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Filed under: Columnists Commentary. Kenneth Starr shows how flamboyantly pious have so much further to fall. The corporation folded, and the Clintons lost money on the real estate deal. Controversy over the deal was revived in the s, however, after David Hale, a banker who had worked with the Clintons' business partners, alleged Clinton pressured him to make illegal loans to finance the Whitewater deal.
A special prosecutor, Robert Fiske, was appointed in January to lead an investigation, and the inquiry expanded to include an investigation of Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster's suicide. Clinton's critics alleged Foster's death had been part of a Whitewater cover-up, but multiple investigations concluded Foster's death was a suicide.
Clinton's sexual relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky began in November and became part of the Whitewater investigation after a coworker notified investigators of her conversations with Lewinsky about the affair. Three years later, in September , Starr's team released a page report detailing its findings on Whitewater and other issues branching off from the investigation.
The report concluded that Clinton's conduct in Whitewater and other matters "may constitute grounds for impeachment" for perjury, obstruction of justice, witness tampering and abuse of power. The House of Representatives opened an impeachment inquiry a month later and voted to impeach Clinton for perjury and obstruction of justice. The Starr Report was highly controversial.
At the heart of it were an array of graphic and embarrassing details about Clinton's sex life and his efforts to lie and hide his affair from the public. In its aftermath, Congress allowed the law authorizing independent counsel appointments to expire. It was replaced by a law allowing the attorney general to name a special counsel, which has less independence.
Starr played a less high-profile role when the impeachment trial moved to the Senate. It did. And so my prior experience with the law had been in the Justice Department in the s when I was privileged to serve as Chief of Staff to the Attorney General of the United States, and under the auspices of the Justice Department we took a very careful look at the statute and its original operations during the Carter administration.
We thought that it was unconstitutional as a violation of separation of powers in our separated powers system. We also thought it was very bad in its applications. Very bad things happened. Conscientious prosecutors would do their job, but it was a different kind of job than a United States attorney. You were targeting one individual and you were to find out every fact that might be relevant to whether a particular crime was committed.
This is very, very unusual and it's potentially quite dangerous. Goodman: Given your feelings about the law and your hesitation over the existence of the Independent Counsel, were you fully able to embrace I mean, it must have been a conflict for you to go ahead and occupy that job. Did you have any hesitation caused by your prior feelings about the whole thing?
Starr: Well the reservations about the statute were deep and abiding. When I was in the Justice Department, again, in the s, we testified through an individual not unknown to the American people, Rudy Giuliani, that the law was unconstitutional.
That was our view. We also thought it was very bad policy. But Congress reenacted the law, it was challenged, and the Supreme Court of the United States overwhelmingly upheld the constitutionality of the law. And so when the Supreme Court speaks, unless it reverses itself, that's the law of the land in terms of the meaning of the Constitution. So we were wrong in the Justice Department. Our position did not prevail.
So I accepted it as the law of the land, and so the defects and the law — both the theoretical and the practical defects. We really tried in the investigation to take steps to make sure that we had, essentially, principles of accountability. What one does not want — and this is frequently said about a Special Prosecutor, that Special Prosecutor is abusing his or her power, that Special Prosecutor is run amok, that's a rogue prosecutor, or all those kinds of charges that may very well be meritorious in a particular situation.
So what do you do to guard against the rogue prosecutor, if that could happen in your own office? And so we built in a number of mechanisms, an indictment review process that was extremely elaborate, very careful, before any indictment would be presented to the Grand Jury. We would insure that we had been very thoughtful and careful about it, that we had searched our motives, that we had made sure that the facts were very powerful, very strong, and that we had abided by Justice Department policy and that we tried to, in essence, be a microcosm of the Justice Department at its very finest.
