The Clinton Impeachment | 6. God Mode
Slow Burn
Slate Audio
4.6 • 25.2K Ratings
🗓️ 19 September 2018
⏱️ 9 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
Some of the most withering criticism of Clinton came from a coalition of conservative activists whose political views were bound up with their faith. The influence of the Christian right within the Republican Party had been growing steadily since the Reagan years. When the Lewinsky story broke, the movement’s leaders pounced on it with righteous vigor.
In the sixth episode of our series on Clinton’s impeachment, Leon Neyfakh charts the religious right’s campaign against the president and how it failed.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | On January 21st, 1998, NPR's Mara Liason was scheduled to interview Bill Clinton about his upcoming State of the Union address. |
| 0:09.1 | The biggest news for us was what he was going to say. I even had a little scoop on that. He was going to say something about Social Security. And I knew what it was. So I was going to ask him about that. How quaint? |
| 0:21.2 | Wyerson and her colleague Robert Siegel had planned out the whole interview. |
| 0:25.1 | And then the day of, we wake up and read the post, and we see the story about Monica Lewinsky. |
| 0:32.8 | And we looked at each other and we went, ugh, Iuck. I guess we have to ask him about this. |
| 0:38.9 | The notion that Clinton had been romantically involved with a former White House intern |
| 0:42.8 | first appeared on a fledgling website called The Drudge Report. The site's proprietor, Matt Drudge, |
| 0:48.3 | had received the tip that editors at Newsweek were sitting on a story about Clinton's affair. |
| 0:53.2 | Drudge published the allegation in the middle of the night on Sunday, January 18th, |
| 0:57.1 | about 24 hours after Monica Lewinsky walked out on Ken Starr's prosecutors at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. |
| 1:03.5 | Drudge had received the tip from Lucian Goldberg, the literary agent who was working with Linda Tripp. |
| 1:09.6 | Drudge's post didn't make it into the mainstream media for three full days. |
| 1:14.0 | When it finally did, by way of a front page story in the Washington Post, it was a lot for |
| 1:19.2 | people to take in. |
| 1:20.2 | The unexpected reports of a new sex scandal involving President Clinton. |
| 1:24.5 | Bombshell allegations that he had a sexual affair with a former White House intern. |
| 1:28.7 | Not only was the president being accused of having an affair with a woman half his age, |
| 1:32.7 | he was also under criminal investigation by Independent Counsel Ken Starr for trying to cover it up. |
| 1:38.0 | There's a growing sense here that this scandal could unravel the administration. |
| 1:43.7 | When Mara Liason and Robert Siegel sat down across from Clinton in the Oval Office, the day |
| 1:48.0 | the Post story came out. |
| 1:49.0 | They opened their interview with a series of direct but charitably phrased questions about the allegations. |
... |
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