The Associated Press

Excerpts from Republican counsel David Schippers' testimony before the House Judiciary Committee Thursday, as transcribed by Federal Document Clearing House:

Allow me to assert my profound and unqualified respect for the office of president of the United States. It represents to the American people, and actually to the entire world, the strength, the philosophy, and most of all, the honor and integrity that makes us a great nation and an example for developing peoples.

Because all eyes are focused upon that high office, the character and credibility of any temporary occupant is vital to the domestic and vital - and foreign welfare of the citizens. Consequently, serious breaches of integrity and duty of necessity adversely influence the reputation of the entire United States.

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It is my sorrowful duty now to accuse President William Jefferson Clinton of obstruction of justice, false and deliberately misleading statements under oath, witness tampering, abuse of power, and false statements to and obstruction of the Congress of the United States in the course of this very impeachment inquiry.

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This is not about sex or private conduct. It is about multiple obstructions of justice, perjury, false and misleading statements, witness tampering, abuses of power - all committed or orchestrated by the president of the United States.

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Over the term of their relationship, the following significant matters occurred. Monica Lewinsky and the president were alone on at least 21 occasions. They had at least 11 personal sexual encounters, excluding phone sex - three in 1995, five in 1996, and at least three in 1997.

They had at least 55 telephone conversations, some of which, at least 17, involved phone sex. The president gave Ms. Lewinsky 24 presents and Ms. Lewinsky gave the president 40 presents.

Now these are the essential facts which formed the backdrop for all of the events that followed.

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While his treatment of Ms. Lewinsky may be offensive, it is much more offensive for the president to expect this committee to believe that in 1996 and 1997 his intimate contact with her was so narrowly tailored that it conveniently escaped his strained interpretation of a definition of sexual relations, which he did not even conceive until 1998.

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Please don't permit the obfuscation and legalistic pyrotechnics of the president's defenders to distract you from the real issue here.

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The treatment of Monica Lewinsky received from the independent counsel, the motives of some of the witnesses, and those who helped finance Paula Jones' case - that's tin foil. The real issues are whether the president of the United States testified falsely under oath, whether he engaged in a continuing plot to obstruct justice, to hide evidence, to tamper with witnesses and to abuse the power of his office in furtherance of that plot.

The ultimate issue is whether the president's course of conduct is such as to affect adversely the office of the presidency by bringing scandal and disrespect upon it, and also, upon the administration of justice, and whether he has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as president and subversive to the rule of law and to constitutional government.

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Did something happen to remove the job search from a low to a high priority on that day? Excuse me.

Oh, yes, something happened.

On the morning of December 11th, 1997, Judge Susan Webber Wright ordered that Paula Jones was entitled to information regarding any state or federal employee with whom the president had sexual relations or proposed or sought to have sexual relation. To keep Monica on the team was now of critical importance. ...

The president told Ms. Lewinsky that seeing her name on the list broke his heart. I imagine it did.

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When the president called Monica at 2 a.m. on December 17th to tell her she was on the witness list, he made sure to remind her of those prior cover stories. Miss Lewinsky testified that when the president brought up the misleading story, she understood that the two would continue their preexisting pattern of deception.

It became clear that the president had no intention of making his sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky public. And he would use lies, deceit and deception to ensure that the truth would never be known.

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Life was so much simpler before they found that dress, wasn't it?

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The essence of lying is in the deception, not in the words. The president's answer was false. ... The president would have us believe that he was able to analyze questions as they were being asked and pick up such things as verb tense in an attempt to make his statements at least literally true. But when he is asked a simple, straightforward question, suddenly he wants us to believe that he couldn't understand it. Neither his answer in the deposition, nor his attempt at explanation is reasonable or true.

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The president knew that Monica Lewinsky was going to make a false affidavit. He was so certain of the content, that when Monica asked if he wanted to see it, he told her no - he had seen 15 of them. He got his information, in part, from his attorneys and from discussions with Ms. Lewinsky and Vernon Jordan, generally, about the content of the affidavit. Besides, he had suggested the affidavit, himself, remember, and he trusted Mr. Jordan to be certain the mission would be accomplished.

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After months of looking for a job - since July, according to the president's lawyers - Vernon Jordan just so happens to make the call to the CEO the day after the false affidavit was signed.

... Monica Lewinsky does not fit within the caliber of persons that would merit Mr. Jordan's direct recommendation to a CEO of a Fortune 500 company. Mr. Jordan was well aware that people with whom Ms. Lewinsky worked at the White House didn't like her, and that she was very unhappy with her Pentagon job. Vernon Jordan was asked if at any point during this process he wondered about her qualifications for employment. He answered no, because that was not my judgment to make.

