The Deal: Lewinsky Gets Total Immunity as Long as She Speaks the Truth

July 29, 1998

THE DEAL

Lewinsky Gets Total Immunity as Long as She Speaks the Truth

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By DAVID STOUT

ASHINGTON -- Not all immunity is equal.
Having been granted what lawyers call transactional immunity, Monica Lewinsky is off the hook as long as she tells the truth.
With transactional immunity, which prosecutors give only when they want someone's testimony very badly, she cannot be prosecuted for the wrongdoing she testifies about. To put it another way, not only is she safe from being incriminated by her own words, but from the words of others.
That last point is crucial in understanding the difference between transactional immunity and the more common use immunity.
When granted use immunity, a witness may not be incriminated by his or her own testimony, nor are prosecutors supposed to use that testimony to gather other evidence against the witness.
But prosecutors can and do use other avenues to gather evidence against witnesses who have use immunity. A quarter-century ago, more than two dozen witnesses were granted use immunity so they would testify before a Senate committee investigating the Watergate scandal.
Two of the most important witnesses, John Dean, President Richard Nixon's White House counsel, and Jeb Stuart Magruder, deputy director of the Nixon re-election committee, then pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice. Prosecutors had gathered plenty of evidence against them before their Senate testimony.
Years later, two important figures in the Iran-Contra scandal, Lt. Col. Oliver North and Vice Adm. John Poindexter, fared better. They were granted use immunity for their congressional testimony, and they were later convicted in court -- on evidence not gleaned from that congressional testimony, the prosecution maintained.
But an appeals court threw out the convictions, holding that even though the defendants' congressional testimony had not been used at trial, it still might have tainted the recollections of other witnesses who had seen the defendants on television.

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