Statute Of Limitations

By Author: Jordon
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Until 1992, the cases confronting the press had involved the current behaviors of politicians: Ray was on Hays's payroll; Foxe was with Mills at the Tidal Basin; pictures existed of Hart and Rice on a boat aptly titled Cheap Cartier Jewelry Monkey Business. In 1992, while Bill Clinton was running for the Democratic presidential nomination, allegations about an earlier extramarital affair raised the question, what is the statute of limitations for the press on investigating candidate behavior?

While governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton had recommended Gennifer Flowers for a job in state government. On a tape of a telephone conversation between the two that Flowers made before the 1992 campaign, Clinton told her that if she were asked whether she had talked with him about the job, she should deny it. She was to say that she learned of the job from a newspaper ad.

Flowers's tapes also included disparaging remarks about New York governor Mario Cuomo, presumed at the time to be Clinton's rival for the nomination. Although the Clinton presidential campaign would argue that the ...
... tapes had been edited to sound incriminating, by apologizing for the remarks about Cuomo, Clinton essentially authenticated at least some of them. If the tapes were genuine, the exchange of a state job for sex would constitute abuse of power. It was on that norm that reporters would pivot when pressed about the newsworthiness of the Flowers story.

Clinton preempted the use of hypocrisy as a justification for continued pursuit of the story when he admitted in a January 1992 interview with 60 Minutes that he had "caused pain" in his marriage. The presence of his wife Replica Cartier Jewelry at his side testified that both believed it was inappropriate to say more. The audience for that interview was magnified by the fact that the program aired at the end of the Super Bowl. In the interview, Clinton in effect admitted to past indiscretions and implied strongly that that sort of behavior was in the past, apparently relying on the principle that if it's old, it should not be retold.