WASHINGTON — The foundation that runs the American Spectator magazine made at least $15,000 in payments between 1994 and 1997 to a former Arkansas state trooper who had once served on the personal security detail of then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, according to the foundation’s confidential accounting records.
The conservative magazine contends that it paid the former state trooper, L.D. Brown, to reimburse him for the cost of chartering a private jet to fly to Washington in 1994 to meet with one of their reporters, and for “investigative services” he performed for the magazine in 1997.
But federal Whitewater investigators have expressed concerns that the payments to Brown, as well as his ties to conservative political activists, may have influenced him to provide erroneous or false information on several matters to independent counsel Kenneth Starr.
Most important, Brown provided information to Starr’s office that partially corroborated allegations against Clinton made by David L. Hale, a former Little Rock municipal court judge who has been the central witness to the independent counsel’s Whitewater investigation.
Specifically, Brown told investigators that he witnessed a meeting between Clinton and Hale at the Arkansas Capitol during which Clinton purportedly pressured Hale to make a fraudulent and illegal loan to Susan McDougal, one of the Clintons’ partners in their failed real estate venture. Some federal investigators questioned the veracity of Brown’s claims to have witnessed the encounter.
The federal Whitewater investigators were unaware of the payments by the American Spectator Educational Foundation to Brown, and his ties to the conservative political activists. The investigators questioned the truthfulness of Brown’s account for a variety of other reasons.
The law enforcement sources are careful to point out that there is no evidence showing that money was paid to Brown with the specific intent to purposely influence him to tell false stories to investigators or journalists.
But these same investigators say that they believe there existed a milieu that encouraged some potential witnesses to their Whitewater probe, such as Brown, to embellish, exaggerate or even fabricate stories to law enforcement authorities.
“There was money that was being passed around and there were apparently other financial incentives to be had as well,” says one federal law enforcement official. “And the better your story, the more attention you’re going to attract and publicity that you are going to draw. That’s the kind of thing that would prove irresistible to someone like an L.D. Brown.”
During the time that Brown received the funds from the Spectator’s foundation, he was also a crucial source for several exposis of Clinton that appeared in the conservative magazine. The magazine contends that the payments to Brown were appropriate reimbursements for expenses and services the former state trooper provided them.
Brown declined to be interviewed for this story. In a brief telephone conversation, he said, “I don’t think I even want to be in one of your stories.” Terry Eastland, the publisher of the American Spectator, and R. Emmett Tyrrell, the magazine’s editor, also declined to comment.
The payments to Brown and several articles that appeared in the Spectator, which were based on his allegations, were one byproduct of the so-called Arkansas Project, a four year, $2.4 million effort financed by conservative billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, to investigate and discredit President Clinton.
Funds for the secretive effort were funneled by two tax-exempt foundations controlled by Scaife through the American Spectator to two conservative political activists who ran the day-to-day operations of the Arkansas Project: Stephen S. Boynton, an attorney and lobbyist; and David Henderson, a former vice president of the American Spectator Educational Foundation.
In exchange for allowing more than $1.7 million of Arkansas Project funds to course through the Spectator with little if any accountability for how the money was ultimately being spent, Boynton and Henderson agreed to provide information from their investigative efforts to the magazine for exposis of the Clinton administration.
The Arkansas Project produced little of any journalistic value for the Spectator to publish, according to five former and current employees of the magazine. In 1997, a senior editor at the magazine complained in a confidential memo to his colleagues that the Arkansas Project “didn’t provide much in the way of exciting stories … there always seemed to be lots of hush hush and heavy breathing, but it never amounted to anything concrete enough for a story.”
One of the Arkansas Project’s rare journalistic byproducts was a series of articles and editorials that appeared in the Spectator alleging that President Clinton, while governor of Arkansas, ordered law enforcement authorities to turn a blind eye to the activities of a cocaine smuggling ring operating out of the small airport of Mena, Ark., about 120 miles west of Little Rock.
The articles were written by Tyrrell, the Spectator’s editor, and based largely on allegations made by Brown. The articles stirred considerable controversy within the magazine, with one editor resigning because of doubts about the veracity of Brown’s claims, and the magazine’s executive editor refusing to edit the stories because of similar concerns.
An exhaustive, two-year investigation by the Republican-controlled House Banking Committee into the Mena allegations, however, uncovered no evidence that Clinton did anything improper.
David Runkel, a spokesman for the House Banking Committee, told Salon: “We engaged in an appropriate inquiry … [But] regarding the president, we found no evidence of wrongdoing.”
What has attracted the scrutiny of federal investigators is whether the payments to Brown by the American Spectator Educational Foundation, or his relationship with individuals associated with the Arkansas Project, may have led him to falsely claim to have evidence to substantiate Hale’s allegations about Clinton.
A federal grand jury in Fort Smith, Ark., has since last August been investigating allegations that representatives of the Arkansas Project had made numerous cash payments and provided free legal assistance and other gratuities to Hale during the time that he was a cooperating witness in Starr’s Whitewater probe. That investigation has been headed by Michael E. Shaheen Jr., a former senior Justice Department official. Shaheen was named by Starr to lead the investigation because Starr said he himself would have had a conflict of interest in conducting it.
Two witnesses before the grand jury testified that they had firsthand knowledge of numerous cash payments made to Hale by Parker Dozhier, a Hot Springs, Ark., bait shop owner who has admitted to receiving $48,000 to be the “eyes and ears” of the American Spectator, and Boynton and Henderson, in Arkansas.
Caryn Mann, an assistant funeral director from Bentonville, Ark., and Dozhier’s former live-in girlfriend, and her 18-year-old son, Joshua Rand, testified to the grand jury that Dozhier had told them about the alleged payments. Rand told the grand jury that he had witnessed Dozhier making payments of money to Hale on several occasions. Dozhier has repeatedly denied making any such payments to Hale, and Hale in turn has denied receiving any.
At the core of Starr’s investigation has been allegations made by Hale that in 1986 then-Gov. Clinton had pressured him to make a fraudulent and illegal $300,000 loan to McDougal, a partner of the Clintons in their failed Whitewater real estate investment.
At the time of the alleged pressure by Clinton, Hale was the head of a federally subsidized loan company, Capital Management Services (CMS), whose mandate was to make loans to disadvantaged and minority businesses. Instead, Hale misappropriated federal funds and made insider loans to family members, friends and powerful Arkansas political and business figures.
In March 1994, Hale pleaded guilty to two felonies, admitting that he used CMS to defraud the federal government of more than $3.2 million. As a condition of a plea bargain with federal Whitewater prosecutors, Hale agreed to provide them with information about potential wrongdoing by Clinton and other Arkansas political leaders.
Testimony by Hale led to the 1996 convictions of then-Arkansas Gov. Jim Guy Tucker and Jim and Susan McDougal, the Clintons’ Whitewater partners. Other information provided by Hale to prosecutors led to guilty pleas by six other individuals.
But evidence corroborating Hale’s allegations that Clinton had pressured him to make a fraudulent loan to Susan McDougal has proven to be elusive for Starr’s team of federal prosecutors and FBI agents, despite their four-year, $40 million probe.
Hale had told investigators that he discussed the purported fraudulent loan for McDougal with Clinton on three separate occasions in 1985 and l986. During two of those three meetings — one at a Little Rock shopping mall and the other at the Arkansas Capitol building — Hale claimed that he and Clinton were alone.
Hale has asserted that during the third meeting with Clinton, at which the Susan McDougal loan was discussed, Jim McDougal was also present. For several years, Jim McDougal adamantly denied Hale’s account, and testified under oath during his own Whitewater trial that the purported meeting as described by Hale never took place.
After having been convicted of 18 felonies, and facing a potential 84-year prison sentence, however, Jim McDougal changed his story. Awarded a significantly reduced sentence by Starr’s office, McDougal now claimed that he had perjured himself, and was indeed present while Clinton and Hale discussed Hale making a loan to Susan McDougal. It was the president’s sworn account that he had never pressured Hale to make the loan to his wife, Jim McDougal now said, that was “at variance with the truth.”
