Bill's Errand Boys
Adams, James Ring
"Bill's Errand Boys" by James Ring Adams The Senate Whitewater Committee's final report reveals defiant Republicans in command of the facts and sychophantic Democrats in sync with the...
...Two weeks later, after this magazine published an article discussing Hillary's contacts with Mrs...
...They could well have been among the bulky files that Margaret Williams, Hillary's chief of staff, was seen removing from Foster's office on July 2o, 1993...
...Hubbell...
...The minority pushes the line that her first referral was shoddy work and deserved to be rejected...
...According to the latest polls, three times as many people are likely to believe in UFOs than to accept the White House story that it pulled FBI files on Republicans by an innocent mistake...
...Based on the description of the referral in public testimony (the original document is still confidential), she flagged the money trail from the Flow erwood Farms loan to the $300,000 that Bill Clinton encouraged David Hale to lend the McDougals...
...It is a lobotomized, uncritical legal brief for the administration, turning United States senators into errand boys for the office of the White House counsel...
...The Whitewater Report charges that Hanson improperly gave the White House advance notice of criminal referrals on Madison that mentioned the Clintons...
...Time and again, it comforts us with the assurance that no impropriety took place because no evidence has been found to support the charge...
...In October 1993, the second wave of RTC criminal referrals mentioned former Arkansas Securities Commissioner Beverly Bassett Schaffer as a possible witness to criminal misconduct...
...Those with the stamina for this thousand-page document can draw their own conclusions from the internal evidence, tone, and deportment of both sides...
...In the course of two interviews with the FDIC in early June, Denton recollected a telephone call with Mrs...
...She apparently drafted some side legal work arising from an allegedly sham real estate transaction called Castle Grande that ultimately cost the taxpayers some $4 million...
...Schaffer was in office, she showed more strength and independence on matters other than Madison than is generally realized...
...One wag suggests making the first lady a permanent position independent of the president, to be occupied by Martha Stewart...
...The minority report perhaps deliberately confuses the decision to act on a referral with a simple formal letter saying it had been received...
...But in almost everything she did, she also represented her husband, who was a partner in Whitewater even before she was...
...It raises the interesting question what he has been telling the independent counsel...
...The Whitewater Report does drop the interesting hint that RTC Assistant General Counsel Andrew Tomback tried to arrange a search of the offices of the Kansas City Three before they returned to work but was rebuffed by the RTC inspector general...
...One of Vincent Foster's prints appears next to an entry showing a telephone conference on April 7, 1986 between Madison Guaranty official Donald Denton and Mrs...
...In a series of meetings, senior aides debated sending emissaries to Fayetteville to keep her in line...
...The minority says witnesses aren't credible because they do remember...
...As it was, Hale just wasn't interested...
...This improper and unilateral act "directly resulted in the public dissemination of confidential information," complains its report...
...It is a strategy that relies shrewdly and with invariable success on the laziness of the Washington press corps...
...Clinton, Mr...
...It argues that "neither Fiske nor Starr has brought any criminal charges based on allegations contained in the referral...
...Even though she violated not one but two memoranda of policy against passing on the confidential transcripts, the minority comforts us with the thought that she didn't change the outcome of that Ethics Office investigation...
...By purging her files, she hid her role in this transaction, and made it harder for the Rose firm to defend the Resolution Trust Corporation, the savings and loan clean-up agency which took over Madison, when Seth Ward sued to collect his commission...
...Lewis, the minority report alleges, committed a "serious breach" of RTC policy...
...How would Ben-Veniste, or any of the committee Democrats, have reacted if a Watergate defendant had said the American public could take comfort in the fact that incriminating evidence was no longer available...
...But Lewis still did remarkable work...
...Narrow, carefully crafted statements are designed to generate the impression that nothing is wrong, so that they can be converted into sound bites...
...enemy), eventually the proof that the explanation was erroneous...
...BILL'S ii MI I by James Ring Adams The Senate Whitewater Committee's final report reveals defiant Republicans in command of the facts and sychophantic Democrats in sync with the administration's evasions and lies...
...Do you think McDougal couldn't have figured out how to make it work, if the offer ever became more than a casual aside...
...34 August r996 • The American Spectator Nothing this election year may be as revealing as the report of the Senate Whitewater Committee...
