by Ann Coulter
There would be no reason, however, for federal officers to be asking Mrs. Clinton about “Castle Grande Estates,” the trailer park. That was not a part of any fraudulent transactions. By contrast, Castle Grande the development had been the focus of James McDougal’s first trial in 1990, and would soon form the basis of criminal fraud convictions against the McDougals and Arkansas Governor Jim Guy Tucker. Mrs. Clinton’s explanation for previous denials would be on the order of O.J. attempting to revise earlier responses to investigators about a certain “Nicole,” on the grounds that he had understood “Nicole” to refer exclusively to his manicurist, not his murdered wife whom he called “Honey.”
Moreover, if Mrs. Clinton knew Castle Grande only as “IDC,” she was the only person involved in the project who did.15 Madison’s senior loan officer said, “[I]t was known as Castle Grande by everyone that was involved within thirty days of the purchase.”16 The development was referred to as Castle Grande in minutes of a board meeting at Madison. A document prepared in 1986 by government officials from the Federal Home Loan Bank Board described the development as the “Castle Grande project.”17
Mrs. Clinton would also have been the only person in all of Little Rock who would not have recognized the Castle Grande development as “Castle Grande.” During Jim McDougal’s first trial for fraud involving Castle Grande in 1990, news accounts of the trial referred to the development only as “Castle Grande.”18 Even if Mrs. Clinton drew no connection between the trailer park “Castle Grande Estates” and the “Castle Grande” it was located on, it is difficult to understand how she could not have known that others called the entire development Castle Grande, including “everyone… involved,” Arkansas newspapers, and government officials.
Despite the evidence of Mrs. Clinton’s own entries in the long-lost billing records, Mrs. Clinton continued to attempt to minimize her role in Castle Grande. Various witnesses, however, directly contradicted the first lady. Mrs. Clinton testified, for example, that it was not she, but lawyer Richard Massey, who was responsible for bringing Madison in as a client to the Rose Law Firm. Testifying before the Senate Whitewater Committee, Massey denied Mrs. Clinton’s effort to thrust Madison Guaranty at him. At the time Mrs. Clinton claims Massey was the rainmaker on the Madison business, he was a first-year associate.
The third piece of evidence establishing either Mrs. Clinton’s criminal intent or her incompetence as a lawyer is the testimony of H. Don Denton, a senior officer at Madison Guaranty. Denton has testified that he specifically warned Mrs. Clinton about the dubious legality of the option agreement she was drafting.
In a deposition taken by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Denton said Mrs. Clinton had called him to ask for notes when she was drafting the option agreement. Denton testified that at that time he raised the legal problems of such an option agreement with Mrs. Clinton, noting that the notes “constituted in effect a parent entity fulfilling the obligation of a subsidiary.”19 Mrs. Clinton “summarily dismissed” his concerns, he told investigators. He recalled that she said something to the effect that “he would take care of savings and loan matters, and she would take care of legal matters.”20 She was, after all, one of the country’s top one hundred lawyers.
As she had once denied performing any work on Castle Grande, Mrs. Clinton denied having any such conversation with Mr. Denton. Perhaps she knew him by a different name.
The White House immediately questioned Mr. Denton’s motives, fingering him as a political enemy of the White House. But, as the New York Times has noted (prominently on page B-9), this “was the first time a figure not under threat of indictment or imprisonment ha[d] given such damaging information” against the Clintons. As such, the article observed, it was a “further dent” in the White House incompetence defense portraying Mrs. Clinton as “a mere technical adviser, not an insider in the deal.”21
THE GOVERNOR’S ALLEGED PARTICIPATION IN DAVID HALE’S CRIME
In May 1996 an Arkansas jury returned a series of guilty verdicts against Jim and Susan McDougal and Governor Jim Guy Tucker, finding that they had defrauded not only Madison Guaranty but also the federal SBA. The guilty counts involving the SBA found that the three conspired to get a $300,000 loan for Susan McDougal through a small business investment company owned by David Hale. Some of the money from that fraudulent loan ended up in Whitewater accounts.
