President Bill Clinton arrives in the Rose Garden to make a statement after being acquitted in his impeachment trial in the Senate on Feb. 12, 1999. | Greg Gibson/AP Photo Clinton's Senate impeachment trial ends, Feb. 12, 1999

On this day in 1999, the five-week impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton came to an end when the Senate voted to acquit the president on both articles of impeachment that had been placed before that body after having been approved by the House. One of them accused Clinton of lying under oath while and the other charged him with obstructing justice.

The 13 House managers, all Republicans, who presented the case to the Senate needed a two-thirds majority to convict the Democratic president. But they failed to win even a bare majority. Rejecting the first charge of perjury, 45 Democrats and 10 Republicans voted “not guilty.” On the charge of obstruction of justice, the Senate split 50-50.


The Senate trial began on Jan. 7, in keeping with a congressional procedure not used since the 1868 impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson. As called for in Article I of the Constitution, the chief justice, William Rehnquist, presided. All 100 senators were sworn in as jurors.

During a partial government shutdown in November 1995, Clinton had begun an affair with Monica Lewinsky, a 22-year-old White House intern. Over the course of 18 months, the president and Lewinsky had a dozen sexual encounters.

In April 1996, Lewinsky was transferred to the Pentagon. That summer, she told Linda Tripp, a Pentagon co-worker, about her former sexual relationship with the president. In 1997, with the relationship over, Tripp began to secretly record conversations with Lewinsky, in which Lewinsky shared salacious details about the affair.

These events became the genesis of the report that special prosecutor Kenneth Starr presented to the House, along with 18 boxes of supporting documents. The Starr report outlined a case for impeaching Clinton on 11 grounds, including perjury, obstruction of justice, witness-tampering and abuse of power. It also offered explicit details about Clinton’s sexual relationship that soon became public.

After the trial, Clinton said he was “profoundly sorry” for the burden that his behavior imposed on Congress and the American people.

Some analysts believe that the fallout from those events has been carried forward to this day. Thus, in seeking the presidency in 2000, Al Gore, the Democratic nominee, who has served as Clinton’s vice president for eight years, declined to ask Clinton to campaign on his behalf in Arkansas, Clinton’s home state. Had Gore carried that state, the outcome of disputed results in Florida would not have mattered because Gore would have attained enough electoral votes to have defeated Texas Gov. George W. Bush, the ultimate winner.

In 2016, Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, repeatedly cited Bill Clinton’s behavior in office to brand Hillary Clinton, the former first lady and his Democratic rival, as an alleged unprincipled enabler of her husband and, perhaps, to also dilute the political impact of Trump’s documented extramarital sexual history among undecided voters.

SOURCE: “THE SURVIVOR: BILL CLINTON IN THE WHITE HOUSE,” BY JOHN F. HARRIS (2005)