...Schaffer worked with Bill's Little Rock friends on a chronology of her work on Madison...
...She edited the draft report of the two inspectors general in ways another investigator thought "were slanting the facts...
...He and his staff maintained a network of loyal 36 August r996 . The American Spectator ists at lower levels as well, people they could work with informally...
...One shudders to contemplate the propaganda barrage that would have ensued if that Little Rock jury had failed to convict...
...As one of them aptly described their dilemma: The hearing that afternoon was in many ways typical of a pattern of unfortunate and frequently avoidable mistakes...
...Some of his points later emerged in a well-circulated piece by Arkansas Democrat Gazette columnist Gene Lyons in the October 1994 Harper's magazine...
...Hale is firmly convinced he was singled out to be the fall guy for the Madison Guaranty scandal, saving the skin of clients of his lending company such as Arkansas Governor Jim Guy Tucker...
...On the Senate Watergate Committee, ranking minority member Howard Baker (and his counsel Fred Thompson) at least publicly intoned the mantra, "What did he know and when did he know it...
...This episode gives one motive-and there are others-for the famous search of Vincent Foster's White House office on the night of his death...
...The report claims "inconsistencies" in Hale's account of his meeting with Clinton...
...His poll ratings plunged, and leaders of the president's own party began to ask embarrassing questions in public...
...When Mrs...
...The prime exam- been ordered ple is the defensive and blustery Minority White- by President water Report, which makes no pretense at Clinton himself...
...The two aides from the White House security office, Craig Livingstone and Anthony Marceca, turn out to have a history of political thuggery...
...The report singles out RTC Senior Attorney April Breslaw, formerly the friend and paymaster for Webb Hubbell...
...Although by statute the RTC should have internal autonomy in all its affairs, Hanson and her boss deputy secretary of the treasury Roger Altman regularly intervened...
...The press headlines so far are the least of the story...
...The minority tips its hand when it says that the Pillsbury, Madison & Sutro report "found no evidence of the type of `over-arching check kiting scheme' alleged in the 1992 referral...
...Its caliber of argument is evident in its blustery summation: Superheated and untenable conclusions...
...He demanded an open court hearing, described in great detail...
...During January Mrs...
...According to the Whitewater Report, Hillary is the sole suspect in their illegal concealment...
...The check-kiting is so obvious from any look at the McDougals' records that this statement raises doubts about the work of the Pillsbury law firm (and the $4 million it was paid...
...The minority challenges this newly "refreshed" recollection, which Denton failed to remember in his first FDIC interview...
...The minority devotes a 3o-page section to "David Hale's False Allegation Against President Clinton," even though he didn't even testify before the committee because of minority opposition to granting him immunity...
...This sequence explains some of the mystery about the search of Fos ter's office...
...At worst, they've condoned obstruction and evasion from the White House...
...One has to weigh Hale's word against Clinton's, and that of the Whitewater Committee Democrats...
...Jim Leach with evidence of tampering with the Madison investigation...
...Vince Foster apparently ordered them printed out during the 1992 campaign, and he was the last one seen to have them in custody...
...The committee's minority counsel, Richard Ben-Veniste, played a bit part in Watergate as assistant prosecutor on the Jaworski Task Force, a forerunner of the modern Independent Counsel...
...impartial fact-seeking...
...The agent of this transaction was Little Rock businessman Seth Ward, father-in-law of Hillary's law partner Webb Hubbell, who was later number three at the justice Department before going on to federal prison...
...On January 7, she was still on the White House's mind...
...Clinton on April 7,1986, in which he said he warned her about a problem in her work for Madison...
...By the end of December, the president and Lindsey went to a University of Arkansas basketball game with Mrs...
...In the second sentence, we omit the name "Nixon...
...It wasn't enough for him to appoint department heads and work through the chain of command...
...rules of propriety and procedure, even statutory and constitutional barriers, have been swept away for no other purpose than to cover up Bill Clinton's past...
...And so, it says, there are "serious questions about his credibility...
...As it dryly notes, "[O]nly three people had previously shown an interest in and handled the billing records-Mrs...
...If we f--- this up, we're done...
...A host of cultural cues and press reports is setting her up as the scapeperson of the Senate's Whitewater report...
...The report instead analyzes his testimony at the McDougal/Tucker trial...