Starr: Once the most controversial phase of the investigation, the Lewinsky phase of the investigation began, Sam, the late Professor Dash, came on board as a specific ethics counselor because by that time, there were all manner of criticisms and suggestions that this was an investigation that had run amok. And there were, it seemed to me, to be a need for an additional kind of voice in the deliberations and Sam Dash, who is a legendary figure from Watergate, provided an additional voice around the table.
I mean he was a voice — it was not as if he had veto power, but he was a voice around the table. Goodman: We'll get to that, but let's start at the beginning, the specifics of the investigation.
You inherited the Whitewater investigation from him. Can you describe the central focus of the investigation as you inherited? What were you looking for? Starr: There actually were numerous dimensions of the investigation that were underway, including issues involving the former associated Attorney General, Webster Hubbell. What I inherited was a wide-ranging investigation that had unfolded under Bob Fisk. And so I simply picked up on the investigation that I'd inherited, which, from the public perspective, just involved the Whitewater real estate project in Arkansas, and then its relationship to the Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan, a failed Savings and Loan in Arkansas.
But the actual investigation, unknown to the public, was much broader, had many more variations. Bob Fiske had conducted an investigation into the suicide of Vincent Foster Jr.
Goodman: Why did you reopen that particular investigation, I mean Fiske had come to a conclusion on that one. Starr: The investigation, I thought, had been done well.
It had not, shall I say, turned over every possible stone, and I came to the conclusion that the American people should not in any way have any reason to suspect that at that point the highest ranking public official since the suicide of James Forrestal had somehow been the victim or subject of foul play, especially going to the highest levels of the American Government. So we saw that more could be done in terms of the investigation. We came to exactly the same conclusion that Bob Fiske did, but we were more thorough, we did more forensic examinations, and so forth.
And I'm very pleased that we did what we did in a very, I think, effective, efficient way. So there will always be those who say, "Oh my goodness, foul play, the body was moved," et cetera, and a whole variety of suggestions, but none had merit.
Goodman: I take your point, the Whitewater investigation was the heart of a much broader set of inquiries, but let's talk about what was central — which was, I gather, that the Whitewater transaction — could you clarify for us what you were really looking at? It wasn't so much the original Whitewater land deal, but the efforts afterwards to prop it up.
Is that a fair statement? That that was really what was the heart of the matter? Starr: Whether there was a misuse of funds of either Madison Guaranty's Savings and Loan or of a small business investment corporation that was owned and operated by a gentleman who had been a judge, who's is a very attractive man, David Hale, and whether there had been any kind of impropriety, violation of federal law, in connection with financial transactions involving the Whitewater land company, which had not done well financially.
So was there a use of Savings and Loan or federally insured funds, as the case may be, in a way, that redounded to the benefit of one or more persons? Goodman: At what point did your office become convinced that the Clintons either knew about or participated in some of the McDougals' financial improprieties in regard to Whitewater?
At what point did it become clear to you that something was amiss here? Starr: Well I'm not gonna comment on specific issues of possible guilt or innocence. There's a very elaborate public record with respect to that. Goodman: Okay. Let me ask this. You mentioned David Hale. What was David Hale telling you?
What was the story that he was telling you in regards to what happened? Starr: Well he had actually told Bob Fiske. And so we again inherited the fine work that Bob Fiske and his investigators and lawyers had done. And he made allegations that Bob credited with respect to the involvement of the then Governor of the state of Arkansas.
Starr: It's all in the public domain, and I don't in any way suggest anything with respect to specific individuals. This question may or may not fly with you then. You had the chance to assess David Hale as a witness, and, of course, he comes with baggage. Did that baggage give you pause?
Did it create a difficulty for you in pursuing this, given who he was and what he'd been involved with? Starr: Well, every witness who has baggage gives a prosecutor pause, and so the issue is, can the allegations of the witness be corroborated?
It depends on the nature of the allegation. Sometimes allegations can be corroborated by a documentary record. These allegations came to the investigation, originally to Bob Fiske from David Hale, but you don't just say, "Well can I find anyone who says the same thing? You're suggesting that federal crimes may have been committed, or at least the information you've provided to us suggests that there may have been fraud, other kinds of potential crimes, so let's look into that.