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Do people like Vernon Jordan go to the wall for marginal employees? They do not, unless there is a compelling reason. The compelling reason was that the president told him this was top priority, especially after Monica was subpoenaed.

Just how important was Monica Lewinsky's false affidavit to the president's deposition? Well, it enabled President Clinton, through his attorneys, to assert, at his January 17, 1998 deposition, that there is nothing, there is absolutely no sex of any kind, shape or form with President Clinton.

You will see this later. When questioned by his own attorney in the deposition, the president stated specifically that the infamous paragraph 8 of Monica's affidavit, the infamous false paragraph was, quote, ''absolutely true.'' The president later affirmed the truth of that statement when testifying before the grand jury.

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If the false affidavit worked, (Clinton) was home free because they wouldn't be permitted to question him about her. Can anyone rationally argue that the president wasn't vitally interested in what Mr. Bennett was saying?

Nonetheless, when he was asked in the grand jury whether Mr. Bennett's statement was false, he still was unable to tell the truth, even before a federal grand jury. He answered with a now-famous sentence: ''It depends on what the meaning of 'is,' is.''

That single declaration, members of the committee, reveals more about the character of the president than perhaps anything else in the record. It points out his attitude and his conscious indifference and complete disregard for the concept of the truth. He picks out a single word, and he weaves from it a deceitful answer: '''Is' doesn't mean was or will be, so I can answer no.''

He also invites - invents convoluted definitions of words or phrases in his own crafty mind. Of course, he will never seek to clarify a question because that may trap him into a straight answer.

Can you imagine dealing with such a person in any important matter? You would never know his secret mental reservations or the unspoken redefinition of words. And even if you thought you'd solved the enigma, it wouldn't matter; he'd just change the meaning to suit his purpose.

But the president reinforced Monica's lie.

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The president wants us to believe that according to his reading of the deposition definition, he did not have sexual relations with Ms. Lewinsky. That definition was an afterthought, conceived while preparing for his grand jury testimony. His explanation to the grand jury, then, was also false and misleading.

The president does not explain his denial of an affair or of a sexual affair. He can't. Neither can he avoid his unequivocal denial in the answers to the interrogatories in the Jones case. These interrogatories were answered before any narrow definition of the sexual relations had been developed.

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Once the controls were established, the president made short, clear, understandable, declarative statements, telling Ms. Currie what her testimony was to be. He wasn't interested in what she knew. Why? He didn't want to be contradicted by his personal secretary. And the only way to ensure that was by telling her what to say, not asking her what she remembered. ...

And you certainly don't make declarative statements to someone regarding factual scenarios of which the listener was totally unaware.

Betty Currie could not possibly have any personal knowledge of the facts the president was asking about. How could she know if they were never alone? If they were, Ms. Currie wasn't there. Right? So too, how would she know that the president never touched Monica. This wasn't any attempt by the president to refresh anybody's recollection. It was witness tampering, pure and simple.

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Betty Currie was in charge of contacting Monica. The president had just completed a deposition in which he had provided false and misleading testimony about his relationship. She was a co-conspirator - she, being Monica Lewinsky - in this relationship for the Jones attorney. And he was losing control over her. She was slipping away.

The president never again got complete control over Monica Lewinsky, and that is why we are here today.

On August 17th, the last act of this tragedy took place. After six scorned invitations, the president of the United States appeared before a grand jury of his fellow citizens and took an oath to tell the truth. We all now know what happened after that: The president equivocated, engaged in legalistic fencing, but he also lied.

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The two had at least 55 phone conversations, many in the middle of the night, and in 17 of those calls, Monica and the president of the United States engaged in phone sex.

Now, I am not going to go into any details, but if what happened on those phone calls is banter, then Buckingham Palace is a cabin.

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In an effort to avoid unnecessary work and to bring this inquiry to an expeditious end, this committee submitted to the president 81 requests to admit or deny specific facts relevant to the investigation.

Although, for the most part, the questions could have been answered with a simple admit or deny, the president elected to follow the pattern of selective memory, reference to other testimony, blatant untruths, artful distortions, outright lies and half-truths, the blackest lie of all.

When he did answer, he engaged in legalistic hair-splitting, in an obvious attempt to skirt the whole truth and to deceive this committee.

The president then has lied under oath in a civil deposition, lied under oath in a criminal grand jury. He lied to the people, he lied to his Cabinet, he lied to his top aides, and now he's lied under oath to the Congress of the United States. There's no one left to lie to.

