Court panel seeks to strip Clinton of law licence

By Sridhar Krishnaswami

WASHINGTON, JULY 1. A Supreme Court Committee in the State of Arkansas has sued the President, Mr. Bill Clinton, to strip him of his licence to practise law, saying that he lacked ``overall fitness'' to be a lawyer.

In a five-page suit filed, the committee has accused the President of serious misconduct in the Monica Lewinsky case including giving false testimony that damaged the profession.

Mr. Clinton has 30 days to respond but his private attorney, Mr. David Kendall, has vowed a fight which is expected to go to the State Supreme Court.

``We fundamentally disagree with the complaint filed today and will defend vigorously against it'', Mr. Kendall said in a Statement.

The Arkansas Supreme Court Committee has 14 members of which eight have already disqualified themselves, five of them saying they had close ties to Mr. Clinton or the Democratic Party.

In May, the remaining six members voted to approve a lawsuit to revoke the President's licence to practise in Arkansas.

The President has maintained that if he was placed in the same standard as was applied to other lawyers, there could be ``no way in the world'' that he could be disbarred.

Legal analysts maintain that it not likely that this case will be settled before Mr. Clinton formally steps down from office on January 20, 2001.

But nevertheless, it is the first time in which steps are being taken to disbar a President of his licence to practice law.

The State of New York yanked Richard Nixon's law licence but this came after he resigned from office in August 1974 as a result of the Watergate scandal.

The Arkansas Supreme Court panel has argued, among other things, that the President gave misleading answers in his sworn deposition in the Monica Lewinsky case.

The panel has said that it based its lawsuit on complaints filed by a Federal Judge and by the Southeastern Legal Foundation.

Both had referred the matter to the panel saying that the President lied under oath about an affair with Ms Monica Lewinsky when asked during a deposition by the lawyers of Ms Paula Jones at the time of her legal battle against Mr. Clinton.

Ms Jones, a former Arkansas State employee, had sued Mr. Clinton saying that while he was Governor of the State in 1991, he had summoned her to a hotel room in Little Rock and propositioned her for oral sex.

In trying to fix a ``pattern'', the lawyers of Ms Jones asked Mr. Clinton during a deposition in January 1998 whether he had any sexual relations with Ms Lewinsky which the President denied.

Later in August, Mr. Clinton admitted before a Federal Grand Jury an ``inappropriate relationship'' with the former White House intern but argued that this did not meet the definition of sex as was provided to him.

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