Tag Archives: Impeachment/President Clinton

Posted on

A Car Is Not a Pirate Ship

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

Indonesia-Lippo-Riady-Huang-Hub-bellgate. Taiwangate. Koreagate (II). Buddhist-Temple-Goregate. Filegate. Travelgate. Paulagate. Cisnerosgate Espygate.

Where to begin?

Some speculations: The man to watch will be Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr, who is still trying to build a case against the president or the first lady or both. The probability that Stair will accuse one or both of crimes seems below 50-50 at this point-but not by much. And there may be less noise than expected on the congressional front, given Republicans’ fears of exposing their own dirty campaign finance laundry.

While a whole new criminal investigation may well find grist in the rivers of cash flowing from the Far East into Democratic campaign coffers-via Clinton cronies who freauented the White House-the greatest threat to the president is the same old scandal that many write off as too complicated to interest (or entertain) the public: Whitewater.

The central questions on which Starr’s team of prosecutors seems to be focusing are whether either or both of the Clintons engaged in a criminal conspiracy with their now convicted former business partners, James and Susan McDougal, to avert bankruptcy for their Whitewater Development Corp. by keeping the McDougals’ foundering Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan afloat during the mid-1980s, and to obtain money by fraud from David Hale’s Capital Management Services Inc.; and whether either or both of the Clintons have engaged ever since then in cover-up activities-both in Arkansas and in the White House-including destroying and secreting evidence, obstructing justice, and perjury.

Posted on

Time of Testing for Kenneth Starr

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

The most important lawyer in America this year is Kenneth Starr, the Whitewater independent counsel.

Starr has the awesome responsibility of passing the most definitive official judgment that we will get in this election year on whether President Bill Clinton and first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton are lawbreakers, or liars, or both. And it’s time Starr began working at that job full time and resolving the key questions.

This has already taken longer than it needed to, perhaps in part because of Starr’s part-time status. In an era of deep public cynicism about government, it will take consummate skill, wisdom, balance, and attention to detail to bring the investigation to a satisfactory conclusion. And Starr must operate under conditions that won’t make it easy for his work to inspire public confidence:

Starr is a politically active, conservative Republican, former solicitor general with ambitions to return to high office-whether by winning a Supreme Court appointment, by running for the Senate, or otherwise-and thus has an incentive to please the Republican leaders who are now bent on driving President Clinton from office.

Starr has expanded and prolonged an investigation that began more than two years ago, and was proceeding more expeditiously under his predecessor, Robert Fiske Jr. Starr had no prosecutorial experience. And he has continued to make very big bucks working part time for private clients, including a conservative foundation that has also financed some of the president’s most virulent critics, as well as tobacco clients and others that are locked in combat with the Clinton administration on various fronts.

Given all this baggage. Starr must work especially hard to dispel suspicions that his million-dollar-a-month investigation is tainted by a subtler brand of the partisanship than pervades the parallel probe being conducted by Sen. Alfonse D’Amato (R-N.Y).

Posted on

NewsHour: Presidential Subpoena – February 6, 1996

by

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Thank you both for being with us. Rex Nelson, this trial is set to begin March 4th. Refresh our memory about the trial. What’s–who’s being charged with what?

REX NELSON, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette: (Little Rock) Well, of course, we have a Whitewater grand jury which has been meeting for quite some time here in Little Rock. An indictment came down from that grand jury on August 17th of last year charging Jill McDougal, Susan McDougal, and Bill Clinton’s successor as governor of Arkansas, Jim "Guy" Tucker. They are being tried together on charges that are not directly related to the Whitewater Development Corporation, which, of course, was the President’s partnership with Jim McDougal.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Now, they have, what, 17 charges in total? They’ve been indicted on 17 charges, or at least Susan McDougal has, right?

MR. NELSON: There are actually nineteen charges against Jim McDougal, eleven charges against Gov. Tucker, and eight charges against Susan McDougal.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: And what–how was President Clinton related to this? Why would the McDougals want him to testify on their behalf?

MR. NELSON: Really, if the linchpin of the prosecution case is a former municipal judge here in Little Rock named David Hale. David Hale claims that a lot of Arkansas political figures back in the ’80’s put pressure on him to make unwise loans. One of those political figures was then Gov. Bill Clinton, and he says that Clinton put pressure on him to make a $300,000 loan to Susan McDougal, and so Susan McDougal says I need the President’s testimony in order to clear me.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: And we should make it clear that the President is not being accused of any wrongdoing here.

Posted on

NewsHour: Stuart Taylor on the Whitewater Grand Jury – January 23, 1996

by

MARGARET WARNER: First Lady Hillary Clinton has been subpoenaed by Whitewater Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr to appear before a federal grand jury here in Washington this Friday. For more on this unprecedented event we hear from Stuart Taylor, correspondent for the American Lawyer and Legal Times and a regular on the NewsHour. All first, first give us the context for this. Which grand jury exactly is it that the First Lady’s been asked to appear before?

