Tag: the hunting of the president
A ‘Reckoning’ For Bill Clinton? Don’t Forget Starr’s $70 Million Probe

A ‘Reckoning’ For Bill Clinton? Don’t Forget Starr’s $70 Million Probe

Suddenly it has become fashionable again in liberal circles to flay Bill Clinton for his sexual misconduct, whether real, alleged, or imagined. Amid the national frenzy swirling around the likes of Harvey Weinstein and Roy Moore, prominent journalists and politicians are competing to display their dudgeon over the former president and things he is said to have done long ago.

On the New York Times op-ed page, a forum for Clinton-bashing from the late William Safire to the eternal Maureen Dowd, new columnist Michelle Goldberg writes that the former president ought to be expelled from “decent society” because of Juanita Broaddrick’s allegation that he raped her in 1978, under the headline “I Believe Juanita.” In Politico, former ABC correspondent Jeff Greenfield pillories Democrats who supported Clinton for supposedly “brushing aside the serious questions not of philandering but of predatory sexual behavior” toward Broaddrick, Paula Jones, and Kathleen Willey.

And in The Atlantic, Caitlin Flanagan — eager to defame feminists and especially Hillary Clinton as somehow culpable for her husband’s alleged predations — demands “a reckoning” of the way that “the Democratic Party protected Bill Clinton.”

All these commentators, and a few more, seem to recollect a moment when Clinton blithely escaped accountability for awful sex offenses because the feckless liberals let him skip. But that isn’t how I remember the record of the Clinton years, because that is precisely the opposite of what happened.

Unlike Weinstein, Moore, Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly, or any of the dozens of powerful men whose misdeeds have provoked a wave of justified fury, Clinton endured a long, painful, and very costly series of official investigations of his alleged sexual misdeeds. Various accounts of his private behavior, whether invented or truthful, filled thousands of hours of national airtime, millions of inches of newsprint, and dozens of books (including The Hunting of the President by Gene Lyons and me, published in 2000).

Unlike the Fox News criminals and many other creeps who quietly reached settlements that kept the most lurid details of their behavior under court seal, Clinton’s alleged acts were litigated publicly all the way to the Supreme Court — with attendant coverage that included, among other embarrassments, a debate about the appearance of his penis.

And most important, unlike any of those now in the dock, Clinton underwent a $70-million investigation by a zealous federal inquisitor who had all the powers of the Justice Department, a team of relentless and experienced prosecutors, and the forensic services of the FBI, which he employed in a wide-ranging sex probe that went back decades. That special prosecutor’s name was Kenneth W. Starr. He would be dismayed to learn that his dogged efforts to destroy Clinton have so soon been forgotten.

What Clinton’s freshly enraged critics also seem to have forgotten is how the Starr investigation actually unfolded after the independent counsel and his staff abandoned “Whitewater,” a small-time land swindle whose principal victims turned out to be the Clintons themselves. Approached with a tip by lawyers for Paula Jones, the former Arkansas state employee who claimed then Governor Clinton had dropped his trousers and exposed his genitalia to her in a Little Rock hotel room, Starr opened a new case that was designed to ensnare President Clinton in a perjury trap over his illicit consensual relationship with Monica Lewinsky. Not only was he not shielded, but his appointee, Attorney General Janet Reno, secretly gave a stamp of approval to Starr’s new prosecutorial direction.

While Clinton certainly prevaricated about Lewinsky, partly in order to avoid telling his wife, his affair was not exactly a predatory attack on an unwilling victim, despite the glaring difference in their age and station. Indeed, she forthrightly portrayed herself as the aggressor and continued to pursue him long after she was transferred from the White House to a job in the Pentagon.

The Lewinsky opening provided Starr with a license to intensify the scrutiny of Clinton’s personal life that his deputies had already begun in Arkansas as an adjunct of Whitewater, which was going nowhere. During the months leading up to Clinton’s impeachment in 1999, the Office of Independent Counsel deployed its full forensic authority to investigate every salacious claim or rumor about him. Included in that expansion of Starr’s probe were the cases of Kathleen Willey and Juanita Broaddrick.