The only other witness who has come forward during the course of Starr’s Whitewater probe to corroborate a portion of Hale’s story has been L.D. Brown. In the fall of 1994, Brown told federal Whitewater investigators that he was present at the Capitol while Clinton purportedly asked Hale for financial assistance.
Both the Washington Times and Washington Post disclosed in October 1994 that Brown had told federal investigators that he overheard Clinton asking Hale to make the loan to Susan McDougal. The Post reported that Brown had overheard Clinton telling Hale: “You’re going to have to help us out. We’re going to need to raise some money.”
Brown provided additional details to the Washington Times of the purported encounter between Hale and Clinton: “David was kind of taken aback, a little bit shocked, he dropped his head,” Brown said. “It was more than just a normal conversation. It was like this is the kind of thing you discuss between closed doors.”
The Washington Post later printed a correction of its original story, saying that Brown’s confirmation of Hale’s story was more tentative than the newspaper originally reported:
“Brown said only that he overheard Clinton press Hale in a general way for financial help,” the Post said. “Brown did not say he heard discussion of any specific loan or amount, or any mention of Susan McDougal.”
Federal Whitewater investigators were skeptical of Brown’s claims for a number of reasons, law enforcement sources have told Salon. For one thing, Brown waited more than a year before coming forward to corroborate Hale’s account. Brown explained this away by saying that he was reluctant to do so because allies of the president might in some way retaliate against him for doing so.
More important, during numerous debriefings with Starr’s office, Hale had always said he and Clinton were alone when they allegedly discussed the loan to Susan McDougal at the Capitol. Even after Brown came forward with claims, law enforcement sources say, Hale still asserted that he was as certain as he could be that there was no state trooper who was present during his alleged meeting with Clinton.
An additional concern for investigators was the fact that Brown had a long personal vendetta against the Clintons at the time he came forward to corroborate Hale’s account. The dispute centered around the fact that Clinton had broken a personal promise to Brown that he would appoint him to be the assistant director of the state police crime lab.
“He [Clinton] and Hillary both told me and my current wife that he would do it and he didn’t,” Brown testified in a 1994 deposition in a civil lawsuit about the matter. Brown was so angry, he testified, that immediately after having been told the news by Clinton, he got in his car and drove away from the governor’s mansion, never to speak to either one of the Clintons ever again.
The intense dislike between the two men was also evident during the president’s deposition in the Paula Jones sexual harassment lawsuit. Asked about Brown’s allegations during his questioning by Jones’ attorneys, Clinton said: “I might have asked somebody to ask L.D. Brown not to lie, but that would be a fruitless request.”
Finally, Brown had serious credibility problems even prior to his corroborating Hale’s story to investigators: According to a confidential Arkansas state police file obtained by Salon, Brown had allegedly diverted thousands of dollars of funds from the Arkansas State Police Association while he was president of the organization in the mid-1980s.
Arkansas law enforcement officials say that Brown escaped prosecution only because the police association’s bylaws did not preclude its officers from diverting funds for their own personal use. Brown has said that the investigation was politically motivated, and done at the behest of Clinton, who was then governor. Brown has also said his expenditure of state police association funds was for legitimate purposes. Justin Thornton, an attorney who represented Brown in the matter, did not return several calls for comment.
Additional questions about Brown’s corroboration of Hale’s account have been raised by Caryn Mann, the former girlfriend of Dozhier and federal witness in the grand jury probe of alleged payments to Hale. According to Mann, Dozhier told her of a secretive meeting that he attended in an Arkansas motel room with Brown and Henderson, the American Spectator Educational Foundation vice president who ran the Arkansas Project, during which the two men questioned Brown about his days guarding Clinton.
Dozhier told Mann that, perhaps unbeknownst to Brown, Hale was in an adjacent room during the entire time that Dozhier and Henderson were questioning Brown. Mann, who cannot recall the date of the meeting, says Dozhier told her that he and Henderson would often excuse themselves during their questioning of Brown, confer with Hale in the adjacent room and then return to Brown’s room with additional questions:
“P.D. [Parker Dozhier] and Henderson would ask L.D. questions. Then [one or both of them] would excuse themselves, confer with David Hale, and then go back to L.D.’s room, with whatever David had given them. Parker said that it was important that L.D. and Hale never speak directly because it might appear like they were colluding with one another to put a story together … But Parker said that Brown probably knew that Hale was in the room next door, because Brown made jokes about it. L.D. said, ‘If I didn’t know better, I’d say you guys know David Hale.’”
Brown first told his story about Clinton and Hale to federal investigators several months after he first had became involved with the Spectator and the Arkansas Project.
In its April/May 1994 edition, the American Spectator published a 7,000-word cover story describing Brown’s firsthand account of facilitating extramarital affairs for Clinton during the mid-1980s when he served on Clinton’s personal security detail.
“What I wrote about was how Clinton used his state employees to facilitate sexual liaisons … and then misused his authority to intimidate people to remain silent about them,” says Daniel Wattenberg, the author of the article.
Wattenberg also noted that his article disclosed the fact that the Spectator had paid to fly Brown to Washington: “A lot of us had concerns about what we later came to know as the Arkansas Project, and so I thought we should be beyond reproach … So we disclosed we paid for Brown’s travel up front.”
Confidential accounting records of the American Spectator Educational Foundation obtained by Salon show that it paid Brown slightly more than $6,200 in February 1994; $4,200 in March 1994; and an additional $737 in August 1994. In 1997, the magazine made an additional $3,500 payment to Brown for “investigative services.”
After Wattenberg’s article appeared, his editor, Tyrrell, struck up a close friendship with Brown. According to Spectator financial records, Brown was often a dinner or overnight guest at Tyrrell’s home.
Tyrrell then published a series of articles — largely based on allegations made by Brown — asserting that Clinton had protected a cocaine smuggling ring operating out of the Mena airport. These are the charges that the House Banking Committee found baseless.
In the articles, Brown claimed to have been recruited by the CIA in the 1980s to participate in a covert operation to smuggle arms to the Nicaraguan contras. As part of that effort, Brown said that he accompanied an infamous drug trafficker named Barry Seal on a flight from the Mena airport to Central America to transport arms to the contras and on the return flight smuggle cocaine back to Arkansas. Moreover, Brown boasted that Clinton had told him that he approved of the cocaine smuggling operation.
It did not take long for serious questions to arise about Brown’s veracity. For example, Brown claimed that he accompanied Seal on a flight to Central America on Oct. 23, 1984. But John Camp, a correspondent for CNN, who was then filming a documentary on Seal’s life, has said that all during that very day, Seal had been with him and his film crew.
“We were with Barry Seal from virtually the moment he woke up in the morning that day until the moment he went to sleep that night,” Camp recalled, “and he was nowhere near Central America.”
Over time, Brown took to making even more grandiose claims. In a bestselling book Tyrrell later wrote about Clinton, Brown was quoted as claiming that he had been personally recruited to work for Seal by one of former President George Bush’s national security advisors. And Brown also boasted that a prominent former CIA operative, Felix Rodriguez, had attempted to hire him to carry out a political assassination.
“It was immensely frustrating to many of us who had toiled so long and hard to build up the Spectator,” recalls a former editorial staffer, “but Bob [Tyrrell] and L.D. Brown, and Boynton and Henderson, were living out their Walter Mitty fantasy. They thought that they were going to bring down the president. But the only thing they might have accomplished in the end is their own undoing.”
So this is where things stand: We have a president of the United States who is unfit to hold that high office and a House of Representatives that is equally unfit to sit in judgment of that president. When the Founding Fathers formulated the idea of “co-equal” branches of government, it’s doubtful this is what they had in mind.
Then we have an independent counsel who lacks any moral authority to make his case. Not to mention a press corps that has abdicated its responsibilities to explain to the American people the consequences to constitutional governance of trivializing the impeachment process as a means to conduct partisan warfare.
