairs. Starr subpoenaed the agents on Tuesday, just a week after a three-judge federal appeals panel upheld a lower-court ruling that rejected the protective-privilege claim. By early Thursday morning, Cockell...
...agents got a last-minute reprieve when the three-judge panel determined that they would not have to testify until the full appeals court made up its mind whether to hear the White House argument. To no one's surprise--full court hearings are rarely granted--the judges rejected the idea. The gist of their ruling was that Secret Service agents are sworn officers of the law; they are obliged to testify about potential wrongdoing and can do so without endangering the President's security. In a concurring opinion, Judge Laurence Silberman referred to the proposed privilege as "a constitutional...
...less important, at least to me, that this old argument got nowhere on the panel than that the feeling created among the President and the other panelists, largely strangers to one another, was familial. At a time when similar meetings have ended either in donnybrooks or in savage politeness, this was unusual. People always call a debate civil when they mean useless. But there was more than civility on the panel. There was active goodwill. It was clear that we wished one another well. We wished the President well...