Powers of the President of the United States Richard Nixon tried to use executive privilege as a reason for not turning over subpoenaed audio tapes to a special prosecutor in the Watergate scandal, the Supreme Court ruled in "United States v. Nixon" that privilege was not absolute. The Court reasoned that the judiciary’s interest in the “fair administration of criminal justice” outweighed President Nixon’s interest in keeping the evidence secret. Later President Bill Clinton lost in federal court when he tried to assert privilege in the Lewinsky affair. The Supreme Court affirmed this in "Clinton v. Jones", which denied the use of privilege in cases of civil suits.
Bill Clinton 1992 presidential campaign Clinton led Tsongas by a solid 16 points with nobody else even close. But Clinton was undone by two damaging stories that cut against his credibility. The first was the allegation that he had a twelve-year extra-marital affair with Gennifer Flowers, a former night club singer and television reporter from Little Rock, Arkansas. Clinton blunted this story with an interview on "60 Minutes" at the conclusion of Super Bowl XXVI, where he flatly denied having had this affair; however, he did later testify during the Paula Jones lawsuit that he did have a sexual encounter with Flowers in 1977. The