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US-POLITICS-CLINTON
Lewinsky affair not an abuse of power, says Hillary Clinton
WASHINGTON, Oct 15, 2018 (BSS/AFP) – Hillary Clinton has said her
husband Bill’s affair with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky was not
an abuse of power and he was right to not resign from the US presidency in
the wake of the scandal.
The two-decade old episode has come under renewed scrutiny in the #MeToo
era, with critics questioning whether the power imbalance between a sitting
president and an intern made it impossible for the relationship to be
considered consensual.
Some, like New York Senator Kristin Gillibrand, have said that Clinton
should have stepped down after he was impeached by a Republican-controlled
House in late 1998 for lying about the affair.
But speaking on CBS News on Sunday, former presidential candidate and
secretary of state Hillary Clinton said she disagreed.
“Absolutely not,” she replied when asked whether her husband should have
resigned.
Pressed on whether the relationship was an abuse of power, Clinton said:
“No, no” and noted that Lewinsky, who was 22-years-old at the time, “was an
adult”.
“There was an investigation and it, as I believe, came out in the right
place,” she added.
In 1999, the Senate held a month-long trial of president Clinton that
ultimately fell well short of the two-thirds majority required to convict and
remove him from office.
Lewinsky, for her part, long maintained the affair was consensual, but
in an essay published in Vanity Fair earlier this year wrote she had begun to
re-evaluate that view.
Bill Clinton has also been accused by several other women of sexual
misconduct in cases going back to the 1970s, prompting a reckoning of his
place in history by Democrats in light of the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements.
BSS/AFP/IJ/1457 hrs