It is as if the various parties to this dispute are in a fast and furious competition to see who can inflict the most serious and permanent damage to the Constitution and the rule of law. And just when it seemed the debate could not sink any lower, hard-line congressional Republicans continued their assault on Clinton after the Iraq airstrikes, even as American troops were in harm’s way.
The articles of impeachment adopted by the House Judiciary Committee and being considered by the full House state: “William Jefferson Clinton has undermined the integrity of his office, has brought disrepute on the Presidency, has betrayed his trust as President, and has acted in a manner subversive of the rule of law and justice, to the manifest injury of the people of the United States.”
It is hard to argue with that statement, although reasonable folks might disagree as to whether Clinton’s actions are what the framers of the Constitution had in mind when they considered impeachment.
But, by the same token, what would be the fate of Kenneth Starr, the House Judiciary Committee and the press if they were to be held to the same standards as Clinton and could also face impeachment?
Have they too undermined the integrity of their high offices and positions, brought disrepute to the institutions they serve and acted in a manner subversive of the rule of law and justice, to the manifest injury of the people of the United States of America?
Before considering them, however, we should acknowledge the role President Clinton has played in his own undoing. While it is true that no other modern-day American president has endured such an organized and vindictive effort to destroy him at all costs, Clinton has played into his opponents’ hands quite pathetically.
After all, his political enemies did not force him to lie under oath during his testimony in the Paula Jones case. Nor is anyone else responsible for his attempt to corruptly encourage others to lie in that civil case as well. It is Clinton who is solely responsible for denying due process to a litigant against him in a civil rights lawsuit.
By engaging in such conduct, Clinton most importantly violated the sacred oath he twice took upon taking office to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States of America.” It is because of the majesty of his high office and his swearing to that oath that House Republicans are correct that the president should be held accountable for his actions in some way.
If Starr truly believes that the president has committed multiple felonies, the only just course is for the independent counsel to seek the return of a federal grand jury indictment against Clinton in the District of Columbia and schedule a trial for when Clinton leaves office. Whatever the result, such a trial would lead to a vindication of one of the two men, the humiliation of the other and an end to the national turmoil their actions have caused the rest of us.
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Next, we consider Rep. Henry Hyde, the Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, who has spearheaded the effort to impeach the president. In explaining his vote in favor of impeachment, Hyde solemnly stated: “We are fighting for the rule of law. I think it is our constitutional duty under the law to pursue impeachment. I’m frightened for the rule of law.”
Apparently, however, Hyde came to his appreciation for the law late in life. Almost a decade ago, as a member of the special Iran-contra congressional investigating committee, Hyde was an outspoken and craven apologist for the Reagan administration’s often illegal and extraconstitutional foreign policy toward Iran and Nicaragua.
Hyde did not lie awake late at night fearing for the fate of the rule of law then. Unlike Whitewater and the Monica Lewinsky affair, Iran-contra involved lawbreaking and abuses of power by the president and his most senior national security advisers that were central to the governance of the nation. They included illegal arms sales by the Reagan administration to Iran, a terrorist state, as well as the covert funding of the contras, despite the fact that such assistance was also illegal.
An investigation by Iran-contra independent counsel Lawrence Walsh led to convictions or guilty pleas by nine people. Criminal charges were brought against senior officials of the National Security Council, the State Department, the Defense Department and the CIA.
As a ranking Republican on the Iran-contra committee in 1987, Hyde had this to say at the time about the massive lawbreaking within the Reagan White House: “All of us, at some time, confront conflicts between rights and duties, between choices that are evil and less evil, and one hardly exhausts moral indignation by labeling every untruth and every deception an outrage.”
Hyde also excused the conduct of National Security Council aide Oliver North by asserting that during previous presidencies, the White House had long been “a palace of pragmatism where dishonesty flourished.”
Rep. Bill McCollum, R-Fla., has also been one of the Judiciary Committee’s most outspoken members in support of Clinton’s impeachment. Even after the bombing of Iraq began, McCollum pushed to continue with the impeachment vote. “I think it is irrelevant if there’s bombing going on. We can still do the impeachment,” McCollum said.
Like Hyde, during the Iran-contra scandal, McCollum was one of the House’s most virulent defenders of the lawlessness of the Reagan administration’s conduct of foreign policy. Then also a member of the House Judiciary Committee, McCollum led an effort to derail a subcommittee probe of the role of then-Attorney General Edwin Meese and White House officials in obstructing criminal investigations of North and his contra resupply network, according to a former member of the Judiciary Committee and two former staffers.
“McCollum was in constant contact with the Justice Department and White House in an effort to thwart what we were doing,” a former Judiciary subcommittee staff member told me earlier this week. “In my mind, he wasn’t assisting the White House’s coverup. He was part of it.”
Next we should consider the role of Starr, a man who finds so much fault with others, but will only acknowledge one fault of his own: loving the law too much.
“My experience is in the law and in the courts,” Starr intoned before the House Judiciary Committee. “I am not a man of politics, of public relations, or of polls … Rather, as a product of the law and of the courts, I have come to an unyielding faith in our court system … the sanctity of the judicial process.”
But Starr’s lasting legacy to this peculiar time will most likely be the enduring harm he has done to the rule of law he says he so loves. Because of Starr’s prosecutorial missteps, it is unlikely that Congress will reauthorize the independent counsel statute. Because of his prosecutorial zeal, a vast segment of the American public has lost its faith in federal prosecutors to enforce the laws of the land.
Starr was certainly right in telling the House Judiciary Committee that no president should be above the law. And he was also right to say that the president should be awarded no greater rights than the average citizen.
But by the same token, we do not want a system of government where anyone, including the president of the United States, should have lesser rights than an ordinary citizen. We do not want our public officials to be below the law any more than we would allow them to be above it.
For most of the rest of us, it would be unthinkable for a wealthy philanthropist, such as Richard Mellon Scaife, to spend millions of dollars on private investigations of our personal lives. Nor is it conceivable that any public prosecutor would ever spend $40 million to investigate the 20-year-old business dealings and personal conduct of any ordinary citizen. And none of us would have been compelled to testify against our best interests to a federal grand jury, as the president was.
As former Rep. Elizabeth Holtzman of Brooklyn, an author of the original independent counsel statute, persuasively argued in the New York Times last August when Starr demanded Clinton’s testimony before his federal grand jury:
“Unlike most witnesses, [Clinton] cannot invoke his Fifth Amendment right not to testify on the ground that he might incriminate himself — even though he is fully entitled to do so. If he were to invoke the Fifth, it could easily, if unfairly, be portrayed as an admission of guilt and could permanently taint his presidency …
“Plainly, Mr. Starr is maneuvering to take advantage of Mr. Clinton’s inability to claim the Fifth and coercing him into becoming a witness against himself. But Mr. Starr should understand the constraints on the president require restraint in the use of the prosecutor’s power.”
During the course of his four-year investigation, however, Starr has displayed as little restraint in exercising his prosecutorial discretion as the president had in his sexual indiscretion.
Finally, we should also consider the role of the media in all of this. After all of its hyperventilating on the soap-opera aspects of this story over the course of the last year, one would think the press would now attempt to lead a thoughtful and national discussion as to what does and does not rise to the level of offense that should lead to the impeachment of the president.
But today, there are no Edward R. Murrows or Walter Cronkites to provide us with the proper perspective. Instead, we are left with the likes of Geraldo Rivera. In all fairness, however, who can claim that Geraldo is not the best qualified journalist to cover the Clinton crisis? After all, understanding complicated DNA evidence has proven to be as crucial to the impeachment of the president as it was to Geraldo’s other recent big story, the O.J. Simpson murder trial.
Clinton’s harshest critics may be right in asserting that one of his most enduring legacies will be his undermining of the rule of the law. But when historians consider this peculiar time, they are likely to conclude that Henry Hyde, Kenneth Starr and numerous others in Congress and the press have been Clinton’s unindicted co-conspirators in the damage they have done to the Constitution.
So this is where things stand: We have a president of the United States who is unfit to hold that high office and a House of Representatives that is equally unfit to sit in judgment of that president. When the Founding Fathers formulated the idea of “co-equal” branches of government, it’s doubtful this is what they had in mind.