The prosecution’s chief witness at trial was former municipal judge David Hale, who had already pleaded guilty to the loan fraud in 1994. Hale accused Mr. Clinton of pressuring him to make the incontrovertibly fraudulent $300,000 federally-backed loan to Susan McDougal in 1985. The loan was made to Mrs. McDougal’s front company, Master Marketing, in order to comply with SBA requirements that borrowers be “socially or economically disadvantaged.”
Hale testified that Clinton asked him to make the loan “for Jim [Guy Tucker] and the governor,” in Hale’s words.22 McDougal explained to Hale that the loan was necessary to “clean up some members of the political family,” a reference Hale took to mean that the loan was intended to help Mr. Clinton. (Though the White House would later denounce Hale as an enemy of the Clintons, at the time he was active in Democratic politics in Arkansas.) At the meeting in a trailer at Castle Grande, Hale testified, Clinton explicitly warned him, “My name cannot show up in this,” at which point McDougal assured Clinton that he had “already taken care of that.”23
Almost $50,000 of the $300,000 loan made to Susan McDougal’s front company found its way to the ailing Whitewater venture.24 Most of the rest of the fraudulent loan went to pay for Mrs. McDougal’s personal expenses. The loan was never repaid. (Clinton’s interest in the loan to Susan McDougal may have been unrelated to Whitewater. James McDougal suspected that his wife had had an affair with the governor.)
Mrs. McDougal served eighteen months in prison rather than tell a grand jury what she knows about the Clintons’ business dealings. When this civil contempt sanction expired she still wouldn’t talk and was indicted for criminal contempt of the grand jury. Mrs. McDougal simply refuses to state under oath whether the president lied in his testimony about the SBA loan. Of course, if she could answer “no,” there would be no reason for her to refuse to answer. If she ever did stop defying the court, one thing the grand jury might want to know is what she meant when she wrote “Payoff Clinton” as a notation on a check.
In videotaped testimony shown at the trial, Clinton denied ever discussing the loan with Hale. At trial James McDougal supported the president’s denial. McDougal attacked Starr’s prosecutors and said he would never cooperate because they were “Republican gangsters” pursuing a “political prosecution.”
One year after his conviction, however, McDougal changed his tune. He said he lied when he testified that Clinton did not pressure Hale to make the fraudulent loan. In an interview with NBC, McDougal said he had been present when the president met with Hale to discuss the loan, just as Hale had described in his testimony. McDougal explained that he had corroborated the president’s denials at trial because “I was trying my best to protect him.”
McDougal admitted that since he had lied at his trial, people would “have every right to be suspicious” and think that he was lying again. But this time, McDougal said, everything he had to say “was very well documented,” and Clinton “should be deeply concerned” about what McDougal was going to say about the meeting.
If David Hale told the truth at trial, and McDougal told the truth after the trial, the president committed perjury in his testimony for the McDougal-Tucker trial. Admittedly both McDougal and Hale are convicted felons, but that’s just the price of having to call Clinton’s friends and associates to testify.
Chapter Fifteen
Fostergate
White House Deputy Counsel Vincent Foster, Jr., was found dead in Fort Marcy Park in northern Virginia on Tuesday, July 20, 1993, shortly after 5:30 PM. The death was reportedly a suicide, a single gunshot through the head. He was the first top executiv
e branch official to kill himself since Secretary of Defense James Forrestal committed suicide in 1949.
For White House cover-ups, almost nothing beats the case of Vince Foster. Not of how he died—that, Independent Counsel Ken Starr established, was clearly a suicide—but of what Foster was working on in his White House office. (Points to ponder: If Starr is part of the vast right-wing conspiracy, why did he conclude Foster’s death was a suicide? If conspiracy theorists on the right are supposed to accept his conclusion that Foster’s death was a suicide, conspiracy theorists on the left ought to show a little respect for Starr’s determinations of malfeasance by the Clinton administration.)
