The Nation's Pulse: Expanding Impeachment

...and Starr has been attacked for his "smear" of what Boston Globe columnist Thomas Oliphant called this "good [man] with impeccable standing around here...

...This is Audio Tape No...

...10994...

...A high-profile defense of Jordan would rule out his cooperating with Starr...

...Instead of going to Reno, Starr asked his statutory supervisors, a panel of federal judges, for authority to probe Hubbell's taxes...

...On July 2, D. C. Federal District Court Judge James Robertson threw out the case...

...Indeed, Starr's report deliberately signals that he has much more to come...

...A little-noticed detail in Judge Robertson's decision shows the state of Starr's probe just before Hurricane Monica...

...The tortuous pursuit of Hubbell explains much of Starr's delay in wrapping up the Whitewater-Madison-Rose Law Firm case...

...According to the report "the OIC [Office of Independent Counsel] also possessed evidence that the President and the First Lady knew and approved of the Hubbell-focused assistance...

...The FBI wired Tripp at Starr's request, and, by several Think of the Lewinsky referral as Starr's interim report...

...A cryptic paragraph titled "Current Status of the Investigation" says in effect that events overcame the OIC's "strong desire" to wrap up "all phases of the investigation" before reporting to Congress...

...But this text takes pains to place the Lewinsky sideshow in the context of a much more serious investigation...

...Castle Grande: James McDougal turned to this real estate development southeast of Little Rock in a last-ditch effort to save Madison Guaranty...

...Such a report would probably lack the lust of the Monica story and the drama of Vince Foster's death, but would lend the impeachment process a gravity that many find lacking in the Affair Lewinsky...

...Starr has less convulsive options...

...Oliphant foreshadowed the White House-congressional Democrat counterattack, charging that Starr inflated the case against Jordan in January when applying to Attorney General Reno for a mandate to follow the Lewinsky leads...

...As Clinton put it to the grand jury, "We have seen this four-year, $40 million investigation come down to parsing of the definition of sex...

...Judge Robertson, a Clinton appointee and former law partner of quondam Clinton White House counsel Lloyd Cutler, overruled two precedents in deciding that Starr had gone beyond his mandate in pursuing the tax case...

...What Hubbell Could Tell Starr's focus on Hubbell hints at the charges that could still emerge...

...Least likely is that he will pretend Whitewater never happened...

...The target of the Lewinsky case was not the president's sex life, but a potential conspiracy to obstruct justice involving Jordan, Hubbell, and the Clintons— the kind of thing that put so many Nixon staffers in jail...

...Jordan helped Hubbell land some of the half-million in consulting contracts that kept him afloat between his resignation from Justice and his plea bargain with Starr, the period when Hubbell's cooperation was up in the air...

...Things to Come The Monica report describes itself as incomplete...

...This continuity in personnel makes it quite possible to transfer evidence developed by the Arkansas panel to one or more of Starr's sitting juries, if in fact there aren't still a few surprises waiting to be unsealed in the Little Rock courthouse...

...Nothing keeps him from making further referrals if other parts of his case reach the same threshold...

...These payments included $62,775 from Revlon, allegedly arranged by Jordan...

...The Rose Law Firm Vacuum: Hubbell testified before Congress that he took a bundle of Rose files from the office and held on to them long after the 1992 election...

...30, of a January 13 meeting between Lewinsky and Linda Tripp at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Virginia...

...This sort of inconsistency is meat and potatoes to defense attorneys, but attacking Tape 30 would serve a grander strategy...

...As of this writing, Smalz hadn't decided whether to appeal, but Starr's appeal was slated for argument October 21 Meanwhile, the pressure is off two key Whitewater witnesses...

...Will Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr be sending up more impeachment referrals...

...This tack relies on Lewinsky's grand jury claims that neither Jordan nor Clinton explicitly told her to lie in the Paula Jones case...

...There is no reason to think that Starr's office has forgotten any of this...

...The same judge on September 22 overturned a conviction of Tyson Foods executive Archie Schaffer, won earlier this year by Donald Smalz, the independent counsel investigating former Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy...

...The missing Rose billing records that mysteriously reemerged in the White House private residence showed that Hillary prepared papers for Ward's loan, which could suggest a conspiracy to commit bank fraud...

...As the Lewinsky probe neared the threshold of the Section 595(c) provision for impeachment referrals, Starr judged delay "would be unwise...

...The Lewin-sky report spells out what Starr was after: By late 1997, this Office was investigating whether a relationship existed between consulting payments to Hubbell and his lack of cooperation (specifically his incomplete testimony) with the OIC's investigation...

...As Hillary Clinton's law partner at Rose and later as the number three man at Justice, Hubbell almost literally left fingerprints on what look like the main Whitewater coverups...

...ed to the Rose Law Firm's representation of Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan Association...

...The White House has long claimed that Starr turned up nothing on Whitewater or his other mandates, and turned to the Lewinsky case out of spite and desperation...

...70 November 1998 • The American Spectator accounts, overheard Lewinsky alleging that Jordan suborned her perjury...