In addition, the half-truths, legalistic parsings, evasive and misleading answers were obviously calculated to obstruct the efforts of this committee.

They've had the effect of seriously hampering the committee's ability to inquire and to ascertain the truth. The president has, therefore, added obstruction of an inquiry and an investigative investigation before the legislative branch to his obstructions of justice before the judicial branch of our constitutional system of government.

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There you have it. Sorry, Miss Jones, because William Jefferson Clinton occupies the office of president, your lawsuit against him, not as president, but personally, must be set aside. The president's lawyers are referring to the most basic civil rights of an American citizen to due process of law and to the equal protection of laws - those same rights that President Clinton had taken an oath to preserve and protect.

Or is it that some people are more equal than others? Here is a clear example of the president abusing the power and majesty of his office to obtain a purely personal advantage over Ms. Jones and to avoid having to pay money damages.

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But the president was just getting started. He employed the power and prestige of his office and of his cabinet officers to mislead and to lie to the American people about the Jones case and the Monica Lewinsky matter. But even more, throughout the grand jury investigation and other investigations, the president has tried to extend the relatively narrow bounds of presidential privilege to unlimited, if not bizarre lengths. ...

The whole plan was to delay, obstruct and detour the investigations, not to protect the presidency, but to protect the president personally. It's bad enough that the office was abused for that purpose, but the infinite harm done to the presidency by those frivolous and dilatory tactics is irreparable.

... Furthermore, the power and prestige of the office of president was marshaled to destroy the character and the reputation of Monica Lewinsky, a young woman that had been ill-used by the president. As soon as her name surfaced, the campaign began to muzzle any possible testimony and to attack the credibility of witnesses, in a concerted effort to insulate the president from the lawsuit of a single female citizen of Arkansas.

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Worst of all, in order to win, it was necessary to convince the public, and hopefully, those grand jurors who read the newspapers that Monica Lewinsky was unworthy of belief.

... How do you do this? Congressman Graham showed you. You employ the full power and credibility of the White House and the press corps of the White House to destroy the witness. Thus, on January 19th, inside the White House, the debate goes on about the best way to destroy ''that woman,'' as President Bill Clinton called Monica Lewinsky. Should they paint her as a friendly fantasist or a malicious stalker?

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For the president now to advance the assertion that he had a subjective belief that his conduct did not constitute sexual relations continues that same subterfuge and obstruction begun in the Jones' case, continued in the grand jury, and now presented here before the Congress.

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How fair have the president and his supporters been? Was it fair to procure and produce false affidavits from prospective witnesses in the Jones case, and thus subject those witnesses to prosecution for perjury? How about employing every conceivable means, including perjury and obstruction, to defeat the legal rights of a woman who claims she'd been wronged? How fair was it to stand by and allow his friends to attack that woman's character with remarks like, ''Drag a $10 bill through a trailer camp and you never know what will turn up''? Was it fair to Monica Lewinsky to construct an elaborate lie that made it appear that she was a predator who threatened to lie about a sexual encounter if the president didn't succumb to her advances?

By the way, if the dress had not turned up, that story would have been President Clinton's defense today. The stage had already been set, the scenery was in place, and the actors had been given their lines.

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Stripped to its basic elements, the president's submission merely states that the president lied; it was OK to lie, because it was nobody's business but his own; that his conduct isn't a high crime or misdemeanor; that he'd never be convicted of perjury or of obstruction in a court of law; the Jones suit was bogus, therefore his testimony didn't matter. By the way, do you settle bogus suits for $700,000 after you won?

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It is relatively simple matter to mouth high-minded platitudes and prosecute vigorously rights violated by others. It's, however, a test of courage, honor and integrity to enforce those rights against yourself. The president failed that test.

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Lies are lies are lies.

Apart from all else, the president's illegal actions constitute an attack upon and utter disregard for the truth and for the rule of law.

Much worse, they manifest an arrogant disdain not only for the rights of his fellow citizens, but also for the functions and the integrity of the other two co-equal branches of our constitutional system.

One of the witnesses that appeared before you earlier likened the government of the United States to a three-legged stool. The analysis is apt because the entire structure of our government rests upon the three equal supports: legislative, judicial and executive.

Remove one of those supports and the state will totter. Remove two and the structure will either collapse altogether or will rest upon a single branch of government. There's another name for that: tyranny.

AP-NY-12-10-98 1823EST

Copyright 1998 The Associated Press. The information contained in the AP news report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.