...It's understandable that the early headlines featured the first lady...
...As an independently elected Arkansas official recently told The American Spectator, "There was always someone at the door when you came to the office, telling you what the Governor wanted done...
...But they uniformly show a willingness to brush aside all the safeguards that try to keep the bureaucracy focused on the public good, instead of the whims of the Chief Executive...
...The minority waxes indignant about her decision to approach Rep...
...Wouldn't his name appear on the mortgage, argues the report...
...Clinton to make that $300,000 loan to Susan McDougal...
...Foster and Mr...
...The Clinton defense that there was no attempt to impede Hale's case misses the point, since Hale argued that his prosecution was being speeded up...
...Hale believes that Clinton wanted him convicted so that his damaging testimony could be dismissed as not credible...
...Said one of them, "I mean the investigation was about the Treasury giving information to the White House, and here it goes again, the same thing...
...Schaffer, we received a call from her husband presenting a detailed rebuttal to the suggestion that Hillary had subjected her to undue pressure...
...The IGs were assembling facts so that the Office of Government Ethics (OGE) could decide whether the original Treasury contacts with the White House were ethical...
...The missionary work bore fruit...
...Even Hillary's brother-in-law stands by grinning on national television at bizarre insinuations about her sexual preference...
...35 The American Spectator • August 1996 A host of cultur al cues and press reports is setting up First Lady Hillary as the scapeperson of the Senate Whitewater Committee's final report...
...The third case, involving David Hale and his Small Business Administration-backed loans, remains a controversy...
...39 The American Spectator • August x996...
...Even with all the massaging, the OGE had made no such statement...
...1 Co-authored by George Frampton, Jr., an attorney who worked with BenVeniste on the Watergate task force...
...The details of the majority report show a White House, in ways both subtle and crude, trying to make all parts of the federal bureaucracy subject to its whims...
...It gives a reason for those early morning calls on July zz between Hillary, her confidante Susan Thomases, and chief of staff Williams...
...She and Altman were forced to resign in the first round of Whitewater hearings, in 1994, and the Whitewater Committee called for a criminal investigation of his allegedly misleading testimony...
...He sent copies of this clipping to aides Bruce Lindsey and Thomas (Mack) McLarty...
...Given this effort, it's surprising that the attack on Hale is so weak...
...No surprise from Dodd, perhaps: he's co-chairman of the Democratic National Committee...
...Not only is chivalry a victim, this campaign distorts the interim lessons of Whitewater...
...He says he doesn't remember passing on details of the fraud charges against Hale, but his subordinates say he told them that he had...
...Curiously, the minority report does not address Hillary's decision to destroy her Madison files in 1988...
...At this point, we have to say, give us a break...
...Never mind that Rep...
...From the film The American President, featuring the romance of an unmarried...
...Fortunately the Whitewater report gives the public an opportunity to sort things out for themselves...
...He later became Clinton's assistant secretary of the interior for fish, wildlife, and parks...
...The minority makes a great deal of Lewis's insistence on getting an acknowledgment of the first referral from the Little Rock FBI just weeks after its submission, a process that the report said normally takes ninety days...
...Among other things, the transcripts contained details about the criminal referrals...
...An attack on Jeff Gerth's original New York Times reports on Whitewater, it concentrated on defending Mrs...
...But Bill Clinton's instinct for political self-preservation runs far beyond the preparation of talking points...
...One of the documents he tried to hold back from the Whitewater Committee was a clipping of a December 20,1993 New York Times editorial on Whitewater on which he had scribbled "Bassett did good job in [campaign] on this-can she now...
...Jean Hanson, the Treasury Department's general counsel, was a central figure in another improper interference...
...One suspects that the small minority staff had a great deal of outside help from the White House...
...The majority thinks administration witnesses are lying when they say they don't remember something...
...It was this report that White House Counsel Lloyd Cutler cited in an August 5,1995 Senate Banking Committee hearing as saying that no White House official had violated ethical standards...
...He told the FDIC that she "summarily dismissed" his concern "in a manner which he took to mean that he was to take care of savings and loan matters, and that she would take care of legal matters...
...Others on the IG team expressed "shock...
...Schaffer and her husband, Archie, the public relations director for Tyson Foods...
...The Whitewater Committee wasn't able to prove this probably unprovable charge, although it did show that the White House was briefed on the case as it developed...
