The White House yesterday adopted a more conciliatory tone as it started a final offensive to save President Clinton from impeachment by Congress.
In remarks which were clearly aimed at the handful of moderate Republicans whose votes will determine Mr Clinton's fate next week, the White House special counsel, Mr Greg Craig, told the House of Representatives judiciary committee that the President's conduct was "sinful" but did not merit impeachment.
"The President wants everyone to know - the committee, the Congress and the country - that he is genuinely sorry for the pain and the damage he has caused and for the wrongs he has committed," Mr Craig said.
Mr Craig was speaking at the start of two days of White House testimony to the Republican-dominated committee, which is expected to approve between one and four articles of impeachment at the end of the week.
The choice of Mr Craig to present the President's defence, and of the respected White House senior counsel, Mr Charles Ruff, to conclude it today, was a deliberate attempt to woo voters and Congress with a less confrontational presentation of Mr Clinton's case than previously adopted.
The committee's vote in favour of impeachment is now widely seen as a foregone conclusion, and the 37 committee members were not the real target audience of Mr Craig's opening speech or the evidence of 14 White House witnesses yesterday and today.
The White House case is aimed rather at reviving public hostility against impeachment, and in particular at winning over the approximately 20 Republican moderates whose votes will decide whether Mr Clinton is impeached in a vote in the full 435-seat house, now expected as soon as next Tuesday.
While Mr Clinton spent yesterday making a speech about social security reform and attending the Tennessee funeral of Albert Gore snr, the Vice-President's father, who died at the weekend, Mr Craig said that the President had "personally instructed" him to ensure that "no technicalities or legalities should be allowed to obscure the simple moral truth that his behaviour in this matter was wrong".
Repeatedly stressing that Mr Clinton's conduct in the Monica Lewinsky affair was immoral rather than illegal, Mr Craig said that the US constitution demanded "proof of official misconduct and abuse of high public office for the drastic remedy of impeachment to be appropriate".
Mr Craig called a series of historians and legal scholars, including the doyen of American presidential historians, Prof Samuel Beer, to challenge the impeachment moves.
One of the witnesses called by the White House, the Yale law professor, Mr Bruce Ackerman, caused a visible stir among Republicans with a confident assertion that next week's vote by the outgoing House of Representatives, in which the Republicans have a 21-vote majority, could not trigger a Senate trial in the new Congress, due to open on January 6th, unless endorsed by the incoming House, when the Republican majority will fall to 11 votes.
Questioning by the committee was expected to continue late last night and is scheduled to resume at 8 a.m. today. Democrat and Republican lawyers will give their final summations tomorrow and Friday, before the committee finally considers the draft impeachment articles. Voting on the articles is expected on Friday or Saturday.
Mr Clinton is not due to speak, but the White House is debating whether he should make a further public statement of contrition in an attempt to sway wavering Republicans before he leaves for a three-day visit to the Middle East this weekend.