The convictions of Susan and James McDougal and Jim Guy Tucker come as no surprise to those following the trial. The eccentric James McDougal had been prosecuted (but acquitted) on similar charges in 1989. David Hale, the chief witness for the prosecution, had been described by Small Business Administration officials as one of the most corrupt operators in the history of the Small Business Investment Corp. program. The real question is: what does this trial say about the president?
It says we must be careful of guilt by association. President Clinton was not even mentioned in the McDougal-Tucker indictment. Still, the alarmists argue that the guilty verdicts are a grave blow to the White House. Amid the sound and fury, we should remember first and foremost, as the prosecution made clear, the president’s conduct was not on trial.
Indeed, Clinton’s appearance at the trial can be entirely laid at the feet of David Hale, who, according to jurors, embroidered his testimony to falsely accuse the president of pressuring Hale to make a loan – embroidery intended to give Hale room to plea-bargain with the independent counsel. In the words of juror Colin Capp, ““David Hale perjured himself . . . invok[ing] the president’s name for one reason: to save his butt. We all thought that way.’’ According to press reports, jurors did not question the president’s truthfulness when he forcefully denied Hale’s allegations.
The defense strategy was to pit the president against Hale, a convicted felon whose conflicting versions of events and association with right-wing anti-Clinton activists made him an easy target. The prosecution saw the trap in time to make clear that the president’s actions were not in question and there was no evidence that Hale was being pressured. After a painstaking review of a paper trail of more than 700 documents, the jury reached its verdicts. The resulting Chicken Little ““sky is falling’’ headlines were to be expected. Indeed, such overblown assertions have characterized Whitewater all along, and may explain the public’s skepticism about ““bombshell’’ revelations.
Take, for example, the discovery of the Rose Law Firm billing records in the White House last January. Putting aside the anomaly of how they were found, some emphasis should be placed on the fact that they were produced. We need only compare the production of these records to the erased and missing tapes and deep-sixed evidence in Watergate, or the shredded documents during Iran-contra, to put the billing-records flap in a more appropriate context. Moreover, having reviewed these records of the Rose firm’s representation of Madison on a handful of legal matters a decade ago in stupefying detail, we can safely conclude that the documents are not the equivalent of the missing murder weapon in the O. J. Simpson trial. Rather, they confirm that Mrs. Clinton’s and her firm’s work for Madison was quite limited, and in no respect improper, a conclusion reached by the independent Pillsbury firm in its report to the Resolution Trust Corp.
The Senate Whitewater committee has now held more than 50 days of hearings on a wide range of subjects, from the search of Vincent Foster’s office to the leasing of office space by Arkansas state agencies in the mid-1980s. The American people should take comfort in the results: there has been no evidence of illegal or improper conduct by the president. Shortly, the Democratic minority will file its report – and you can be sure it will distinguish between hyperbole and fact.
