The Consortium
By Robert Parry
Largely outside the view of the national news media, the
conservative campaign to impeach President Clinton through
endless "scandal" has started to come unglued.
Cracks are appearing in both the Whitewater (or money) side of
the scandal machinery and the "Trooper-gate" (or sex)
side. Given the five years of scandal momentum, the well-financed
conservative machinery is likely to lurch onward toward
impeachment hearings. But new allegations about paid-off
witnesses and the collapse of some earlier anti-Clinton
allegations are threatening to tear apart the Right's
"get-Clinton" contraption.
The biggest threat to the Right's strategy now is the disclosure
that star Whitewater witness David Hale was receiving cash and
other gratuities from a conservative operative, a Clinton-hating
sportsman named Parker Dozhier.
According to articles in the Internet magazine, Salon, Hale
received the gifts from 1994-96 while Dozhier was working for The
American Spectator's Arkansas Project, a $1.8 million
investigative effort to dig up dirt on President Clinton. In
turn, the Arkansas Project was financed by right-wing billionaire
Richard Mellon Scaife.
Salon quoted Dozhier's former live-in girlfriend, Caryn
Mann, and her 17-year-old son, Joshua Rand, describing a pattern
of cash payments to Hale -- in amounts $500 or less -- when the
former municipal judge stayed at Dozhier's cabin in Hot Springs,
Ark. According to the story, Hale also got free lodging and free
use of Dozhier's car.
Mann and Rand also asserted that during this time, Hale and
Dozhier met with other representatives of The American
Spectator's Arkansas Project and with investigators from
Starr's staff.
The chief problems for Starr are these: this additional taint on
Hale's motives could devastate Starr's Whitewater investigation
-- and the new disclosures could damage Starr's own credibility
just as he is drafting a report recommending President Clinton's
impeachment.
Starr has his own political and financial connections to Scaife.
Most notably, Scaife has heaped his largesse onto offices at
Pepperdine University where Starr planned to go to work after
finishing his Whitewater investigation. To lessen that criticism,
Starr announced on April 16 that he would forego his Pepperdine
career.
But the Scaife-Starr bond is not so easily severed. Scaife also
has financed a number of other right-wing lawyer groups with
close ties to Starr, such as the Washington Legal Foundation, the
Federalist Society and the Landmark Legal Foundation.
For their part, Dozhier and Hale denied the cash allegations,
with Dozhier adding ominously that Joshua Rand was "destined
to be a chalk outline somewhere."
Beyond Starr's conflicts of interest, further damage to Hale's
credibility could knock out a key underpinning of Starr's
Whitewater case. Hale was the witness who claimed that Gov.
Clinton applied pressure in 1986 to get Hale to direct a bogus
$300,000 loan to Clinton's Whitewater business partner, Susan
McDougal.
But Hale always had credibility problems. He only fingered
Clinton in 1993 after the FBI caught him defrauding the Small
Business Administration of $2 million. Hale was desperate for
bargaining leverage. Still, Hale's story was important because it
was the only Whitewater charge that implicated Clinton directly.
Since then, Starr's investigation has worked aggressively to
corroborate Hale's charge. [For more details, see "Whitewater:
A Tale of Two Judges" in this issue.]
Starr has had only mixed success in that endeavor, but Hale's
account still is expected to be one of the twin pillars of
Starr's impeachment report to Congress. The other pillar
reportedly will consist of allegations that Clinton lied when he
denied sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky and other women
mentioned in the Paula Jones case. Yet, Republicans might find an
impeachment debate over financial fraud less politically dicey
than discussions of sex.
At least for now, the Hale pay-off allegations have disrupted the
GOP strategy. The threat to Starr's investigation deepened
further when the Justice Department suggested that Starr should
let professional prosecutors from the department examine the
payments, not try to do it himself.
On April 16, in a prickly letter to Attorney General Janet Reno,
Starr refused to relinquish the pay-off case. He denied that he
had any conflict of interest, but asserted that the Justice
Department did. Most of his legalistic response turned on one
tangential issue.
"Preliminary information indicates that most if not all of
the alleged FBI-supervised contacts between David Hale and Parker
Dozhier occurred prior to August 1994 [when Starr was named
special prosecutor] -- i.e. while the investigation was being
conducted under the auspices of the Department of Justice,"
Starr wrote.
Ignoring his own long list of potential conflicts with Scaife and
Hale, Starr then lectured Reno on her conflicts as a Clinton
appointee. By the end of the letter, Starr made clear that he
intended to keep control of any internal examination of his key
witness.