And the results speak for themselves. There were felony criminal convictions of the sitting Governor of the state, and of James and Susan McDougal, there were other guilty pleas, all arising out of allegations originally made by Judge Hale, who had been a judge as well.
Goodman: You mentioned the conviction of the McDougals and Tucker. A lot of people looking back at this whole thing say, "If only he had stopped at that point, that would have been a tremendous triumph for Starr and a thing that could have ended. Starr: Well, we didn't have the luxury of just stopping with the convictions of the Governor of the state and of James and Susan McDougal.
Other facets of the investigation were underway. There were issues again involving the former associated Attorney General, Webster Hubbell. So we had to complete the work that we had underway, and that work in large measure was again inherited from Bob Fiske. So if there's one thing that I think was not understood in the public mind was, when the new Independent Counsel began in August of , he had inherited essentially a portfolio.
And to call a halt to one or more branches of that investigation I felt would have been a mistake. Goodman: Your office, very quickly, was able to turn McDougal. And part of that effort involved a personal meeting between the two of you in Arkadelphia at the Rileys' house.
Can you tell us about that meeting? What took place there, what your conversation with? Starr: Well we had a meeting with Jim McDougal after his conviction, so he stood convicted. He was going to be mounting, and did mount, an appeal to the court of appeals. All of the appeals were unsuccessful, and so the three individuals who were convicted, including James McDougal, had their convictions upheld.
After the jury had returned its verdict and before sentence was entered, we had a series of conversations with Jim McDougal. I had one meeting with him and we talked about Franklin Delano Roosevelt. We talked about a variety of things unrelated to the investigation. It was really sort of person-to-person. Goodman: How did it come about, in what context did he sort of change his story and then join the prosecution of Starr: I'm not sure he's changed his story.
But I think that Jim — I mean you're asking me to look into the minds of individuals who were caught up in the investigation.
He was — first of all, I think this is very critical for everyone to understand — he was advised by counsel, and I don't know what his counsel was advising him, but we began communicating with his counsel more freely, with counsels obviously initiating some of these conversations. And it was just a natural process that happens in prosecutions, that an individual who has been convicted and says, "Am I going to cooperate or am I not?
In one phase of our investigation, one of the individuals, a business person, who was about to enter a guilty plea just had a change of heart. He just said, "I'm tired of the fraud, I'm tired of the deceit, I don't like thinking about this, I just want to come clean, I want to make a complete break, call it redemption. And so when it came time in Federal Court for this — all part of the Whitewater investigation involving a fraudulent bankruptcy in Texas, people might say, "Why were you investigating that?
And so when it came time for Bill Marks to enter his guilty plea in United States District Court, he said ''I am guilty your honor,'' it was almost as if it was cathartic for him to be able to say in open court, "I did something I shouldn't have done.
I'm not coerced into this guilty plea, I want to get this behind me. Goodman: And you feel that Jim McDougal had a similar kind of feeling of wanting to come clean? Jim had a sense of sorrow. I think he felt that if he had been able to stay at the helm with Madison Guarantee Savings and Loan all would have come out right.
He had a really good heart. Jim McDougal, I think, was a good man at a basic moral level, but he did play fast and loose with the finances of Madison Guarantee Savings and Loan. It did fail, it was taken over, the taxpayers of the United States faced a not insignificant loss because of that. But I think his heart was in the right place. He loved people, and he wanted to help. He was a great builder and he wanted to take this piece of dirt and turn it into something that — yes, he would prosper from, but the community would be better for it.
Goodman: There were those who say about Jim McDougal at the time that you had your interaction with him post conviction, that he was a man who was unstable mentally, a man who was certainly angry at the Clintons, very angry at the Clintons, and a man who was facing his greatest fear which was prison and therefore was completely unreliable as a witness. Click here to contact our editorial staff, and click here to report an error.
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