For political connoisseurs of a certain vintage, it feels like deja vu all over again.
To anyone who witnessed Bill Clinton’s presidency in the 1990s, the once unimaginable spectacle of a sitting president testifying under oath over sexual misconduct allegations levelled on a wave of Republican antipathy became so familiar as to seem almost routine.
Clinton gave sworn testimony twice in 1998, each occasion filmed for posterity: first in a suit filed by Paula Jones, an Arkansas state employee who accused him of sexually harassing her; then to a grand jury over the nature of his affair with Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern.
This week, a re-enactment of those half-forgotten ancient political battles will play out when the former president and his wife, Hillary, give depositions under oath to the House of Representatives’ oversight committee on the Jeffrey Epstein files.
The pair are due to testify on separate days – Hillary Clinton on Thursday, her husband the following day – after being subpoenaed by the committee’s Republican chair, James Comer, over their ties to the disgraced late financier and convicted sex trafficker.
The proceedings will take place behind closed doors but will be recorded, with footage expected to be released later – an arrangement reminiscent of what happened with Clinton’s 1998 grand jury testimony, which was made public the following month.
Bill Clinton has denied any wrongdoing but is under scrutiny over admissions that he flew on Epstein’s private plane several times. Photos in the recently released files show the ex-president in potentially compromising poses – particularly one with him in a hot tub with Epstein and a woman whose identity is redacted. Hillary, for her part, denies ever having met Epstein but acknowledges meeting Ghislaine Maxwell, his partner and convicted co-conspirator.
For Republicans, putting a searchlight on the Clintons has the advantage of deflecting attention from Donald Trump’s relationship with Epstein.
Longstanding allies depict the tactic as a reflex that may backfire.
“This is one of the things they’ve been doing for the last nearly 40 years – when in doubt, attack Bill Clinton,” said Matt Bennett, founder of the Third Way thinktank and a former White House staffer under Clinton. “Bill Clinton is often underestimated and when he is, his political foes are often the worse for it.”
Clinton was on the ropes – and game for being underestimated – in September 1998 when he appeared at a White House prayer breakfast as disclosures over the Lewinsky affair threatened to submerge him and end his presidency.
The disclosure had been unearthed during the sprawling years-long independent counsel investigation that had been spurred by deep-seated Republican antagonism towards a Democratic president whom many regarded as a draft-dodger and illegitimate.
It did not come out of nowhere.
Clinton – who repeatedly insisted that his “inappropriate” liaison with Lewinsky did not amount to sexual relations – had faced accusations from multiple women, including Jones, who later won an $850,000 settlement without him admitting guilt. Juanita Broaddrick alleged he had raped her in a hotel room in 1978 when he was governor of Arkansas.
Yet with Congress preparing to release a long-awaited report from the independent counsel, Kenneth Starr, Clinton rose above the sordid backdrop with a prayer breakfast address that showed his best side and displayed his political resilience.
“I don’t think there is a fancy way to say that I have sinned,” he said, reading from a hand-written text he had composed the night before and apologizing to his family, friends and Lewinsky.
In often salacious detail, Starr’s 445-page report initially seemed to add to Clinton’s travails by asserting that the president was guilty of perjury, obstruction of justice and witness tampering, transgressions that Starr argued amounted to impeachable offenses.
But far from withering under Starr’s sanctimony, Clinton’s humble and self-abasing address laid the platform for political recovery.
Defying expectations, Democrats actually gained seats in the following November’s midterm elections – the first time since 1934 that the sitting president’s party had achieved this in the House of Representatives, although the Republicans narrowly retained control of both the House and Senate.
Although the Republican party pressed ahead and impeached the president the following month, he was subsequently acquitted in a Senate trial and stayed in office.
By contrast, it was two Republican speakers who lost their posts amid the tumult. First, Newt Gingrich, the conservative firebrand who had locked horns with Clinton for years and had led a drive to pressure him over the Lewinsky affair, resigned after the election failure amid revelations that he, too, had been having an extramarital affair.