Then we have an independent counsel who lacks any moral authority to make his case. Not to mention a press corps that has abdicated its responsibilities to explain to the American people the consequences to constitutional governance of trivializing the impeachment process as a means to conduct partisan warfare.
It is as if the various parties to this dispute are in a fast and furious competition to see who can inflict the most serious and permanent damage to the Constitution and the rule of law. And just when it seemed the debate could not sink any lower, hard-line congressional Republicans continued their assault on Clinton after the Iraq airstrikes, even as American troops were in harm’s way.
The articles of impeachment adopted by the House Judiciary Committee and being considered by the full House state: “William Jefferson Clinton has undermined the integrity of his office, has brought disrepute on the Presidency, has betrayed his trust as President, and has acted in a manner subversive of the rule of law and justice, to the manifest injury of the people of the United States.”
It is hard to argue with that statement, although reasonable folks might disagree as to whether Clinton’s actions are what the framers of the Constitution had in mind when they considered impeachment.
But, by the same token, what would be the fate of Kenneth Starr, the House Judiciary Committee and the press if they were to be held to the same standards as Clinton and could also face impeachment?
Have they too undermined the integrity of their high offices and positions, brought disrepute to the institutions they serve and acted in a manner subversive of the rule of law and justice, to the manifest injury of the people of the United States of America?
Before considering them, however, we should acknowledge the role President Clinton has played in his own undoing. While it is true that no other modern-day American president has endured such an organized and vindictive effort to destroy him at all costs, Clinton has played into his opponents’ hands quite pathetically.
After all, his political enemies did not force him to lie under oath during his testimony in the Paula Jones case. Nor is anyone else responsible for his attempt to corruptly encourage others to lie in that civil case as well. It is Clinton who is solely responsible for denying due process to a litigant against him in a civil rights lawsuit.
By engaging in such conduct, Clinton most importantly violated the sacred oath he twice took upon taking office to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States of America.” It is because of the majesty of his high office and his swearing to that oath that House Republicans are correct that the president should be held accountable for his actions in some way.
If Starr truly believes that the president has committed multiple felonies, the only just course is for the independent counsel to seek the return of a federal grand jury indictment against Clinton in the District of Columbia and schedule a trial for when Clinton leaves office. Whatever the result, such a trial would lead to a vindication of one of the two men, the humiliation of the other and an end to the national turmoil their actions have caused the rest of us.
- – - – - – - – - -
Next, we consider Rep. Henry Hyde, the Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, who has spearheaded the effort to impeach the president. In explaining his vote in favor of impeachment, Hyde solemnly stated: “We are fighting for the rule of law. I think it is our constitutional duty under the law to pursue impeachment. I’m frightened for the rule of law.”
Apparently, however, Hyde came to his appreciation for the law late in life. Almost a decade ago, as a member of the special Iran-contra congressional investigating committee, Hyde was an outspoken and craven apologist for the Reagan administration’s often illegal and extraconstitutional foreign policy toward Iran and Nicaragua.
Hyde did not lie awake late at night fearing for the fate of the rule of law then. Unlike Whitewater and the Monica Lewinsky affair, Iran-contra involved lawbreaking and abuses of power by the president and his most senior national security advisers that were central to the governance of the nation. They included illegal arms sales by the Reagan administration to Iran, a terrorist state, as well as the covert funding of the contras, despite the fact that such assistance was also illegal.
An investigation by Iran-contra independent counsel Lawrence Walsh led to convictions or guilty pleas by nine people. Criminal charges were brought against senior officials of the National Security Council, the State Department, the Defense Department and the CIA.
As a ranking Republican on the Iran-contra committee in 1987, Hyde had this to say at the time about the massive lawbreaking within the Reagan White House: “All of us, at some time, confront conflicts between rights and duties, between choices that are evil and less evil, and one hardly exhausts moral indignation by labeling every untruth and every deception an outrage.”
Hyde also excused the conduct of National Security Council aide Oliver North by asserting that during previous presidencies, the White House had long been “a palace of pragmatism where dishonesty flourished.”
Rep. Bill McCollum, R-Fla., has also been one of the Judiciary Committee’s most outspoken members in support of Clinton’s impeachment. Even after the bombing of Iraq began, McCollum pushed to continue with the impeachment vote. “I think it is irrelevant if there’s bombing going on. We can still do the impeachment,” McCollum said.
Like Hyde, during the Iran-contra scandal, McCollum was one of the House’s most virulent defenders of the lawlessness of the Reagan administration’s conduct of foreign policy. Then also a member of the House Judiciary Committee, McCollum led an effort to derail a subcommittee probe of the role of then-Attorney General Edwin Meese and White House officials in obstructing criminal investigations of North and his contra resupply network, according to a former member of the Judiciary Committee and two former staffers.
“McCollum was in constant contact with the Justice Department and White House in an effort to thwart what we were doing,” a former Judiciary subcommittee staff member told me earlier this week. “In my mind, he wasn’t assisting the White House’s coverup. He was part of it.”
Next we should consider the role of Starr, a man who finds so much fault with others, but will only acknowledge one fault of his own: loving the law too much.
“My experience is in the law and in the courts,” Starr intoned before the House Judiciary Committee. “I am not a man of politics, of public relations, or of polls … Rather, as a product of the law and of the courts, I have come to an unyielding faith in our court system … the sanctity of the judicial process.”
But Starr’s lasting legacy to this peculiar time will most likely be the enduring harm he has done to the rule of law he says he so loves. Because of Starr’s prosecutorial missteps, it is unlikely that Congress will reauthorize the independent counsel statute. Because of his prosecutorial zeal, a vast segment of the American public has lost its faith in federal prosecutors to enforce the laws of the land.
Starr was certainly right in telling the House Judiciary Committee that no president should be above the law. And he was also right to say that the president should be awarded no greater rights than the average citizen.
But by the same token, we do not want a system of government where anyone, including the president of the United States, should have lesser rights than an ordinary citizen. We do not want our public officials to be below the law any more than we would allow them to be above it.
For most of the rest of us, it would be unthinkable for a wealthy philanthropist, such as Richard Mellon Scaife, to spend millions of dollars on private investigations of our personal lives. Nor is it conceivable that any public prosecutor would ever spend $40 million to investigate the 20-year-old business dealings and personal conduct of any ordinary citizen. And none of us would have been compelled to testify against our best interests to a federal grand jury, as the president was.
As former Rep. Elizabeth Holtzman of Brooklyn, an author of the original independent counsel statute, persuasively argued in the New York Times last August when Starr demanded Clinton’s testimony before his federal grand jury:
“Unlike most witnesses, [Clinton] cannot invoke his Fifth Amendment right not to testify on the ground that he might incriminate himself — even though he is fully entitled to do so. If he were to invoke the Fifth, it could easily, if unfairly, be portrayed as an admission of guilt and could permanently taint his presidency …
“Plainly, Mr. Starr is maneuvering to take advantage of Mr. Clinton’s inability to claim the Fifth and coercing him into becoming a witness against himself. But Mr. Starr should understand the constraints on the president require restraint in the use of the prosecutor’s power.”
During the course of his four-year investigation, however, Starr has displayed as little restraint in exercising his prosecutorial discretion as the president had in his sexual indiscretion.
Finally, we should also consider the role of the media in all of this. After all of its hyperventilating on the soap-opera aspects of this story over the course of the last year, one would think the press would now attempt to lead a thoughtful and national discussion as to what does and does not rise to the level of offense that should lead to the impeachment of the president.
But today, there are no Edward R. Murrows or Walter Cronkites to provide us with the proper perspective. Instead, we are left with the likes of Geraldo Rivera. In all fairness, however, who can claim that Geraldo is not the best qualified journalist to cover the Clinton crisis? After all, understanding complicated DNA evidence has proven to be as crucial to the impeachment of the president as it was to Geraldo’s other recent big story, the O.J. Simpson murder trial.