Keen as Starr was to compile a thoroughly damning impeachment dossier against Clinton, both of those cases presented factual and legal problems that proved impossible for him to overcome. (Oddly, the New York Times noted this week that the Broaddrick and Willey cases were omitted from Starr’s impeachment referral, but neglected to reveal that he investigated them thoroughly.) Two of Willey’s closest friends directly contradicted her version of how Clinton aggressively “groped” her in the Oval Office despite her protestations. One was Linda Tripp, a fellow White House employee and, inconveniently, a key witness for Starr in the Lewinsky case. The other was Julie Hiatt Steele, whom Starr cruelly and unsuccessfully prosecuted in an effort to force her to change her testimony.

During his investigation, Starr learned that Willey had lied to FBI agents after receiving a grant of transactional immunity from his office. He immunized her again, but by then Willey was bereft of believability. She went on to publicly concoct bizarre fantasies of plots against her life, the assassination of her cat, and so on. Immortalized as a Clinton victim in a gripping CBS “60 Minutes” interview, she was lucky not to be prosecuted for lying to federal agents. In the Final Report of the Office of Independent Counsel, Willey was singled out as a figure lacking in credibility.

Starr also confronted vexing problems with Broaddrick’s charge that Clinton had assaulted her in a hotel room in 1978, biting her lip until it was swollen. Before the independent counsel brought her in, she had sworn an affidavit in the Paula Jones case denying any sexual contact with Clinton, and then repeated that denial in a deposition under oath.

The FBI found five witnesses who insisted that Broaddrick had told them about the rape at the time. Two of those witnesses were sisters and close friends of Broaddrick who hated Clinton for commuting the death sentence of their father’s convicted killer. A third was Broaddrick’s husband David, with whom she had been conducting an illicit affair when the alleged incident occurred. Broaddrick said she told her then-husband Gary Hickey that she had hurt her lip in an accident, but Hickey could recall neither the injury nor her explanation. Republican operatives who had pursued the rape rumors when Clinton first ran for president also cast doubt on her story and her motives. Later she made an accusation against Hillary Clinton that directly contradicted her own prior comments about whether anyone had sought to “intimidate” her.

Whether Clinton assaulted Broaddrick was impossible to know — or to prove — from the available evidence. That was why, in a footnote to his report, Starr described his findings about the woman called “Jane Doe #5” as “inconclusive.”

As for Paula Jones, it was she who had described the famous “distinguishing characteristic” of Clinton’s penis in a sealed affidavit, which Jones attorney George Conway (now better known as the husband of Trump aide Kellyanne Conway) leaked to the Drudge Report. Urologists eventually determined that Clinton had normal male equipment with no marks or misshapenness. But that was only the most notorious of several contradictions marring Jones’ testimony, which led more than one observer to doubt the validity of her harrowing story, including her sister. Finally, Clinton agreed to pay her a settlement of $850,000 without any admission to end the litigation.

In many ways, the payment to Jones was the least of the indignities and injuries that befell Clinton. The independent counsel probe and impeachment proceedings cost him tens of millions of dollars, a five-year suspension of his license to practice law, a searing scar upon his family, a continuous series of public humiliations, and a future obituary that will feature his status as the only president ever impeached over a sex lie.

So he may well think that there has been some public reckoning, at least, with the accusations against him – and that Starr’s exhaustive investigation, completed almost 20 years ago, served as an adjudication of those charges.

Yet those who still feel an urge to flog Clinton, for whatever motive, should pursue that stern impulse with all the seriousness it deserves. A just reckoning requires grappling with all the evidence – the depositions, the testimony, the recordings, the exhibits, the affidavits, the books, and even the journalism, dreadful as much of it was. This case isn’t a current legal proceeding. It’s history—and the facts, not fitting an easy storyline or moral fable, are available to those willing to deal with them.

