Impeach Bill, Volume 1

StarrChamberBack Saturday offers you a break from the impeachment trial of Donald Joffrey Trump. I've already dealt with the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson, and the cartoons I drew about the Nixon impeachment hearings were lost decades ago; so here's the first installment of a two-part reverie on the impeachment of William Jismerson Clinton.

in UW-M Post, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, February 13, 1997

To begin at the beginning: Kenneth Starr had been appointed Independent Counsel by the District of Columbia Circuit Court to continue predecessor Robert Fiske's investigation into the purported "Whitewater Scandal." Bill and Hillary Clinton were accused of some skulduggery in a realty deal back in Arkansas in which they had ended up losing money anyway. While the Fiske-Starr investigation turned up no crime with which either Clinton could be charged, the Independent Counsel's investigation branched out into several unrelated investigations, including the suicide of Vince Foster, the firing of some staffers in the White House Travel office, and a lawsuit by Paula Jones charging Bill Clinton with sexual harassment when he was Governor of Arkansas.

in the UW-M Post, February 12, 1998

In spite of voluminous leaks from Starr's office, most of the investigations went nowhere. The Jones investigation, however, inspired Pentagon employee Linda Tripp to record her phone calls with a White House intern, Monica Lewinsky, about the intern's affair with the President, and to turn those tapes over to Starr's office. When Starr's office deposed President Clinton over that affair, Clinton denied under oath ever having had "sexual relations" with Lewinsky.

in UW-M Post, April 23, 1998

Clinton had emphatically made that same claim in a televised speech in January, unaware that Tripp had convinced Lewinsky not to dry-clean a navy blue dress stained with presidential spooge, but to turn it over to Starr's office instead.

Q Syndicate, August, 1998

I had begun drawing cartoons for Q Syndicate the year before this, and for two individual LGBTQ newspapers before that. My cartoons for the national LGBTQ media touched on aspects of news stories that might have been overlooked by the mainstream media.

Q Syndicate, September 1998

The Trump impeachment trial may well be over before next Saturday, but I'll be back with the rest of the Clinton impeachment story anyway. See you then!