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Clinton says he will not apply for government reimbursement of legal fees
December 24, 1999 WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President Clinton will not apply to the government for reimbursement of his legal fees, he said in an interview on Larry King Live. "I've never considered doing that ... I may be entitled to it, but my instinct is not to do it."
Clinton said a story in The Washington Post that said he was planning to seek reimbursement was wrong. "I think it was leaked from the independent counsel's office. That's the way the story read to me," Clinton said during the Larry King interview, which was taped on Wednesday, and aired on Thursday. Clinton said he has been trying to figure out how to help the many "completely innocent people that were harassed repeatedly and called into hearings" and who built up "massive legal bills." "The travesty in this thing is, the way the law's written, you can only get your legal fees if you're a target of an investigation, but you're not charged. So if you're charged and acquitted, you can't get them, and if you never were a target, you can't get them." Clinton said he had a legal defense fund that was helping him pay his bills. He is grateful, he said, for the "overwhelming loyalty that I have enjoyed from people that could have made a lot of money by dumping on me because that's what sells in the kind of media culture we're in." Not included in that supportive group was Dick Morris, his former consultant, who resigned from Clinton's 1996 campaign and went on to criticize the president publicly. "When Dick first started going on television and saying those things, he used to call somebody here in the office and apologize in advance and just say, you know, `I've got to do this. It's the only way I can get on television.'" "It's a game," Clinton said. "I know that, so it's hard for me to take it seriously. I think a lot of the things he has said he knows downright are not true. I feel bad for him, because I think you pay a terrible price when you do that over and over and over again." Clinton said he never watches the Sunday morning talk shows. "If I did, what good would that do me?" "If I read a column, like an op-ed column, of someone who says, `I think the Clinton administration policy is all wet on this for these reasons,' I'll read that. Because Benjamin Franklin said our critics are our friends. They show us our faults." "If you're angry all the time over things people say about you ... then you're wasting a lot of time and emotional energy that belongs to the American people. And you're not going to make good decisions, so nothing really good can come of that." |
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