Starr's Theory of the Case
BARNES, FRED
Starr's Theory of the Case by Fred Barnes President Clinton and his backers aren't shy about trumpeting their version of what independent counsel Kenneth Starr is up to: He's a partisan prosecutor...
...At the same time, Hubbell got lucrative legal work with the Lippo Group, Time-Warner, the city of Los Angeles, McAndrews & Forbes, and the Los Angeles-based Consumer Support and Education Fund...
...It was highly unusual for a state prosecutor to go after a friendly witness in a federal case...
...Even so, Starr hasn't made much headway in pursuing Clinton...
...Starr thinks Hillary had them...
...Starr's prosecutors contrast Hubbell's good fortune with the fate of David Hale, the ex-judge in Arkansas who testified Clinton spurred the $300,000 SBA loan...
...Initially, his job was to flesh out charges that Clinton cut corners in the Whitewater land deal and used his influence to obtain an illegal $300,000 loan from the Small Business Administration for a business associate...
...His candor lasted one day...
...Starr feels the same about the coverup of the Clinton scandals...
...To silence potentially harmful witnesses, the Clinton team tries to steer them to lawyers linked with the president's defense team...
...Minor witnesses are now represented by some of the most expensive defense lawyers in the country...
...It was Tripp's tape-recorded conversations with Lewinsky that prompted Starr's latest grand-jury probe...
...Meanwhile, Hubbell, accused of overcharging clients at the firm, worked out a plea bargain, then failed to give Starr any help in his investigation...
...This isn't the theory of the case Starr started off with...
...After four years, they say, the case still has no theme, no consistent story line...
...It's exactly what Emanuel says is lacking in Starr's case: It's the theme, the common thread that runs through every Clinton scandal—Whitewater, Travelgate, Filegate, the White House database, campaign-finance abuses, Paula Jones, Monica Lewinsky...
...Thus, investigators couldn't obtain them from the firm...
...The prosecutor, Mark Stodola, was a friend of Clinton...
...Is Emanuel right...
...Though Starr believes it began before Clinton arrived in Washington, what's significant is that it continues today at full throttle, in connection with civil suits, congressional probes, and Starr's investigation...
...Jordan denies he sought to silence her...
...And while pledging to cooperate with investigators, Clinton resists them totally, citing privileges that don't apply, failing to comply fully with subpoenas, causing delays...
...The pattern was familiar—and the tapes were the most compelling evidence that Starr had obtained to buttress his theory of a coverup...
...Those who don't (David Hale, Linda Tripp) are targeted for various forms of retribution...
...In other words, the case involved financial finagling by a guy who later became president...
...and to Webb Hubbell...
...Starr, further along than Walsh, is still trying...
...Walsh failed to prove his theory...
...You might think so based on starr's reluctance publicly to provide his own theory of the case against Clinton...
...The Clinton defense team, Starr believes, has been relentless in trying to silence inconvenient witnesses, often by steering Clinton-friendly lawyers to them...
...Everything Clinton's done post-Lewinsky—stonewalling, trying to rein in troublesome witnesses, assaulting critics, making sure the stories told by people like secretary Betty Currie dovetail with his own— has reinforced Starr's belief in his theory of the case...
...It's what one prosecutor calls "a generalized, full-court stonewall...
...There are recurring patterns in the coverup, Starr believes...
...The coverup is the story...
...But the coverup is different...
...Once Hale began cooperating with Starr, he was charged in a state prosecution with lying to insurance regulators...
...This arrangement allows the president's legal team to keep track of what witnesses have told the grand jury...
...Witnesses who protect Clinton (Webb Hubbell, Susan McDougal, even minor witnesses) are rewarded, often with jobs...
...After all, would Clinton act this way if Starr's theory were wrong...
...His pattern of arranging jobs for persons whose public testimony would be damaging to him goes back to Gennifer Flowers, with whom Clinton now admits he had an affair and for whom he arranged a job in his gubernatorial administration in Arkansas...
...After White House officials conferred with him, he changed his story...
...Clinton mysteriously appeared at the White House...
...In terms of specific criminal offenses, it involves perjury, witness tampering, conspiracy, and obstruction of justice...
...But Starr does have one, and it's both coherent and all-encompassing...
...A law partner of Hillary Rodham Clinton, Hubbell took her records from their law firm's files in 1992...
...Watt conceded he had, even mentioning the name of David Kendall to Denton...
...And these lawyers have reached joint-defense agreements with Clinton's attorneys...
...to state troopers who were offered better jobs for their silence about Clinton's private life...
...More recently, Democrats allied with Clinton have pressed a Maryland prosecutor to file charges of wiretapping against Linda Tripp...
...While these charges were serious, they weren't likely to lead to impeachment...
...In 1996, an Arkansas judge, Bill Watt, testified that he had lied to a Whitewater witness to persuade him to join Clinton's defense team...
...This investigation started on a 24-year-old real-estate deal and has ended up on a 24-year-old lady, and that's the only common thread between the two," says Rahm Emanuel, a senior Clinton adviser...
...it can be stated in one word: coverup...
...Starr's Theory of the Case by Fred Barnes President Clinton and his backers aren't shy about trumpeting their version of what independent counsel Kenneth Starr is up to: He's a partisan prosecutor who's out of control, poking into what should be private matters, leaking, and violating constitutional rights, all to bring down the president by unscrupulous means...
...In particular, Lewinsky's insistence that Clinton pal Vernon Jordan had sought jobs for her so she wouldn't reveal her affair with the president matched Clinton's practice of arranging employment for potentially damaging witnesses...
...Starr and his team of prosecutors believe that they have encountered a longstanding, comprehensive, White House-directed effort to hide facts and suppress the truth about a whole series of Clinton scandals...
...All of this explains why Starr and his aides were so intrigued by Tripp's tapes of her conversations with Lewinsky...
...A Starr deputy, Jackie Bennett, asked Watt if he'd tried to recruit the witness, Don Denton, "into the group of people who were resisting cooperation with the independent counsel" and were "teaming up and exchanging information...
...Several years later, billing records that undermined testimony by Mrs...
...In Starr's view, the Lewinsky affair is critical because Clinton's handling of it is so characteristic...
...Fred Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard...
...In another case, a former Democratic National Committee finance chairman, Truman Arnold, told reporters that DNC fundraisers routinely tapped a White House database for names of possible donors...
...Kendall is Clinton's personal defense attorney...
...oddly enough, Starr's theory of the case is much like independent counsel Lawrence Walsh's in Iran-contra...
...Walsh thought there was a coverup involving President Reagan in Iran-contra that overshadowed the scandal itself...
Vol. 3 • March 1998 • No. 26