Another potential reason for Starr's defensiveness on the
Scaife-Hale issue soon slipped out in notes turned over to the
FBI by Caryn Mann and disclosed by Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
columnist Gene Lyons. Purportedly in Dozhier's handwriting, the
notes raise other questions about whether Scaife operatives
collaborated in a campaign to discredit a federal judge who was
hearing one of Starr's Whitewater cases. Starr himself played a
role in this apparent scheme of judge-shopping.
The notes describe meetings held at Dozhier's bait shop during
1995 reportedly involving Hale, Dozier and individuals close to
Scaife. The notes appear to refer to the group's contacts with
old-line segregationist judge Jim Johnson and with Wesley Pruden,
editor of the right-wing Washington Times. Pruden's
father had been a prominent figure in the Arkansas white citizens
council of the 1950s.
Then, on June 23, 1995, Johnson wrote an error-filled op-ed piece
for The Washington Times which attacked the objectivity
of U.S. District Judge Henry Woods, who was presiding over
Starr's trial of then-Gov. Jim Guy Tucker. Johnson denounced
Woods, a pro-integration Democrat, as having unacceptable ties to
the Clintons.
The article -- and others that followed -- gave Starr an opening
to seek Woods's disqualification. Citing the articles, Starr
argued that they "create an unmistakable appearance of bias
by Judge Woods." In 1996, Starr got his wish. An 8th Circuit
Appeals Court panel of three judges -- all Republicans -- ousted
Woods from the trial.
Recently, Lyons showed Woods the Dozhier-Hale meeting notes and
the senior federal judge responded in a written statement. Woods
demanded an investigation of this apparent ruse by Starr and
fellow conservatives to orchestrate the selection of a more
compliant judge. "Such actions" Woods wrote,
"strike at the heart of the judicial process." But
Woods added that if the inquiry remains in Starr's hands, "I
am not sanguine" about a fair inquiry. [Arkansas
Democrat-Gazette, Apr. 15, 1998]
The new Hale disclosures put the potent conservative news
media on the defensive, but it soon mounted a counter-attack.
Columnist Robert D. Novak used his nationally syndicated column
to falsely describe Salon's sourcing. "The sole
source is [Caryn] Mann," Novak wrote, "a single,
dubious, unconfirmed source." [WP, April 13, 1998]. Novak
ignored the easily checkable fact that the Salon article
also cited Mann's son, Joshua Rand, and two other sources who
were not identified by name.
The Washington Times rallied to the Starr-Hale
battlements, too, with a front-page story denouncing Mann as a
onetime Democratic delegate and a wacko who once "gave
psychic readings" at a bookstore. The story contained a
number of uncorroborated criticisms supplied by Dozhier who
termed his ex-lover "a crippled bird ... with mental
problems." [WT, April 13, 1998]
Initially, the mainstream press relegated the Starr-Hale problem
to the inside pages. The Washington Post, which has
promoted the Whitewater story almost as aggressively as The
Washington Times, finally gave the Starr-Hale story
front-page attention on April 19. The Post acknowledged
in its headline that the charges put "a cloud over Starr['s]
witness."
Still, the Post treated the story mostly as a
he-said-she-said dispute. "You have to think about the
credibility of this source," Dozhier told the Post.
Mann responded, "I just decided I had to tell the story of
how these people were doing everything they could to try to bring
down the president."
In its recounting of the controversy, the Post did add
one important piece of corroboration to Mann's story. Mann had
claimed that Dozhier instructed her to quietly add Hale's wife to
the insurance policy for the car being used by Hale. The car's
insurance records did show Linda Hale as an insured driver, the Post
reported.
The Hale problem also apparently forced some changes in Starr's
timetable. On April 16, Starr declared that "the end is not
yet in sight" for his investigation.
Though unclear as to its precise meaning, the "not yet in
sight" comment could mean Starr plans to proceed as expected
with his impeachment report against Clinton this spring, while
simultaneously seeking time-consuming indictments against other
"scandal" figures, such as Webster Hubbell, Monica
Lewinsky and even First Lady Hillary Clinton. Or the statement
could just indicate that Starr believes he must shore up his
Clinton case before pressing ahead for the president's
impeachment.
The broader problem for Starr is that other elements of the
"Clinton scandals" already are in tatters. With little
or no public fanfare, investigations led by Starr and other
Republicans have concluded that no serious evidence has been
found implicating Clinton in many cases that form the bedrock for
the image of a "scandal-scarred" presidency.