...How to Read the Starr Report One of the casualties of the television and computer age is the skill of close textual analysis...

...This tape is surely part of the "corroborating information" that led to Starr's detour...

...Attorney's grand jury sitting in northern Virginia...

...He can save his material for a final report to the three-judge panel that appointed him, a submission required by law...

...He can indict lesser figures and trot out that time-honored term, "unindicted co-conspirator...

...But those immunized against the White House spin organism, including former Clinton pollster Dick Morris, warn of dramatic future indictments, possibly reaching the First Lady...

...Nor is Whitewater the only possible subject for further action...

...04 The American Spectator • November 19 9 8 71...

...Hubbell concealed information about certain core Arkansas matters, namely, the much-publicized Castle Grande real estate project and related legal work by the Rose Law Firm, including the First Lady...

...And it would be rash indeed to ignore the high level of activity at Stan's Washington-area panels, including his secretive use of the U.S...

...Schaffer is the husband of Beverly Bassett Schaffer, former head of the Arkansas Securities Department...

...At least two straws point to Starr's lasting interest in Jordan: His grand jury still sits, after calling Jordan to testify five times...

...The damning material turned up in five years of digging, and independently reported in TAS, demands a synthesis...

...A grand jury has asked White House aides about apparent attempts to intimidate witnesses and prosecutors, and Judiciary Chairman Henry Hyde has an incentive to look into that matter as well...

...The crucial section "Scope of the Referral" says the diversion into Monica came because Starr's probers were targeting presidential friend and alleged fixer Vernon Jordan...

...It will be a sticky question for House Judiciary whether Lewinsky lied to Tripp or later to the grand jury...

...Hubbell had friends in the faction-ridden and demoralized RTC who hampered the Madison probe at crucial moments...

...It may mean that Starr is working up his warehouse of evidence on Whitewater, Madison, and the compromised Resolution Trust Corporation criminal probe into a report that, like his last two products, will be painstakingly detailed, heavily documented, and apt to arrive on the Hill at an hour's notice...

...Bittman was the interrogator who seemed most to nettle President Clinton in the four-hour grand jury session on August 17...

...The glaring omission of Whitewater from the Monica Lewinsky report may not signify a dry hole, as the White House suggests...

...He got it on January 6, a week before the Lewinsky case came over the transom...

...Starr's men seized on the parallelwith Jordan's "earlier relationship with a pivotal Whitewater-Madison figure, Webster L. Hubbell...

...This is the other shoe hanging over the Judiciary Committee, and Congress...

...An attempt by a senior Justice official to fix a federal investigation at the behest of a sitting president would be the epitome of an impeachable offense...

...On April 30 of this year, after Hubbell finished 17 months in prison for fraudulent billing at Rose, Starr hit him, and his wife and his lawyer and his accountant, with a ten-count indictment for tax fraud...

...Bittman has worked with at least two of Stan's grand juries, including the marathon in Little Rock that disbanded in May...

...This decision changed the ground rules for the independent counsel, and Starr promptly appealed it...

...Most of the press, after the first nanoseconds of the Monica report's release, paid little attention to its introduction...

...Starr might be curious whether these files were "vacuumed," of what, and why...

...According to published reports, much of the obstruction probe has been in the hands of Deputy Independent Counsel Robert J. Bittman, who was diverted to the Monica case...

...It's no wonder the topic is nearly taboo, as the country heads into a mid-term election already dominated by the Lewin-sky referral...

...His request showed why Tripp's mention of Jordan hit a nerve...

...Linda Tripp told them that Jordan was finding legal counsel and jobs for Monica...

...The Independent Counsel's Office warned in the Monica report that it is still looking into File-gate, the Travel Office firings, and most ominously for the First Lady, "events relatJAMES RING ADAMS is a TAS investigative writer...

...This was clearly a squeeze play, but it ran into powerful blocking...

...On January 13, 1998, Lewinsky accepted a job at Revlon, arranged by Jordan...

...One of these RTC allies had earlier approved inflated Rose Law Firm bills that Hubbell submitted to federal bank regulators and for which he went to jail...

...A bill of particulars far beyond the Lewinsky matter can be gleaned from the public record, including the Monica report itself...

...The charge is that he tried to evade federal regulators by making straw loans through Seth Ward, Hubbell's father-in-law...

...Hubbell has received from various individuals and entities since Jan...

...In particular, the OIC was investigating whether Mr...

...But the White House strategy, and Lewinsky's testimony, will run smack into one of the most devastating items in Starr's impeachment referral, if one credits an apparent committee leak to the Drudge Report...

...Webb of Deceit Jordan is just one prong of Starr's attempt to crack Hubbell, the man who really knows where the bodies lie...

...In Robertson's summary, Starr wanted to probe "whether Webster L. Hubbell, or any individual or entity violated any criminal law, including but not limited to obstruction of justice...related to payments that Mr...

...The Criminal Referral Shuffle: The Resolution Trust Corporation reopened a criminal investigation of Madison in 1992 and produced a batch of referrals that disappeared into the higher reaches of the Justice Department when Hubbell was its de facto boss...