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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
The first lady's lost Whitewater billing records were supposed to be the smoking gun that would lead to her indictment. Instead, they corroborated her claims of innocence.
Mar 6, 2000 | Almost from the outset of his presidency, the hunters of Bill Clinton were simultaneously in hot pursuit of his controversial wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton. As a former partner in the Rose Law Firm and as the steward of her family's tangled finances, the first lady drew fire not only from the Washington press corps but from Kenneth Starr's chief deputy in Arkansas, W. Hickman Ewing Jr., a conservative Republican whose prosecutorial energy had always included a tinge of fundamentalist zeal.
Ewing's moral certainty about Hillary Clinton's guilt soon seeped into the media coverage of the Clinton "scandals." With an unseemly eagerness, Clinton critics in the press began to trumpet rumors of her impending indictment. And when a set of long-misplaced billing records from the Rose firm were found in the White House, the crescendo of accusations reached a frenzied pitch.
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After a few years in solo law practice, Hickman Ewing Jr. got a call in late August 1994 from Kenneth Starr, who had just been appointed Whitewater independent counsel. They met at a McDonald's restaurant in Brinkley, Arkansas, and Ewing quickly accepted the position as Starr's senior deputy, even though it meant living in Little Rock during the week and commuting home to his family in suburban Memphis on weekends. He had the right attitude for the Office of Independent Counsel, guided always by his trained ability to sense guilt, as he told the New Yorker's Jeffrey Toobin years later.
As early as the spring of 1995, Ewing testified years later, he had drawn up a draft indictment against Hillary Rodham Clinton and circulated it to other lawyers in the OIC. He said the document was based upon a sworn statement she had given that April "about her representation of Madison Guaranty when she was at the Rose Law Firm: How the business came in, what work she performed, and how the retainer was returned." During his testimony at Susan McDougal's contempt trial in 1999, Ewing also admitted that he had taken to making quasi-public pronouncements about the first lady's guilt. He recalled, "We were eating dinner one night, and somebody said, 'How do you grade them?' I think the President was about a 'C' and Mrs. Clinton was about an 'F'."
On December 19, 1995, the morning after the Wall Street Journal's comprehensive news summary of the Pillsbury Report's findings absolving the Clintons, a front-page article appeared in the New York Times indicating that the first lady was in serious trouble. Written by Stephen Labaton, the story appears likely to have relied upon Ewing or other Starr deputies as sources. It confidently laid out a case for two possible felony courts against Hillary: perjury and obstruction of justice. Labaton repeated Jim McDougal's account of Bill Clinton jogging over to Madison Guaranty's office in the summer of 1984 to solicit legal business for Hillary because the couple needed cash. But the real bombshell in the Times article was the supposed contradiction between Hillary's account of how her law firm came to represent Madison Guaranty and that of a former colleague named Rick Massey.
"Mrs. Clinton said in a sworn statement this year," wrote Labaton, "that Mr. Massey, then a first year associate at the Rose firm, had been contacted by a friend at Madison, John Latham, with a request for legal help ... Mr. Massey, who is now a partner at the Rose firm, told Federal investigators he 'does not know how or why Madison selected the Rose Law Firm,' according to a summary of his October 1994 interview with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation."