STUART TAYLOR, The American Lawyer: The grand jury in Washington. There’s also a grand jury in Little Rock being run by the same Independent Counsel, Kenneth Starr, investigating Whitewater and related matters. And the two grand juries are dividing their work up roughly with the Washington grand jury investigating the things that happened in Washington since President Clinton took office, the Arkansas grand jury investigating things that happened in Arkansas earlier, but there’s great overlap between the investigations. And they share information with each other.

MARGARET WARNER: All right. And what do we know from the subpoena or from what’s come out about what she’s going to be asked to testify about?

MR. TAYLOR: Well, the subpoena and the fact that about six or seven other people were subpoenaed seems to indicate that the Independent Counsel is particularly interested in how these Rose Law Firm billing records for Hillary Clinton appeared mysteriously in the White House living quarters some two years after they had been subpoenaed and whether someone was hiding them or obstructing justice. However, the White House statement that was put out yesterday also indicated that the First Lady was prepared to discuss the content of the billing records which suggest that some of the questions may get into looking at particular entries and how do you explain this and how do you reconcile it with your testimony on that and so forth.

Posted on

The Clinton-Cisneros Web of Deception

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

Q: At any point did you lie to the FBI?

A: No, I did not.

With that, Henry Cisneros lied again, this time (March 15) to USA Today. Fortunately for Cisneros, who is secretary of housing and urban development, and for President Bill Clinton, lying to the news media (and the American people) is not a crime.

But lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation is. It’s a federal felony, punishable by up to five years in prison. And people have gone to the slammer for lies less blatant (and less "material") than those that Henry Cisneros told his FBI background checkers in late 1992 or early 1993.

Cisneros’ lies, made in pursuit of the high office he now holds, were, to be sure, pretty petty: He understated (vastly) the amounts of-and perhaps the motivation for-his more than $150,000 (as of 1992) in payments to his former mistress. Whether lies of that nature are serious enough to warrant prosecution is a "close and difficult" question, as Attorney General Janet Reno said in her March 13 application for appointment of an independent counsel to consider whether Cisneros should be indicted for his false statements and for conspiring with the former mistress to deceive the FBI.

Posted on

A Betrayal of the Constitution

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

In a sad display of Democratic hypocrisy-only cosmetically offset by a smaller dose of the Republican variety-President Bill Clinton is about to trash one of the Constitution’s cardinal principles: its solemn reservation to Congress of the power "to declare war."

If this would-be imperial president fulfills his lawless (and foolish) vow to invade Haiti without first seeking a congressional vote of approval, he and his congressional accomplices will have administered a near-fatal blow to the framers’ carefully crafted restraints on the President’s war-making power.

Already weakened by decades of Cold War strangulation-most recently by Presidents Reagan and Bush-those restraints may not survive this betrayal by their supposed Democratic guardians. Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell of Maine, House Speaker Thomas Foley of Washington and many others have abdicated their constitutional responsibilities and bowed to Bill Clinton’s power grab.

The planned 20,000-troop invasion of Haiti would surpass recent Republican rapes of the Constitution in at least one sense: It would be the first time a president has launched an invasion without seeking congressional consent solely because he couldn’t get it. It will also apparently be the first time an invasion has been sped up to pre-empt Congress from voting to forbid it.

Worse still, the White House claims power to launch an invasion even if Congress does forbid it. Or, at least, so one anonymous official told The New York Times, " ‘Either the [congressional] leadership figures out a way not to have the vote, or we find some compromise, or we lose and go ahead with the invasion anyway.’ " Having thus posited a presidential predisposition to commit an impeachable offense, this official blandly added, " ‘Politically, there are no great options.’ ”

Posted on

Why Clinton Should Get Limited Immunity

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

"The entire presidency could turn on the occurrence of a trial like this" -White House Special Counsel Lloyd Cutler, May 24, on "The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour."

Wow. That really lets the cat out of the bag. This stuff about "temporal immunity" (as Cutler called it) is not, at bottom, about diverting President Bill Clinton from his weighty duties or wasting his time (although Cutler stressed that, too). It’s about muffling potentially ruinous publicity.

That’s why all the president’s lawyers are cooking up arguments for putting Paula Corbin Jones’ sexual-harassment lawsuit on ice for as long as seven years.

The president is worried that the American people will turn from him in disgust if they have their noses rubbed in the spectacle of Arkansas state troopers, who were the then-governor’s bodyguards, swearing that Clinton regularly sent them out to procure women and had them arrange and conceal his extramarital encounters.

Worse, Trooper Danny Lee Ferguson, Clinton’s co-defendant, has told reporters (and might testify) that the president telephoned him several times dangling possible federal jobs, perhaps in the hope of keeping him quiet, and that Clinton operatives pressured him not to tell the truth. (The White House denies this.)

Worse still would be the spectacle of the president undergoing cross-examination about whether he had ever had Ferguson bring Paula Jones to him in a hotel room (as Ferguson and Jones have both said), and if so, for what purpose. The president has said- through his private lawyer, Robert Bennett-that he "has no recollection of ever meeting this woman." Nobody I know believes that.