Clinton’s harshest critics may be right in asserting that one of his most enduring legacies will be his undermining of the rule of the law. But when historians consider this peculiar time, they are likely to conclude that Henry Hyde, Kenneth Starr and numerous others in Congress and the press have been Clinton’s unindicted co-conspirators in the damage they have done to the Constitution.
Congress finally gets to interrogate the great interrogator. On Thursday, independent counsel Kenneth Starr will appear before the House Judiciary Committee as it decides whether to pursue an impeachment inquiry against President Clinton.
The committee chairman, Rep. Henry Hyde, R-Ill., has announced his intention to limit questions to Starr. The 37 committee members will be given five minutes each to question the independent counsel about the allegations of bias, leaks, conflicts of interest and collaboration with Clinton’s enemies that have plagued his inquiry from the outset.
As Salon has revealed, Starr pursued his initial investigation into Whitewater with the key assistance of David Hale, a tainted witness who stands accused of taking money and legal help from anti-Clinton activists at the Arkansas Project, a secret $2.4 million project to undermine Clinton financed by Starr’s former patron, Richard Mellon Scaife. When Starr’s Whitewater inquiry went nowhere, he latched onto Paula Jones’ civil suit, and then when that failed, he wired Linda Tripp and finally snared Clinton on adultery. The ties between Starr, Tripp and Jones — which have not been satisfactorily explained — helped the independent counsel create a perjury trap for the president in his Jones deposition that would lead to the impeachment crisis.
To enable committee members to use their five minutes well, Salon has prepared a list of questions that Starr should be asked.
1) What was the nature of your contacts with the Paula Jones legal team prior to your appointment as independent counsel?
2) Did you know that your partner at Kirkland and Ellis, Richard W. Porter, was assisting the Paula Jones legal team?
3) When did your office first learn of allegations of payments to David Hale by conservative political activists?
4) Was your office aware of attempts by David Hale to suborn perjury from his brother Milas regarding Whitewater?
5) Did you ever discuss with your friend and former Justice Department colleague Theodore Olson the Arkansas Project and/or David Hale?
6) What steps did your office take to maintain the independence of special investigator Michael Shaheen to investigate David Hale?
7) Did you or your office ever inform the attorney general, or the three-judge panel that appointed you, of the ties between you or your law firm and the Paula Jones legal team?
How and when did you learn of the existence of Linda Tripp’s tapes?
9) Why has your office refused to disclose the salaries and other compensation paid to you and your prosecutors?
10) What steps are you taking to accommodate the special master investigating potentially illegal leaks by your office to the media?
11) In a letter to Steven Brill, editor of Brill’s Content, you denied your prosecutors ever suggested Monica Lewinsky wear a wire and secretly record conversations with Vernon Jordan and the president. But Lewinsky testified to the grand jury that your office indeed made that demand. Who is telling the truth?
12) Having now served as independent counsel, would you favor reauthorization of the independent counsel statute? And would you like to see changes to the statute?
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Here is a fact sheet of what every American citizen should know about Kenneth Starr and his probe.
1) After successful lobbying by staunch conservatives such as North Carolina Sen. Lauch Faircloth, a three-judge panel dominated by Republicans replaced moderate Whitewater prosecutor Robert Fiske with Kenneth Starr in August 1994. Starr, former chief of staff to Reagan Attorney General William French Smith and a member of an ambitious circle of activist conservative attorneys, accepted the job despite the fact that he had opposed the independent counsel law when he was a Reagan official and helped prepare a brief arguing it was unconstitutional, vesting too much power in one unaccountable person.
2) At the time of his appointment as Whitewater independent counsel, Starr, a $1 million-a-year Washington attorney with the high-powered firm of Kirkland & Ellis, was advising the Paula Jones camp on her sexual harassment suit against Clinton and offered to write a friend-of-the-court brief on her behalf. He was also representing the tobacco industry, an ardent foe of the Clinton administration. Later, Iran-contra prosecutor Lawrence Walsh would comment that, considering Starr’s conflicts of interest, he should have felt obligated to turn down the job of investigating Clinton.
3) Starr proceeded to build his Whitewater case against Clinton largely around the testimony of confessed felon David Hale, a corrupt municipal judge and businessman who claimed then-Gov. Clinton had pressured him into making an illegal $300,000 loan to Jim and Susan McDougal, Clinton’s partners in the failed Whitewater real estate deal. Starr’s Whitewater investigators unearthed a formidable amount of evidence casting doubt on Hale’s testimony against Clinton, including the fact that Hale had falsely invoked Clinton’s name on a separate occasion to win a $50,000 kickback from an Alabama health company seeking an Arkansas state contract. But Starr chose to overlook this inconvenient episode in Hale’s past, as well as the fact that his star witness had turned his courthouse into a personal ATM when he served as a municipal judge, taking kickbacks from a private collection agency he had installed to gather fines. A Salon investigation has also revealed that David Hale attempted to get his respected brother Milas, a judge, to falsely corroborate his allegations about Clinton’s role in the Whitewater affair.
4) William Watt, another former municipal judge implicated in the Whitewater scheme, was used by Starr to corroborate Hale’s testimony during the trial of the McDougals and Gov. Jim Guy Tucker. But Watt would later tell Salon that Starr’s investigators ignored exculpatory information he provided them about Clinton and tried to pressure him into telling a more incriminating story about Clinton: “I was told they didn’t like the truth the way that I told it. I had my truth and they had their truth and I was told that they liked their truth better.” Watt also told Salon that he regarded Hale as someone who would “lie and manipulate people. He was a pathological liar.”
5) David Hale, while cooperating with Starr as his chief Whitewater witness from 1994 to 1996, would sometimes stay rent-free at a fishing resort in Hot Springs, Ark., owned by anti-Clinton activist Parker Dozhier, who passed on secret cash payments to Hale. This charge was made to Salon by Dozhier’s former live-in girlfriend, Caryn Mann, and her teenage son, both of whom have repeated their testimony before a federal grand jury. According to Mann, the money came from conservative attorney Stephen Boynton and David Henderson, vice president of the foundation that owns the conservative American Spectator magazine. Boynton and Henderson oversaw the Arkansas Project, an anti-Clinton muckraking campaign lavishly funded by right-wing billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, who funneled his contributions through the Spectator.
6) “We’re convinced that none of our people had any knowledge of any such [Arkansas Project] payments [to Hale],” asserted Starr’s chief Arkansas deputy, W. Hickman Ewing Jr. But the first meeting of the Arkansas Project took place in the Washington law offices of Theodore Olson, a friend, political ally and former colleague of Starr’s, whose relationship dated back to their days as young activist conservatives in the Reagan Justice Department. Olson and Starr were also both beneficiaries of Richard Mellon Scaife’s politically inspired generosity. Starr was scheduled to take a Scaife-funded deanship at Pepperdine University until controversy about his connections to Scaife forced him to resign the post. Olson has served on the board and as the attorney of the Scaife-funded American Spectator as well as on the advisory boards of four other right-wing institutions funded by Scaife. Referring to Olson’s oversight role on the Arkansas Project, one source told Salon, “Olson is somebody who Scaife would trust to see that nothing went wrong and that his money would not be wasted.”
Like Starr, Olson worked on the Paula Jones case. Last year, when Jones challenged Clinton’s claim of immunity from civil suits while in office, Olson, together with Robert Bork, held a moot court to prepare Jones’ lawyers for their successful argument before the Supreme Court.
7) Olson — who, along with his wife, Barbara, is often called upon by the press to defend their friend Starr — also represented David Hale when he was called to testify before the Senate Whitewater Committee. Later, Hale lied under oath about how he came to retain Olson while testifying at the trial of Tucker and the McDougals. Two sources told Salon that by lying Hale was trying to conceal his connection to the Arkansas Project. It was the project’s Stephen Boynton and David Henderson who put Hale in touch with Olson. (Olson’s Arkansas Project connection is never mentioned when the New York Times and other media outlets call on him for comment about Starr’s investigation of the president.)
