President Clinton has urged members of Congress to be guided by their conscience and judgement as to the national interest before voting on whether to impeach him and remove him from office.
The President's plea made through his legal counsel, Mr Gordon Craig, came after Republicans and Democrats in the Judiciary Committee used clips from the video of President Clinton's testimony denying sexual relations with Ms Monica Lewinsky to bolster their respective views on impeachment.
Mr Craig told reporters that the White House was "disappointed and saddened" at the level of "innuendo" used by the Republican side in the final legal submissions to the committee.
The committee will vote today on four articles of impeachment after two days of hearing the legal submissions and the views of its 38 members. The Republican members are expected to use their five-vote majority to approve at least two of the impeachment articles and send them to the full House of Representatives for its vote next week.
This was the first time that the public was allowed to see parts of the video of Mr Clinton's testimony under oath last Jaunary 17th to lawyers of Ms Paula Jones in her sexual harassment suit against him.
President Clinton, who leaves for the Middle East tomorrow has so far refrained from commenting on the impeachment debate but he has personally approved of a harshly-worded motion of censure on himself drawn up by Democratic members as an alternative to impeachment.
At a human rights ceremony yesterday, he made what some see as an indirect reference to the impeachment controversy. "I have learned in ways large and small in the last six years that there is within every person a scale of justice and that people can too easily be herded into hatred and extremism often out of a belief that they have absolute truth and therefore are entitled to absolute power," he said. "That they can ignore any constitution, any laws, override any facts."
At the committee hearing, the Democratic counsel, Mr Abe Lowell used an extract from the January 17th video to show Mr Clinton studying a written definition of "sexual relations" given him by Ms Jones's lawyers. The video then records a lengthy exchange between lawyers and the judge on the definition.
Mr Lowell used the video to try and show that the President was "set up" by Ms Jones's lawyers and that their contorted definition had created "havoc and confusion". Mr Lowell also played extracts from the tapes secretly made by Ms Linda Tripp of her phone conversations with Ms Lewinsky. In these extracts she is heard denying that she had sex with the President because they did not have full intercourse.
Later, the Republican counsel, Mr David Schippers, used clips from the same video to show that the President was listening intently to a statement by his lawyer denying sex in any shape or form with Ms Lewinsky although Mr Clinton later told the grand jury that he was not paying attention.
In the video Mr Clinton is seen in a dark suit with polka dot tie peering over his spectacles to follow the discussion between opposing lawyers. He sips from a cup of coffee and nods when he agrees with what his lawyer is saying.
After Mr Schippers shows a clip of the President saying that he could not remember being alone with Ms Lewinsky, he comments sarcastically: "Life was so much simpler before they found that dress, wasn't it?"
The US Army said yesterday it had charged Maj Gen David Hale, a retired two-star general, with having improper sexual relationships with the wives of four other officers and then trying to obstruct an investigation by lying about it.