FOSTER’S ROLE
Vince Foster was a longtime Arkansas friend of Bill and Hillary Clinton, having attended kindergarten with the future president and with future Chief of Staff Mack McLarty. Foster was a partner in the Rose Law Firm with Webster Hubbell, William Kennedy III, and Hillary Clinton. As deputy White House counsel as well as the Clintons’ personal attorney, Foster knew more about the first couple and their political and legal machinations than perhaps any other individual.
In addition to being the taxpayer-supported deputy White House counsel, Foster performed personal legal work for the Clintons regarding their Whitewater and tax problems. Performing personal legal work for the first couple was an improper role for a public servant, to say the least. That, however, does not seem to be what troubled Foster. Nor, obviously, did it trouble the president. In almost any other administration, a taxpayer-supported public servant performing legal work on the president’s personal affairs would have been a scandal by itself.
It was Foster who was constantly submitting corrected tax forms to the IRS on behalf of the Clintons, such as when he discovered the Whitewater partnership—of which the Clintons were half-owners—had neglected to file corporate tax returns for three years.1 Foster himself referred to the first couple’s tax issues as a “can of worms.” As Special Prosecutor Robert Fiske determined in his report on Foster’s death, the May 1993 sacking of Billy Dale and the rest of the Travel Office staff had troubled Foster. But White House Counsel Bernard Nussbaum dismissed Foster’s worries and disagreed with his view that the Travel Office matter merited an independent counsel.
White House efforts to cover up whatever it was Foster was working on would eventually lead to interference with an FBI investigation, resignation of a top Justice Department appointee, attacks of amnesia—so peculiar as to suggest perjury—by top White House officials before Senate and House investigative committees, and completely frivolous assertions of privilege by the White House that were thrown out by the courts. If the White House wasn’t trying to hide something in Foster’s office, it didn’t act like it.
The White House’s secretive actions could not help but create the impression that there was something worthy of being kept secret. As the Clinton-appointed deputy attorney general, Philip Heymann, said to Bernard Nussbaum when he learned that Nussbaum had refused to allow federal investigators to search Foster’s office, “Bernie, are you hiding something?”
THE TIMELINE
The White House was first notified of Foster’s death at around 8:30 PM on the night of July 20, 1993, when the Secret Service contacted David Watkins, assistant to the president for management and administration. Over the next forty-eight hours, there would be a flurry of activity by the first lady and her close aides and advisers—a search of Foster’s office, scores of phone calls that none of them would later remember, moved files, and rebuffed federal investigators.
About an hour after the Secret Service telephoned Mack McLarty, he called First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton in Little Rock to tell her the news. At 9:45—five minutes after her phone call from McLarty—Mrs. Clinton called her chief of staff, Maggie Williams. After receiving Mrs. Clinton’s call, Williams headed to the White House—to Foster’s office.
Park Police Major Robert Hines called the White House sometime between 9:45 and 11:00 PM that night to ask that Foster’s office be secured. Hines said he made his request to White House aide Bill Burton. In addition, Park Police Sergeant Cheryl Braun told the Senate Whitewater committee that she spoke to David Watkins within hours of Foster’s death and asked him to make sure Foster’s office was secured, so that the Park Police could search for a suicide note or other evidence of suicidal disposition. But during those critical early evening hours of July 20, the security Sergeant Braun asked for was breached by a sort of ad hoc White House political search team, comprised of Nussbaum, Maggie Williams, and Patsy Thomasson.
Instead of sealing the office, Watkins asked his deputy, Patsy Thomasson, to go into Foster’s office to look for a suicide note.2 As White House administrator, Thomasson had the combination to Foster’s office safe. Soon, Nussbaum and Williams would join Thomasson.
Nussbaum later testified that he and the others present that evening opened a drawer or two but that “no one, no one looked through Vince’s files.”