While Hale was cooperating with Starr’s Whitewater case, the independent counsel aggressively protected the man he called “a model witness,” despite all evidence that Hale was anything but. Starr and his deputies tried to stop an insurance fraud case brought against Hale by Arkansas prosecutors, who charged that Starr’s office tried to intimidate them into dropping the case. The trial, which Starr succeeded in delaying but not stopping, will now begin in March. It will certainly cast a further cloud on Starr’s “model witness,” for Hale is charged with bilking poor black clients in rural Arkansas out of their funeral payments.
9) Some of Starr’s deputies were alarmed by the independent counsel’s unquestioning embrace of Hale. They shook their heads in dismay when Starr argued in court for a reduced sentence for “Judge Hale,” as he called him, telling the court, “I have witnessed his contrition. I believe, your honor, that he is genuinely remorseful of his criminal past. I have been impressed with his humble spirit.” Taking issue with Starr, one Whitewater investigator told Salon, “With someone like Hale, you can never let down your guard. You should never get to a point where you begin to trust him.”
10) Starr deputy Hickman Ewing met quietly several times during the course of his Whitewater investigation with Rex Armistead, a private eye hired by the Arkansas Project to dig up dirt on Clinton. Armistead’s investigation focused on allegations that then-Gov. Clinton had protected a cocaine-smuggling ring operating out of the Mena airport in rural Arkansas. The drug charges were examined and rejected by three separate federal investigations.
One Whitewater investigator expressed concern about Ewing’s meetings with the private eye, because of the controversial connection between Starr and Scaife and because not all the meetings were recorded in official files: “This was either the worst case of judgment or something worse.”
11) At a critical juncture in Paula Jones’ long-running legal battle with the president, the Arkansas Project’s Stephen Boynton, David Henderson and Parker Dozhier intervened to find her experienced litigators, just before the statute of limitations on her lawsuit ran out. The suit was successfully revived — and it in turn would later revive Kenneth Starr’s flagging pursuit of the president.
Another connection between the Jones case and the Arkansas Project surfaced when Salon reported that William Lehrfeld, a conservative attorney who has worked for Scaife and who served as legal counsel for the project, contributed $50,000 to Jones’ legal fund from a little-known foundation he ran.
12) In early 1997, Starr’s Whitewater case against Clinton had reached such a dead end that he made an effort to flee his job for the sunny Pepperdine campus in Malibu, Calif. When his attempted escape provoked howls from his political and media supporters, Starr returned grimly to his Whitewater post. But his fortunes would dramatically reverse later in the year when the Jones lawsuit was green-lighted by the Supreme Court — with help from Starr’s friend Olson — and Jones’ lawyers subpoenaed Clinton and a then-obscure former White House intern named Monica Lewinsky.
13) Finally, in recent months, new attention has been given to the previously reported fact that Starr had close ties to the Paula Jones case even while he was seeking to replace Robert Fiske as Whitewater independent counsel in August 1994. Before his appointment, Starr had publicly spoken out against presidential immunity from Jones’ suit and had even prepared an amicus brief for Jones. Starr also consulted directly with Jones’ lawyers about the case, a fact he may not have told Attorney General Janet Reno when he sought approval to extend his probe into the fetid waters of Jones-Lewinsky-Tripp.
Perhaps most important, new documents have revealed that Starr knew much earlier than he told Reno about Linda Tripp’s Monica Lewinsky tapes; and that Tripp herself, not Lewinsky or Clinton, suggested to Lewinsky that she ask Vernon Jordan to help her find a job in exchange for her silence about her affair with the president.
By ensnaring Jordan in the Lewinsky matter, Tripp built the bridge that Starr walked across to move from the Reno-authorized Whitewater probe — where he was investigating whether Jordan helped Clinton pal Webster Hubbell get a job in exchange for his silence about the Whitewater deal — into the unrelated, but much more enticing matter of the Lewinsky affair. The shadowy ties between Starr, Tripp and Jones and their right-wing friends allowed the independent counsel’s office to create the perjury trap for Clinton in his Jones deposition that would result in the current impeachment crisis.
And so the Clinton-Starr drama came full circle. By returning to the Paula Jones civil case that he had counseled before his appointment as Whitewater prosecutor, Kenneth Starr was finally able to get his man. Like Roger Chillingworth, the vengeful moralist who relentlessly pursued the adulterous Hester Prynne and her lover, the Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale, in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter,” Starr branded Clinton with the scarlet “I” — for impeachment.
But this month’s election showed that most Americans have resisted the hysterical anti-Clinton sermonizing. They understand that Starr’s enterprise was a political inquisition from its very birth, and that his marriage of limitless prosecutorial force and political vengeance is a much more dangerous specter than President Clinton’s libido. It’s this sense of decency and balance that will, we hope, save the country from being torn apart over a matter that should never have been dragged into the public arena.
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — Milas H. Hale II, the older brother of Whitewater witness David Hale, has asserted that his brother repeatedly pressured him to lie to federal law enforcement authorities on his behalf during the late summer and early fall of 1993, Salon has learned. Most importantly, David Hale asked his brother to falsely corroborate allegations of illegal misconduct by President Clinton that have been central to the Whitewater investigation of independent counsel Kenneth Starr.
Milas Hale has told confidants that he had no firsthand knowledge about whether David’s allegations regarding Clinton were true, and that he would be lying to the federal authorities if he corroborated his brother’s story, as he had been asked to do. Milas Hale ultimately refused to lie on his brother’s behalf, sources say.
This account of David Hale’s attempted subornation of perjury by his brother was provided to Salon by three people close to Milas Hale. Significant portions of those accounts have been independently corroborated by other sources and documents as well. Milas Hale himself declined to comment for this story, however.
The three sources who have confirmed the story for Salon declined to be identified because of their friendships with the Hale family, and also because of concerns that being named would lead to questioning by the Whitewater independent counsel. They say they have never been questioned by the independent counsel or any other federal law enforcement authorities.
Since March 1994, David Hale has been the central witness against Clinton in Starr’s Whitewater investigation. Hale alleged that in 1986 then-Arkansas Gov. Clinton had pressured him to make a fraudulent and illegal $300,000 loan to Susan McDougal, the Clintons’ partner in their failed Whitewater real-estate investment.
Informed of Salon’s new information, a federal law enforcement official who had worked for Starr commented: “If it turns out that David Hale had indeed attempted to suborn perjury from another potential witness to our investigation, that not only raises the most troubling questions about him as our witness … It also raises the most basic and fundamental questions about our own investigation.
“Someone should be made to answer as to how this could have come to pass as long as five years ago and we did not know a thing about it … After all, we’re talking about the attempted subornation of perjury regarding allegations of criminality about the president of the United States of America.”
During the time that David Hale is said to have asked his brother to lie for him, the Justice Department was on the verge of bringing criminal charges against David Hale for having defrauded the Small Business Administration of more than $3.2 million through a federally subsidized loan company that he then headed. In an attempt to escape criminal charges and a lengthy prison sentence, Hale offered information to prosecutors about alleged illegal conduct by Clinton and other Arkansas political figures.
It would have been extraordinarily significant to the Whitewater probe if Hale had been successful in recruiting his brother to falsely corroborate his story regarding Clinton. That is because Hale has not been able to produce for prosecutors any evidence other than his own word that his story about Clinton was true.
In the five years since Hale first leveled his charges against Clinton, Starr’s investigators have failed to uncover anything significant that might corroborate Hale’s account. As a result, Starr’s impeachment referral to the House of Representatives this summer was devoted entirely to the Monica Lewinsky affair and contained no material at all about Whitewater.
In recent days, Starr has signaled that he is not yet giving up on his Whitewater investigation. Friday, Starr’s office returned a 15-count indictment against Webster Hubbell, a former associate attorney general and close friend of President Clinton and the first lady. The new criminal charges allege that Hubbell, a former law partner of Hillary Rodham Clinton at the Rose Law Firm, engaged in perjury and obstruction of justice to conceal information about the first lady’s legal work on behalf of the Clinton’s Whitewater partner, Jim McDougal.