Having been there and done that, I can assure the would-be judges that this is no small project. What they’ve written and said so far indicates a need to stop posturing and start reading.

 

Hillary’s Billing Records: The Facts Omitted From Your Morning Infotainment

Hillary’s Billing Records: The Facts Omitted From Your Morning Infotainment

During my contentious appearance on Morning Joe today, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski both evoked the ancient tale of Hillary Clinton’s “missing billing records” from her days working at the Rose Law Firm, the documents that were supposed to prove that she had done something wrong in the matter known as “Whitewater.”

If that paragraph reads like gibberish, you may be too young (or perhaps too old) to recall the details of “Whitewater,” often known as “the Whitewater scandal” — a small-time Arkansas land deal that lost more than $45,000 for the Clintons, but nevertheless became an overwhelming obsession of the Republican propaganda apparatus and its enablers in the media for several feverish years. The central character in this drama was the Clintons’ partner, a colorful old friend named James McDougal who also operated a small thrift institution called Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan – and who turned out to be a swindler suffering from severe mental illness.

For the full story, still important because dim memories of Whitewater continue to inform (and mostly misinform) media attitudes toward Bill and Hillary Clinton, I would recommend downloading Eastern Harbor Media’s free e-book, The Hunting of Hillary — abridged by Gene Lyons and me from our 2000 St. Martins Press bestseller, The Hunting of the President.

The e-book could be especially instructive to Joe and Mika, who talked about the billing records in hysterical tones but seem to know almost nothing about that vexed subject. To make this educational exercise as simple as possible for them and all the fans of Morning Joe, I’ve posted the book’s most relevant section below. (I’m only trying to improve the quality of our infotainment.)

A few introductory notes: The “Pillsbury Report” was a voluminous investigation of Whitewater, the Rose Law Firm, and related topics, commissioned by the Resolution Trust Corporation (RTC), a corporate entity run by the Treasury Department to dispose of the assets of failed thrift institutions taken over by the federal government. Hired to conduct that investigation was the San Francisco law firm of Pillsbury, Madison & Sutro, under the eye of partner Jay Stephens, a Republican attorney and former United States Attorney who had served in the Bush and Reagan administrations. Based on the Clintons’ sworn interrogatories, interviews with 45 other witnesses, and some 200,000 documents, the Pillsbury firm’s findings, published in several volumes, fully exonerated both Bill and Hillary Clinton of any wrongdoing.

In 1995 the Office of Independent Counsel (OIC), charged with prosecuting any criminal offenses that might arise from Whitewater, subpoenaed a set of copies of Hillary Clinton’s billing records from the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, where she had been a partner when her husband was governor of Arkansas. Those copies of her records had been used by the Clintons and their friend and former Rose partner Vincent Foster — who committed suicide in July 1993 — to answer inquiries about Whitewater during the 1992 presidential campaign. After the campaign they went missing. But early in 1996, just in time for Clinton’s re-election campaign, a White House aide named Carolyn Huber found the mislaid copies of the billing records — a discovery that stimulated an even frothier media frenzy over Whitewater.

The following is excerpted from The Hunting of Hillary:

What really made the story take off, however, was White House aide Carolyn Huber’s belated discovery of missing Rose Law Firm billing records that had been under subpoena by the OIC. The time sheets had been used by the 1992 Clinton campaign to respond to reporters’ questions, and then disappeared.

For weeks, Republicans on the Senate Whitewater Committee had spoken darkly of obstruction of justice. On January 4, 1996, Huber found the missing documents in a box in her office at the Old Executive Office Building. She called the Clintons’ lawyer, David Kendall, who immediately made copies and sent the originals to [Independent Counsel] Kenneth Starr. Actually, the documents Huber found weren’t themselves originals, but photocopies of computer printouts made in 1992.