Patsy Thomasson later testified that she spent at least ten minutes searching for a suicide note in Foster’s office on the evening of July 20, 1993.3 Thomasson, by the way, did not receive her security clearance until March 1994. During her testimony before the Senate Whitewater committee, Senator Lauch Faircloth (R-NC) wondered why the security clearance-challenged Thomasson was allowed to rifle through Foster’s papers but Justice Department and Park Police officials were not allowed to touch anything in the room that night. “If this isn’t a total contradiction,” said Faircloth, “I don’t know what it is.”4 Thomasson’s security problems may have been related to her former boss, Little Rock investment banker Dan Lasater, a Clinton friend and campaign contributor, who was convicted of cocaine distribution in 1986. The Drug Enforcement Administration had identified him as a drug dealer as early as 1983.
Eighteen-year veteran Secret Service agent Henry O’Neill testified that he saw Maggie Williams walk out of Foster’s office that night with a stack of folders about three to five inches thick—a claim Williams would later deny.
O’Neill’s story was detailed and unshakable—despite four hours of testimony and detailed cross examination by Senate Democrats trying to raise doubts about his credibility. (O’Neill was asked, for example, “In July of ’93, was there a sofa against that wall?”)
O’Neill had arrived at the White House in uniform around 10:30 PM, he said, and began his office rounds, unlocking office doors in the West Wing for the White House cleaning crew and disposing of “burn bag” documents. When O’Neill first went by the counsel’s office he chanced upon Evelyn Lieberman, Maggie Williams’s aide, who asked him to be sure to lock up the counsel’s suite. On returning to the office a little while later, O’Neill said he saw a woman sitting at Foster’s desk reading something. He assumed the woman was Foster’s wife, so he left. In fact, he later learned, the woman was Patsy Thomasson. Returning to the office a third time to lock up, O’Neill said he saw Lieberman leave the office followed by Nussbaum, and then Maggie Williams, who was carrying a stack of documents.
Williams, according to O’Neill, put the documents in her office down the hall and then went down to the first floor. “I’m not in any doubt about it,” O’Neill testified. Lieberman identified Williams to O’Neill as “the first lady’s chief of staff.” At 11:41, O’Neill said, he locked up the counsel’s office and took the elevator down with Lieberman and Williams.
Williams, however, denied that she removed anything from Foster’s office that night. As she testified before the Senate Whitewater committee, “I took nothing from Vince’s office…. I did not look at, inspect, or remove any documents…. That evening was not about documents.” Williams explained that she had gone to the White House after the first lady called her at home, and when she saw a light on in Foster’s office, she decided to go in, propelled by the “this hope, albeit irrational, that I would walk in and find Vince Foster there.”5
Williams was ultimately forced to plead to having a very poor memory regarding a num
ber of events surrounding Foster’s death. In particular, Williams had no recollection of the frenzy of phone calls between Hillary and her advisers in the forty-eight hours between the discovery of Foster’s body and the White House’s decision not to allow investigators access to Foster’s documents.
“BERNIE, ARE YOU HIDING SOMETHING?”
Those forty-eight hours comprise the crucial time period during which Bernard Nussbaum first agreed to give the FBI access to Foster’s office and then reneged.
The day after Foster’s death, July 21, 1993, Nussbaum and Deputy Attorney General Philip Heymann discussed how to proceed with the investigation of Foster’s office. According to Heymann, at 5:00 PM that day Nussbaum agreed to allow senior Justice Department officials and FBI agents to examine Foster’s office the next day at 10:00 AM.
But when the FBI agents showed up the next morning, Nussbaum said he had changed his mind: the investigators would be permitted only to watch Nussbaum perform his own search. (It was when Heymann later found out about this that he asked Nussbaum if he was “hiding something.”) Nussbaum assistant Steve Neuwirth testified that he understood Nussbaum to say the policy reversal was made at the request of Susan Thomases, Hillary Clinton’s close friend and Whitewater adviser, to accommodate Mrs. Clinton’s concerns about investigators having “unfettered access” to Foster’s office. This was denied by the first lady, Thomases, Nussbaum, and Williams.6 But Nussbaum admitted he had spoken with Thomases—contradicting Thomases.7
