Kay Bailey Hutchison issued the following statement (h/t MM) when voting to convict Clinton on perjury charges.

ELEMENTS REQUIRED FOR CONVICTION OF PERJURY

Lying is a moral wrong. Perjury is a lie told under oath that is legally wrong. To be illegal, the lie must be willfully told, must be believed to be untrue, and must relate to a material matter. Title 18, Section 1621 and 1623, U.S. Code.

If President Washington, as a child, had cut down a cherry tree and lied about it, he would be guilty of `lying,’ but would not be guilty of `perjury.’

If, on the other hand, President Washington, as an adult, had been warned not to cut down a cherry tree, but he cut it down anyway, with the tree falling on a man and severely injuring or killing him, with President Washington stating later under oath that it was not he who cut down the tree, that would be `perjury.’ Because it was a material fact in determining the circumstances of the man’s injury or death.

Some would argue that the President in the second example should not be impeached because the whole thing is about a cherry tree, and lies about cherry trees, even under oath, though despicable, do not rise to the level of impeachable offenses under the Constitution. I disagree.

The perjury committed in the second example was an attempt to impede, frustrate, and obstruct the judicial system in determining how the man was injured or killed, when, and by whose hand, in order to escape personal responsibility under the law, either civil or criminal. Such would be an impeachable offense. To say otherwise would be to severely lower the moral and legal standards of accountability that are imposed on ordinary citizens every day. The same standard should be imposed on our leaders.

Nearly every child in America believes that President Washington, as a child himself, did in fact cut down the cherry tree and admitted to his father that he did it, saying simply: `I cannot tell a lie.’

I will not compromise this simple but high moral principle in order to avoid serious consequences to a successor President who may choose to ignore it.

Here is what she said yesterday to Tim Russert:

MR. RUSSERT: Senator Hutchison, you think those comments from the White House are credible?

SEN. HUTCHISON: Tim, you know, I think we have to remember something here. An indictment of any kind is not a guilty verdict, and I do think we have in this country the right to go to court and have due process and be innocent until proven guilty. And secondly, I certainly hope that if there is going to be an indictment that says something happened, that it is an indictment on a crime and not some perjury technicality where they couldn’t indict on the crime and so they go to something just to show that their two years of investigation was not a waste of time and taxpayer dollars. So they go to something that trips someone up because they said something in the first grand jury and then maybe they found new information or they forgot something and they tried to correct that in a second grand jury.

Russert responds, correctly in my opinion, with this:

But the fact is perjury or obstruction of justice is a very serious crime

Bill Faith over at Small Town Vets thinks Michelle is a bit over the top calling this a “blunder.”

James Joyner appreciates the irony of the Democrats sudden interest in the seriousness of perjury.

Ian has a montage which includes Hutchison’s comments.

John Hawkins has this to add:

[T]here has been absolutely no evidence up to this point, not one single shred, that Patrick Fitzgerald has been unfair or politically motivated. Nor would bringing perjury or obstruction of justice charges be evidence of bias either. Anyone who works in the White House should know better than to lie under oath or get involved in cover-up, and if they did something that foolish, then they should expect to be charged with a crime.

That’s not to say that Patrick Fitzgerald is beyond criticism, but conservatives should be very careful not to go down the same contemptible road that the Clinton administration did with Ken Starr. While in all fairness, Kay Bailey Hutchinson cannot be accused of the same sort of contemptible partisan sliming that the Clintons and their allies aimed at Starr, it seems to me that her comments are a step in that direction. That is not the sort behavior Republicans should engage in…