Meanwhile, a number of serious questions have arisen regarding Hale’s credibility as Starr’s central witness against the president. Most importantly until now, a federal grand jury began hearing testimony in August regarding allegations that conservative political activists had made numerous cash payments, paid legal fees and provided other gratuities to Hale in a possible attempt to influence his testimony as a Whitewater witness.
But the new information that David Hale attempted to influence his brother to give false information to federal investigators raises perhaps the most serious questions to date about his credibility as a witness against the president.
“If it could be shown that a cooperating witness to a federal investigation attempted to recruit someone else to falsely corroborate their testimony, that would be severely damaging to that witness’ credibility,” says John Q. Barrett, a former federal prosecutor who is now a professor at St. John’s law school. “Any ethical prosecutor would want to be aware of the baggage that their witness is carrying before they rely on that witness to testify for the government and send people to jail.”
That such information has apparently not been uncovered by Starr also raises additional questions about the thoroughness and fairness of his probe of the president. In March, for example, Starr said that he and his staff were unaware of allegations that conservative political activists made covert payments of money to Hale until they were disclosed by Salon.
And several of Starr’s own prosecutors and FBI agents have privately criticized the conduct and judgment of Starr and his top deputy in Arkansas, W. Hickman Ewing Jr., in their handling of Hale as a witness to their Whitewater probe. These federal law enforcement officers have privately stated that Starr did not exercise the necessary skepticism regarding Hale that a more experienced prosecutor would have brought to the case. Charles Bakaly III, a spokesman for the Whitewater independent counsel, declined to comment for this story.
With little more than his own word to corroborate his charges against Clinton, David Hale asked Milas to lie on his behalf and say he had firsthand knowledge that they were true, according to three sources. David Hale also asked his brother to verify other information to federal investigators that Milas had no way of knowing was true, the same people said.
All three of the sources said that their knowledge was based on direct discussions with Milas Hale. Several other individuals close to the Hale family confirmed that these three people are indeed close friends of Milas.
Milas Hale, 63, presided over the municipal court in Sherwood, Ark., for more than 25 years, retiring from the bench in December 1996. He is currently a partner in the North Little Rock law firm of Hale and Young.
Milas used his position as judge all those years to build his own formidable political base. He was also a political ally and sometime confidant of Clinton’s throughout Clinton’s 12 years as governor of Arkansas. During legislative sessions, Milas would often lobby for Clinton’s agenda, skillfully making arguments to sympathetic legislators and twisting the arms of others who wanted Milas’ political support during election time.
“Milas has had an outstanding reputation in this community, for honesty and integrity, a standing that David Hale could and would never have,” said one person close to Milas. “No one from Arkansas would ever take David Hale’s word for anything,” this person added, “but Milas is a very different story. If he were to have corroborated David’s account, that would have surely given David a stronger hand in negotiating with prosecutors.”
Over the course of the last several months, Milas Hale has declined to comment about any aspect of this story. Reached at his law firm in April, Milas said that he might consider speaking to this reporter, but later refused to specifically comment as to whether his brother had ever pressured him to lie on his behalf. Telephone messages subsequently left for Milas with his law partner, his wife and a third brother, Randy Hale, went unreturned. An advance copy of the story with a list of questions left at his home went unanswered as well.
Tona De Mers, an attorney for David Hale, denied that her client has done anything wrong: “David has never asked anyone to lie for him. He has not suborned perjury, nor would he. I know the man. I know him well. This is not something that he would do.”
Two sources told Salon that David also asked Milas to use his political influence with Clinton and White House aides to have them attempt to thwart the 1993 federal investigation of David’s lending company. When Milas refused, David subsequently asked Milas to see if he could arrange for Clinton allies to intercede in some lesser way on David’s behalf. The two sources said that Milas refused to become involved in any such endeavor, and as a result the two brothers have barely spoken a word to each other since.
Six people close to the Hale brothers confirmed that they had become estranged from each other in 1993, when David allegedly pressured Milas to lie. Three of those people said that the estrangement was directly related to Milas’ refusal to do anything improper to assist David in his effort to avoid accountability for his Whitewater crimes. Three other sources, including two members of the Hale family, confirmed the brothers’ estrangement from each other, but said that they were unaware of the reasons for the falling out.
One close family friend recalled that during the 1996 funeral of David’s and Milas’ eldest brother, John Hale, the two brothers refused to speak to each other: “They [David and Milas] didn’t say a single word to one another during the service, or for that matter even acknowledge the presence of the other.”
Another intimate of the Hale family said that although the brothers were estranged from one another, Milas “would still do just about anything to protect his brother … Milas has been taught since he was young that you do anything to protect, to look after your family, at all costs. Milas isn’t going to say or do anything that is going to get his brother into further legal trouble … unless him and his family is really pushed to the wall.”
But the same family intimate said he believed that Milas has been torn between “protecting his brother” on the one hand, and on the other “protecting the rest of the family from David” and “restoring the family’s good name.”
“Milas Hale would do just about anything for his family,” explained a person close to the Hale family. “That is, except commit perjury against the president of the United States. That he was not going to do.”
An intimate of Milas Hale said, “David believed that he had this ‘bullet-proof’ attitude. He thought that he could talk or charm his way out of anything … and that if you did get caught, there was always a political fix to be had. When the SBA was warned that there was something wrong [with David Hale's lending company], David was able to convince them that nothing was wrong. When he got caught with that deal at the courthouse, he was able to rely on Milas’ political clout to get out of trouble again.”
(As Salon disclosed in August, while David Hale was a Little Rock municipal court judge, he received illegal kickbacks from a private company that he allowed to operate rent-free from his courthouse to collect bad checks. But Hale was able to escape prosecution and disciplinary action at the time because of his political connections.)
“David didn’t understand fear the way the rest of us do,” the same source said. “He thought that things worked in Washington the same way they worked in Arkansas. He thought that Milas could just call someone and there would no longer be a problem.”
Not long after David Hale’s failed attempt to convince Milas to intervene with Clinton on his behalf, David instructed his attorney, Randy Coleman, to make a similar approach to White House officials, according to the findings of a congressional investigation.
The final report of the Senate Whitewater Committee revealed that on Aug. 17, 1993, Coleman called William Kennedy, then the associate counsel to President Clinton, to give him a “heads-up” about the federal investigation of Hale and discuss the “mutual interests of our clients.”
During that conversation, Coleman let it be known that if the federal investigation of Hale’s lending company were to continue, President Clinton himself might be vulnerable. The Senate report relates: “The conversation was brief. Mr. Coleman told Mr. Kennedy that the FBI had raided Mr. Hale’s CMS office, and confiscated records containing information on the Clintons, Gov. Tucker, the McDougals, Whitewater and Madison. Mr. Coleman told Mr. Kennedy that if Heidi Fliess was the ‘madam to the stars, David Hale was the lender to the political elite in Arkansas.’ Mr. Kennedy’s notes indicate that Mr. Coleman specifically mentioned President Clinton and Gov. Tucker.”
Coleman, who no longer represents Hale nor practices law, declined to comment. Kennedy also did not return phone calls from Salon.
White House aides, afraid that they were being set up by Coleman to do something improper, did not pursue the matter much further, according to the congressional investigative records.
Two sources close to David Hale said that when he failed to get the help
he was seeking from his brother, the White House and other Democrats, he
made a conscious decision to approach conservative opponents of the
president instead. From this point on, Hale began to work closely with the
Arkansas Project, the $2.4 million effort associated with the American
Spectator magazine to undermine President Clinton. A federal grand jury has
heard testimony that a representative of the Arkansas Project made covert
payments to Hale and attempted to influence his testimony against Clinton
in the Whitewater matter.
David Hale told federal investigators that he and Clinton were alone during two of three purported conversations in which Clinton pressured Hale to make the loan to Susan McDougal. During the first purported conversation about the loan, Hale said that Jim McDougal was also present.
For several years, Jim McDougal adamantly denied Hale’s account, and testified under oath during his own Whitewater trial that the meeting never took place. Only after having been found guilty of 18 felonies, and potentially facing as many as 84 years in prison, did Jim McDougal change his story. After Starr’s office offered him a significantly reduced sentence, McDougal asserted that he had committed perjury during his trial, and indeed was present while Clinton discussed with Hale a loan to his former wife, Susan.