Starr's office has acknowledged this reality only in a
back-handed way. The admission came in the context of his
drafting of an impeachment report focusing on Hale-Lewinsky
matters. In an April 8 story, The Washington Post's
Susan Schmidt quoted one "knowledgeable" source --
presumably inside or close to Starr's office -- as saying that
lengthy investigative memos have been written about dry-hole
cases, in which little or no evidence against Clinton was found,
but those "might never see the light of day."
The source said there is a strong sentiment inside Starr's office
against releasing much about investigative topics, unless they
lead to indictment or are part of the impeachment recommendation
to Congress. "You shouldn't, as a prosecutor, trash
someone's reputation unless you are doing an indictment or
impeachment report," said the source, apparently missing the
fact that the Clintons had already been trashed.
So, according to the Post's story, Starr plans to stay
silent on the "scandals" that went bust, including:
A similar reluctance to clear Clinton has occurred in an
investigation by the GOP-controlled House. For two years, the
House Banking Committee has examined allegations linking Clinton
to cocaine-trafficking and money-laundering in the 1980s at a
remote airstrip in Mena, Ark. But again the Republicans couldn't
back up the suspicions.
"We haven't come up with anything to support these
allegations concerning then-Gov. Clinton," committee
spokesman David Runkel told me. But the committee has moved
slowly in publishing a report that would formally clear Clinton
-- and might draw attention to the fact that another anti-Clinton
charge had gone sour. The Mena report is still months off, the
Republicans indicated.
Yet, while the Republicans sit on exculpatory findings, the
"Clinton scandal" machinery grinds forward. A Christian
Right group called the Citizens for Honest Government continues
to peddle the Mena allegations in videos, such as "The
Clinton Chronicles" and "The Mena Cover-up." In
one promotional letter, the group's president, Pat Matrisciana,
declared that "with Bill Clinton in the White House, it is
entirely possible -- even probable -- that U.S. government policy
at the highest levels is being controlled by the narcotics
kingpins in Colombia."
Matrisciana wants Clinton removed from office and has distributed
a "Clinton Impeachment Petition" accusing Clinton of
"subverting the Fundamental Moral Laws of the nation."
An accompanying cover letter from former Rep. William Dannemeyer
called impeachment the proper remedy to "a mountain of
scandals," including the Travel Office firings, the FBI
files and "interference with the police investigation of
Vince Foster's death" -- charges that Starr apparently could
not substantiate.
Though the Right's impeachment strategy makes some
congressional Republicans nervous -- fearing that it could
backfire in November -- it has become the battle cry for the
movement's foot-soldiers and its financial overlords.
As Frederick Clarkson disclosed in In These Times [May
3, 1998], the Council for National Policy -- a kind of board of
directors for the Right -- has actively promoted "The
Clinton Chronicles" since September 1994 when the video was
distributed to all CNP members, about 500 total, with the advice
that it be passed around so "as many Americans as possible
should become informed about the evil which infests the Clinton
administration."
Clarkson also reported that the CNP -- with its roster of
prominent conservatives from Paul Weyrich and John Whitehead to
Oliver North and Jesse Helms -- also secretly has pushed the
impeachment drive. Clarkson cited an "impeachment organizers
kit" prepared by Matrisciana's group which said the
impeachment resolution now before Congress was conceived at
"an impeachment panel discussion" during a CNP
"Montreal meeting in June [1997] and a follow-up discussion
in South Carolina."
While ever eager to throw mud at Clinton, the conservatives have
balked at opportunities to wipe it off. On CNBC's "Rivera
Live," the Rev. Jerry Falwell was cornered about the
spurious allegations in "The Clinton Chronicles" --
which he hawked on his "Old Time Gospel Hour." Falwell
haltingly admitted that the video was unfair.
"If I had it to do all over again, I wouldn't do it, and I'm
sorry I did," Falwell finally acknowledged. But he
immediately sought to push the blame back onto Clinton. "The
fact is the president has over these last five years, there's
just a continual cloud. And -- I would think that he himself
would want to get this behind him and deal with it
forthrightly." [March 25, 1998]
But what is painfully apparent in the "Clinton
scandals" is that conservative operatives will never let the
"continual cloud" disperse. Like the gloomy Pigpen
character in the "Peanuts" comic strip, Clinton seems
destined to live always with a cloud over his head. ~
(c) Copyright 1998 -- Please Do Not Re-Post
Return
to Clinton Scandals Index
Return
to Main Archive Index
Return to Consortium
Main Menu.