Nobody who wanted to hide them could have any way of knowing how many additional copies might be floating around. Nor was Huber, an Arkansas loyalist who supervised the Clintons’ personal correspondence, certain where she had found the documents, at least according to Kendall.

In her subsequent Senate testimony, however, the former office manager at the Rose Law Firm was unequivocal. Huber recalled coming upon the time sheets in August 1995 in the “book room” on the third floor of the White House, inside the Clintons’ private quarters. Without looking to see what they were, she had stuck them in a box and taken them to her office for later filing. Then in January 1996, she had finally opened the box and gotten scared.

How she could be sure they were the same papers without having examined them in the first place was never clear. Putting the 1992 campaign records in order and storing them was one of Huber’s secondary tasks at the White House. Kendall later testified that when Huber first contacted him, “She said a number of different things that were inconsistent. She was flustered. She was upset. Her hands were shaking. She said that she had brought the documents over from the residence at some earlier point. She said she thought it was maybe three months ago. A little while later in the conversation, she referred to bringing them over ten months ago. She was very confused about the timing….She was unclear about where she had found them…. Her stories were extremely vague.”

Kendall’s co-counsel Jane Sherburne remembered the same thing. But the lawyers hadn’t pressed Huber on the issue because they didn’t want to be accused of trying to influence her testimony. Here at last was a dramatic Whitewater event that even the dullest vote could grasp. Kenneth Starr lost no time hauling the First Lady before a Washington grand jury in the most public manner possible, prompting press commentary about a “smoking gun.” The irrepressible [New York Times columnist and former Nixon speechwriter William] Safire predictably saw Nixonian skullduggery: “Can you imagine the sinking feeling in the ‘Someone,’ when he or she came back to the Book Room and found the records gone?” Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff went further. “The printouts were covered with the late Vince Foster’s handwriting,” he wrote, continuing, “It is Foster’s suicide that lends Whitewater its aura of menace.”

Hillary Clinton emerged from Starr’s grand jury to say that she had no idea where the billing records had come from, but was glad they had turned up — perhaps because they provided only exculpatory evidence. Along with Vince Foster’s handwriting, FBI fingerprint analysts found his fingerprints, as well as those of the First Lady. Hers were found only on those pages dealing with issues discussed during the 1992 campaign—but not on topics of more recent interest, such as the ill-fated McDougal real estate development and shopping center known as “Castle Grande.” All the forensic evidence suggested that the billing records had in fact been misplaced ever since the 1992 election.

The records’ contents also supported Hillary’s testimony and public statements in detail. In her sworn statements to RTC investigators, she had recalled only a single phone conversation with [Arkansas] Securities Commissioner Beverly Bassett Schaffer regarding the Madison Guaranty preferred stock issue. The records showed exactly one, on April 29, 1985.

Asked whether she had done any work on McDougal’s “Castle Grande” development, she had replied no. Republicans charged that an unused 1985 real estate document she had prepared for [her former law partner] Webb Hubbell’s father-in-law contradicted her. But the billing records, like all internal Rose Law Firm documents, referred to that transaction not as Castle Grande but as “the IDC matter.”

A small part of a large parcel of land Madison Guaranty bought from a company called the Industrial Development Corporation later became known as “Castle Grande”—-but not the part described in the document Hillary Clinton had prepared. Her answer was accurate.

After studying the newly found billing records, the investigators at Pillsbury, Madison & Sutro came back with an even stronger conclusion that nobody at the Rose Law Firm had done anything unethical or illegal in their representation of McDougal’s savings and loan. Regarding the unused real estate contract, the report stipulated that “while Mrs. Clinton drafted the May 1,1986 option, nothing proves she did so knowing it to be wrong, the circumstances of the work point strongly toward innocent explanations, and the theories that tie this option to wrongdoing …are strained at best.”

Starr’s investigators would spend years seeking evidence to the contrary, with no success.

Photo: U.S. Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton delivers remarks at a gathering of law enforcement leaders at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, U.S., August 18, 2016.  REUTERS/Lucas Jackson