Jim McDougal told investigators that at the time Clinton and Susan McDougal were romantically involved with each other. Some federal law enforcement officials say that they have always tended to believe Hale’s account in part because it fit Clinton’s pattern involving other women with whom he had affairs.
These law enforcement officials say that Clinton has a history of assisting the women he was involved with — such as Gennifer Flowers and Monica Lewinsky — helping them obtain jobs and other financial benefits in an effort to conceal those relationships: “Asking David Hale to help out Susan McDougal would have fit that pattern,” said one of the law enforcement officials.
For his part, Clinton denied under oath that he had ever discussed with David Hale any loan to Susan McDougal, let alone pressured Hale to make the loan. Clinton has asserted that Hale fabricated the entire story.
But the president also has some obvious credibility problems of his own to overcome, in the view of some federal Whitewater investigators. Starr’s impeachment referral to the House of Representatives alleges that there is “substantial and credible” evidence that Clinton “lied under oath” in the Paula Jones sexual harassment case and during his federal grand jury testimony about Lewinsky.
“The problem with trying to evaluate Hale’s account is that we’re dealing with three people — David Hale, Jim McDougal and Bill Clinton — who have shown that they do not have the slightest compunction about lying under oath,” says one law enforcement official. “It’s immensely frustrating, especially for those of us who still try and have an open mind as to what might have transpired between these various people.”
YELL COUNTY, Ark. — It was on an 80-acre vegetable and livestock farm here at the foot of the picturesque Ozark National Forest where David Hale, his older brother Milas, two other brothers and a sister were raised. Like so many families of Yell County, their parents and grandparents were dirt farmers who had migrated to Arkansas seeking a better life for their children.
Their community shared a passionate attachment to the land, which, though harsh and unforgiving, allowed its inhabitants to live, in the words of one historian, amid “fresh air and intense morning sunlight, softened and diffused by the mists and low-hanging clouds.”
Although the Hales did not have much in the way of material wealth, they had their way of life and a set of bedrock values. The five Hale children were in attendance every Sunday at the local Baptist church. Their dad constantly told them that education was the only way for them to get ahead. There was no such thing as situational morality. There was only right or wrong.
“We were taught the value of hard work and taking care of your neighbors,” Randy Hale, the baby brother of the family, recalled in an interview. “If someone fell ill, you made sure to look after their livestock until they were better. You did chores on their farm until they were able to do for themselves again.”
Their father not only ran the family farm but also worked as a foreman for the state highway department. His goal of elevating his family to the middle class proved to be elusive in his own lifetime.
One of Milas Hale’s favorite stories about his childhood revolved around the family’s hound dogs. The dogs would congregate at the back of the house for spare biscuits that he and his brother, David, would toss to them at the end of the supper meal. The hounds would catch the biscuits in mid-air and swallow them whole.
One day, Milas caught a tiny mouse scurrying across the floor with his feet, scooped it up and tossed it in high into the air. One of the hounds, thinking that the mouse was a biscuit, caught it mid-air and swallowed it whole: “That hound had indigestion for some time,” Milas joked.
Their father’s hope that education would lead to a better life was realized after both Milas and David graduated from the Belleville high school and attended the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville before going on to law school.
Later, David went to work for his brother’s Little Rock law firm. Both appeared at the time to have bright, limitless political futures. David worked briefly as a deputy prosecutor for Arkansas’ sixth judicial district. He would also be prominently mentioned at an early age as a candidate for Arkansas secretary of state, lieutenant governor and attorney general.
Milas became the judge of the municipal court for the town of Sherwood, just north of the river from Little Rock, in 1971, a position from which he would build his own formidable political base. Any candidate for local political office, from prosecuting attorney to state legislator, knew that he stood a much better chance of being elected if he had the support of Milas Hale.
In contrast to his brother, David had interests beyond politics and the law. In 1974, he became president of the national Jaycees. Then he purchased an insurance company. And in 1978, he obtained a license to run his federally subsidized loan company, Capital Management Services.
David Hale would later exploit all of those entities for dishonest or criminal purposes. As president of the Jaycees, he embezzled money from the national nonprofit, according to confidential financial records of the organization obtained by Salon. Hale allegedly looted hundreds of thousands of dollars of funds from his insurance company, an offense for which he is scheduled to stand trial on state criminal charges next March. And through Capital Management Services, he stole more than $3.2 million from the Small Business Administration.
In 1979, at the behest of Milas Hale, the Arkansas Legislature passed a bill establishing a new municipal court for Little Rock. Even before the bill’s passage, it was well understood that the legislation was proposed with the idea that David Hale would be the person awarded the job, two members of the Legislature recalled in recent interviews.
“Milas was trying to give his brother what he had,” recalls a family friend. “He had hoped that by making David a judge that David would all of a sudden turn straight and narrow. But David was no more capable of living that life than Milas could wake up some day and live a criminal existence.
“It was like their respective lives were set at birth. That’s the tragedy for Milas and his family.”
David Hale’s ascendance to the judiciary hardly changed him. In fact, as Salon disclosed earlier this year, Hale used his position as county judge to demand illegal kickbacks from a local bail bonds company operating out of his courthouse.
And David Hale would abruptly resign his judicial seat when he was indicted by a federal grand jury Sept. 23, 1993, on charges that he used his federally subsidized loan company to defraud the Small Business Administration of millions of dollars. It was in an effort to escape those criminal charges that Hale first made his allegations against the president, and also pressed Milas to falsely corroborate those charges.
As a result of David’s request that Milas lie on his behalf, the once close brothers all but stopped talking to each other: “It just breaks my heart,” says their older sister, Hazel Dennis, 66. “It’s been a difficult time for the entire family.”
In retribution for Milas refusing to lie for him, David went out of his way to get even during his debriefings with the federal agents. According to a confidential FBI report, David Hale admitted to having received $50,000 from a now-defunct Alabama health-care company in exchange for assisting it in its effort to obtain a $30 million state contract to provide medical services to Arkansas’ prisons.
The FBI report asserted that Hale had told the Alabama health-care executives that “he would need [the] $50,000 for political help … Hale advised that what he meant was that this money would probably have to be used to pay off individuals around the contract process.”
Hale told the FBI that he then gave $10,000 to Milas, who he alleged then “probably” passed the money along to two Arkansas state senators who “were involved in the decision-making process on this contract.”
Whitewater investigators never even bothered to investigate the allegations, a federal law enforcement source said, concluding the information was too far outside their mandate to investigate the president and other Arkansas political figures. Moreover, two individuals involved in the effort by Hale to obtain the contracts for the Alabama company told Salon that they believed that David Hale never paid any of the money to his brother or other Arkansas political figures. Instead, the best available evidence suggested that David kept the money for himself, scamming the Alabama health-care executives.
Milas Hale declined to comment about the charges his brother made against him. But Arkansas state Sen. Cliff Hoofman, a lifetime friend of both Hale brothers, said he was certain that Milas had done nothing wrong:
“I would bet my life and soul that Milas Hale would never have had anything to do with something like that,” Hoofman asserted in an interview. “Milas would know that a payoff for activity that took place during a legislative session would be inappropriate … If David said he did something like that, I would say that he is lying.”
Hoofman also said that the rest of the Hale family should not be judged by David’s actions: “The whole family had to have a good Christian foundation for all of them to turn out as good and sharing as they are … It’s tragic that their brother has the mark of Cain on him.”
In contrast, a former business partner of David Hale’s recently recalled better days for the Hale brothers:
“David once made the comment to me that every important politician and businessman from around here — either they or their wife or their kid — was bound to one day get a DWI [driving while intoxicated] or some other serious traffic violation. He said that if it was ‘south of the river’ they would have to see him. If they were ‘north of the river’ they would be before Milas in his court. David said that there were gonna be a lot of important folks owing them favors. David saw this as a means to power. He was on the top of the world.”