...A number of federal investigations had them under subpoena...
...The attacks on Hale's personal character founder on the principle that you know a man by his friends, and that Hale's political friends included the likes of the McDougals and Jim Guy Tucker...
...No tactician could have arranged the sequence of events in a more disadvantageous order: first the bombshell announcement, next the simplistic explanation (sometimes coupled with a salvo against an identifiable...
...Despite this experience, however, Stonewall Ben-Veniste led the Senate Democrats in a slavish defense of the White House...
...But the lead Democrats on the Whitewater Committee, Paul Sarbanes of Maryland and Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, are die-hard Clintonites who have tried to play down the whole affair as a political witch-hunt...
...In fact, Hale was quite happy to help people he considered part of his "political family...
...According to the report, Mrs...
...This is the minority argumentation in the face of Starr's overwhelming courtroom triumph...
...In people like Breslaw and Kerner, one can see this network taking shape in the federal government, with the potential to squelch investigations and rewrite reports...
...Someone in the RTC put Lewis and her two supervisors on administrative leave after their work became public, a blatant display of intimidation, but the affair is under wraps while Kenneth Starr investigates...
...She had dropped James McDougal's savings and loan as a client, because the firm was pursuing more lucrative business on the other side of the fence, helping the federal government shut down the looted thrifts...
...incumbent, to the "Saturday Night Live" leers about the services O. J. Simpson could provide for Bill Clinton, the theme of the second administration is shaping up to be "Free to date...
...Of these, Mr...
...This isn't the first time Senate Democrats used this forum to address extraneous charges against the Clintons...
...Consider the report's treatment of Jean Lewis, the outstanding whistle-blower in the affair...
...pervade the Majority report...
...But during Watergate, there was at least some bipartisan effort to find out what had happened...
...It is distinguished by harsh personal attacks against every witness damaging to the White House and uncritical acceptance of every administration apologist...
...Ironically this pressure play caused Hale to go to the press and break open the Whitewater story...
...Largely overlooked by the press, the details of the Whitewater Report show a much broader cover-up attempt that extended through the federal bureaucracy, and that could only have been ordered by the president himself...
...Schaffer never came back to the phone when I called him...
...Denton recently testified that during this call he warned Mrs...
...The minority writes in the same weaselly style that marks those "exoneration" reports issued so frequently by the administration...
...Her White House enemies are treating her as the tail of the president's tear-away shirt-and who leaked her imaginary dialogues with Eleanor Roosevelt...
...But there are blank areas in their relationship, probably because Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr is pushing his own investigation...
...Or has Clinton managed to bring his party members in the co-equal Congress firmly under his discipline...
...The minority's main valid point is that the press, presumably duped by conservative activist Floyd Brown of Citizens United, embellished Hale's story to say he was "pressured" by Gov...
...Two of these cases fell outside the scope of the Whitewater Committee-the indictment of Billy Dale, head of the White House Travel Office, and the destruction of Arkansas attorney general Steve Clark in 199o on charges of credit-card fraud...
...But the minority is up to the task...
...According to a set of notes kept by communications director Mark Gearan and released only at the tail end of the Whitewater hearings, Harold Ickes said, "Bassett is so f---ing important...
...When Sen...
...those discussions led White House counsel Bernard Nussbaum to reverse a decision of the previous afternoon and shut career Justice Department employees out of the review of Foster's documents...
...The minority finds some documentary inconsistencies-Denton's phone slip for that call with Hillary was attached to a sheet for a separate matter...
...Indeed, Bill Clinton worried about keeping her in line...
...The Whole Cover-up Catalog Some of the administration's damage control attempts are emphasized in the Whitewater Report...
...The words, with some deletions, are those of Richard BenVeniste, the chief minority counsel...
...Kerner's chain of command ran to Jean Hanson, and her behavior bore out the suspicion that she served two masters...
...As a Rose Law Firm partner, Hillary was point person of her family's business deals, and her name may show up on embarrassing financial documents yet to be revealed...
...The tapes never turned up, but the flap produced a spate of editorials calling for Nixon's resignation...
...For the most part, the hand of Bill is well hidden in this network, but one incident in the Whitewater Report shows how events trace back to his subtle directions...
...The minority trashes witnesses when they do remember...