Gingrich declined comment for this article.
His successor, Bob Livingstone, resigned weeks later, hours before the House impeached Clinton, after he also admitted marital infidelities.
Clinton, meanwhile, saw his popularity rise. His public approval rating hit a peak of 73% the week he was impeached in December 1998, according to Gallup, and was at 66% when he left office two years later.
His appeal endured despite an all-out Republican assault that began early in his presidency – often targeting Hillary Clinton, the first lady – and initially centered on Whitewater, a failed property company the two had co-owned in Arkansas, before delving into other alleged scandals courtesy of the independent counsel’s open-ended investigation.
Both Clintons’ standing has diminished in recent years, leading a majority of Democrats on the oversight committee to express readiness to vote to hold them in contempt of Congress if they refused to testify.
Besides Hillary’s 2016 election defeat to Trump, Bill’s once-exalted status fell with the rise of the #MeToo movement and the popularity of the pro-free trade and globalization policies he promoted has faded.
“The big change is that many Democrats, as one of them put it, [were] in kindergarten when all of this was going on [and] are no longer willing to pay any political price to defend him,” said Bill Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former domestic policy adviser in Clinton’s presidency.
“For a long time, Bill Clinton was part of the living past of the Democratic party, and now so much time has elapsed that it’s in the history books. Many younger Democrats have no particular reason to look back with favor on what they describe as the neoliberal orientation of the administration.”
Despite the couple’s fallen political stock, Clinton watchers insist Comer may suffer the same political rebound effect that afflicted his predecessors.
“The Republicans have learned none of the lessons of history of dealing with Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton,” said Sidney Blumenthal, a Guardian columnist and former aide to Bill Clinton who became one of the couple’s most partisan defenders.
Blumenthal cited Hillary Clinton’s testimony before the House of Representatives’ select committee on the deadly 2012 terror attack on the US diplomatic mission in the Libyan city of Benghazi, which happened when she was secretary of state. Clinton was widely seen to have emerged creditably after testifying, often under withering Republican fire, for 11 hours in October 2015. Her performance prompted an increase in donations to her presidential campaign.
“Both Bill and Hillary Clinton, who have both testified in such memorable situations in the past, when they appeared they come across as who they are,” Blumenthal said. “The allegations against them seem to either fade away, become transparent as partisan gambits or diminish in proportion, given the Republicans’ vehemence.
“It will all play to the Clintons’ strengths. They’re setting themselves up for their own humiliation. I mean, please do this publicly and reintroduce the Clintons to a whole new generation.”
David Maraniss, author of a feted biography of Bill Clinton, said the former president was likely to view the forthcoming proceedings as a forum to exhibit his political comeback credentials.
“With Bill Clinton, his life is an endless cycle of loss and recovery, in every possible way,” Maraniss said. When he’s down, he figures his way out, and when he’s up, he screws up and gets in trouble again.
“I think that cycle is still there, but it doesn’t have the same meaning any more, because he’s not central to the politics of today,” Maraniss added. “A final comeback for Bill Clinton would be fascinating. I don’t see a total comeback in the cards, but it’s quite possible that that he and Hillary will come out of this hearing in a better place.”
Yet there is a vital qualifier. In his prime, Clinton’s communicative powers were a force to behold. Now aged 79, there are doubts over whether he retains his previous trademark ability to hold an audience in his thrall. A meandering and uneven speech at the 2024 Democratic national convention in Chicago suggested his oratorical powers may have declined.
“I don’t know to what extent time has diminished him,” said Galston, who recently turned 80. “Agility is a function of energy, quickness of mind, etc. He may have lost a few miles off his fastball.”
Maraniss predicted that even an older, slower Clinton could stage a cameo return redolent of his once self-proclaimed comeback kid label, given the spur of a return to the limelight and political relevance.
“Clinton hates to be irrelevant. [For him] that’s a worse sin … than screwing up. It means nobody cares about you any more. So in that sense, I think he is gearing up for this and relishing it.”