...But here the minority is at its most disingenuous...
...According to Stonewall, BenVeniste "listened in controlled anger...
...In fact, Pillsbury partner Jay Stephens, the arch-Republican former U.S...
...There is an interesting polarity on the Whitewater Committee...
...Her department was the overseer of the RTC and its investigations...
...At best, they've cast themselves as Johnnie Cochran and Robert Shapiro to Bill Clinton's O.J...
...This whole sequence proves out a pattern that goes back to Clinton's career as governor of Arkansas...
...The Senate report charges that Kerner coached witnesses before their interviews and then leaked sensitive transcripts to the Treasury general counsel's office...
...As in the The report shows Nixon years, the White House is willing to over- a much broader ride all restraints of pro priety and bureaucratic cover-up extend ethics to protect the pres- . ident's narrow personal ing through interest...
...Although the coverage has gone largely to the accusations against Hillary Clinton, this much abused lady is a diversion from the chilling picture presented by both the Republican and Democratic parts of the report-the portrait of Bill Clinton as control freak...
...And this kind of hardball is something even Hillary wouldn't have the arm to throw...
...The unrelenting attack portrays her as a Republican partisan bent on pushing through the Madison criminal referral before the 1992 election so that she could "alter history" and prevent the election of that "lying bastard" Clinton...
...According to testimony at Clark's trial, the charges were based on a story developed by Bruce Lindsey and Webster Hubbell and leaked to Arkansas Gazette reporter Anne Farris, who more recently was the researcher for James Stewart's Whitewater book Blood Sport...
...He has been accused at least three times of using criminal prosecutions to discredit inconvenient people...
...0 ther witnesses than Lewis are hurting the White House, and the minority rushes in a last-minute attack on Harry Don Denton, the Madison Guaranty officer who has recently brought forth damaging testimony against Hillary Clinton...
...attorney who was eased out of the project after White House objections, criticized the end product for this very failure to look at the overall context...
...But if the Whitewater scandal is about anything, it is about the massive, long-term effort of the Clintons to seek out and destroy incriminating evidence...
...The advance portions of the majority report that were leaked to selected members of the press told a devastating story about her apparent obstruction of justice...
...37 The American Spectator . August 1996 The majority thinks witnesses are lying when they don't remember The Defense Team One has to feel some pity for the Democrats charged with defending Clinton...
...But they come from his book, Stonewall: The Real Story o f the Watergate Prosecution,' about his service as an assistant on the Watergate Special Prosecution Force, the forerunner of the institution of the Independent Counsel...
...The minority report in its totality shows the impact of this control...
...A set of billing records from the Rose firm was the last surviving account of Hillary's work on Castle Grande...
...The Majority Report inferred that, during the 1992 campaign or after, Foster and Mrs...
...Clinton began her habit of destroying evidence in 1988, when she purged her Madison Guaranty files at the Rose Law Firm...
...All we know for sure is that these records turned up again in August 1995 on a table in a third floor White House storage room that lay between Hillary's office and the exercise room...
...Lacking any credible case against the President, the Majority is now engaging in a blatantly political game of "tag" by tarring several witnesses with unsupportable suggestions of perjury in a bid to grab media attention...
...Clinton about legal problems in paying Seth Ward his Castle Grande commission and that she "summarily dismissed" his cautions...
...This type of interference continued, incredibly, when the inspectors general at Treasury and the RTC launched an investigation into the first round of leaks to the White House...
...This classic abuse of FBI resources fits far too neatly into the pattern of White House behavior evinced in the White water Report...
...The subsequent year-long stall on the referral certainly bears out Lewis's concern...
...The American people deserve to know, and now can take comfort in knowing, that this year-long investigation shows no misconduct or abuse of power by their President or First Lady...
...Sometime soon after, this writer drove to Fayetteville hoping for a personal interview, but Mr...
...But this is by no means the whole story...
...Yet just thirty pages later, the report leaps to the defense of Francine Keener, the Treasury lawyer who leaked witness depositions to the White House...
...The first sentence modifies the word "pattern" with the ending clause "which was to dog the Nixon White House virtually until the President's resignation...
...Cutler later confessed to the committee that he had "transgressed...
...But according to the committee, Hillary had helped McDougal arrange one episode of plunder...
...Against this background the developing Filegate scandal takes on a more sinister cast...
...And then-freshman Republican Lowell Weicker infuriated Nixon loyalists with his bullying indignation...
...Clinton...
...Their report also devotes a long section to James Stewart's Blood Sport...
...The Majority Report emphatically charges, for example, that there was a "concerted effort" to obstruct the RTC's criminal investigation of Madison Guaranty and Whitewater...
...Clinton worked together to reconstruct her role in Castle Grande: "Both had a powerful motive to protect the billing records from scrutiny...
...A comparison of their records and motives does not make Hale the less credible party...
...38 August r 9 9 6 . The American Spectator norm, FBI Special Agent Steve Irons corrected him, saying the typical response time is a week...
...should now be applied to Senate Democrats as a whole...
...Hubbell reported to federal prison on August 7,1995 " Further conclusions come from an FBI fingerprint analysis of the documents...
...According to the Whitewater Report, the IGs worried that one of their staff, Treasury IG counsel Francine Keener, was a "mole" for the Treasury officials they were supposed to be investigating...
...This trail produced Susan McDougal's convictions and still bodes trouble for the Clintons (see "The Case Against Hillary," TAS, February 1996...
...But all it can show is that Clinton offered his land holding in Marion County (i.e., Whitewater Estates) as security while saying his name couldn't appear anywhere in connection with the loan...
...How would Ben-Veniste have reacted if a Watergate defen dant had said the public could take comfort that incriminating evidence was no longer available...
...Foster passed away on July 20,1993 and Mr...
...It turned out later that Cutler was stretching the facts...
...It takes a great deal of footwork to dance around the massive fact that she called for a criminal investigation when nobody else did, and that the end result was the conviction of both Jim and Susan McDougal and the sitting gov error of Arkansas...
...Witnesses, of course, often have faulty memories, which is why investigators prefer to deal with documents...
...Sarbanes suggested in hearings that ninety days was the something...
...It ignores the fact that her referral was approved by two career supervisors, both Democrats...
...The energetic SBA Administrator Erskine Bowles had direct access to Clinton and he is now a White House aide...
...Partisanship has colored the Majority's decisions in conduct ing the inquiry and in reaching conclusions that clearly are intended for political impact...
...JAMEs RING Annhls is an investigative writer for The American Spectator...
...In fact Altman for a while was acting head of the RTC, a blatant conflict of interest that allowed him to keep tabs on the Madison investigation...
...One can understand why Hillary so vehemently opposed the appointment of a special prosecutor...
...At the end of the month, she went to a White House movie with Bill, Hillary, and Bruce Lindsey...
...But worn down by years of scandal and the federal abuse, the resistance of the bureaucracy and the bureaucracy that Washington establish ment is far weaker than it could only have was in the days of Water gate...
...Their detailed and artfully worded report shows an immense amount of work...
...The House Banking Committee had just completed hearings in which they were a major issue...
...Well, the Nixon White House did just that, telling Jaworski's investigators that tapes of two conversations they had subpoenaed did not exist...
...We don't know for whom Breslaw was acting when she told RTC investigator Jean Lewis that "higher-ups" at the RTC wanted to be able to say that Whitewater was not a factor in the failure of Madison Guaranty...
...others fall outside its scope...
...Schaffer's performance...
...Making Hillary the Fall Girl A first conclusion from reading the full document is that Hillary Clinton is getting a raw deal...
...Although Hillary played the most visible role in the hours after Foster's death, the documents in his office were a potential threat to Bill, too...
...They may find that the question once posed by Deputy Attorney General Philip Heymann to White House counsel Bernard Nussbaum-"Bernie, are you hiding something...
...This may be factual only in the narrowest possible legal sense-that the referrals did not cite the specific criminal statutes that provided chapter and verse for the Tucker-McDougal indictments or any of Stares fourteen other successes...
...Why hasn't this begun to happen with the Senate Democrats...
...Is it because Clinton now looks as strong politically as Nixon did in 1972...
...Leach, now chairman of the House Banking Committee, is one of the most serious and respected members of Congress, and that congressional oversight is one of the essential checks on government abuse...
...The lack of questioning from the minority Democrats is an ominous spectacle, boding ill not so much for the country as for them...
...The transcripts used for this report wound up at the White House...
Vol. 29 • August 1996 • No. 8
