[CTRL] How Hillary Beat the Rap

[Hilary A. Thomas]

Monday January 10, 7:44 PM How Hillary Beat the Rap By the spring of 1996 the legal picture looked very bleak for First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. So bleak, in fact, that predictions of her imminent indictment were everywhere. Clinton's long-subpoenaed Rose Law billing records, complete with her fingerprints, had just materialized in the White House Book Room. For an explanation, Independent Counsel Ken Starr had brought Hillary before his Washington grand jury, an historic humiliation for a sitting president's wife. But perhaps the most dangerous development for Mrs. Clinton was the emergence of a smoking gun memo written by top White House aide and longtime Clinton friend David Watkins. In it, Watkins quoted Hillary demanding that he fire the Travel Office staff because "we need those slots for our people." Watkins' contemporaneous notes made it amply clear that when Mrs. Clinton denied under oath that she pushed for the Travel Office firings, she was lying. Instantly the three-year-old document became known as the "Hell to Pay" memo. Watkins wrote that if Mrs. Clinton's order to fire the Travel Office staff wasn't followed, there would be "hell to pay" for himself and his co-worker-friend Vince Foster. Accounts from other White House staffers corroborated Watkins' version, blatantly contradicting Mrs. Clinton's. Barbara Olson, whose new best-selling Hillary biography takes its title from the Watkins memo, was the lead investigative counsel for the House Travelgate Committee. In October 1996, her boss, committee chairman William Clinger (R-Pa.), handed up criminal referrals for a myriad of top Clinton aides. But, to the shock of many familiar with Hillary's legal vulnerabilities, he did not name Mrs. Clinton. "Chairman Clinger thought long and hard about that," Olson told NewsMax.com last week. "He just felt as though it was improper to name her in a criminal referral." Did Clinger believe that the first lady had committed perjury? "He felt that there was a conflict between her testimony and certain evidence," Olson explained diplomatically. "We had lots of evidence that showed Mrs. Clinton not only had a hand [in the Travel Office firings] but that she was the driving force." Like what? "We not only had David Watkins' notes," explained Olson, "we had Mack McLarty's memo talking about 'HRC pressure,' we had Vince Foster's notebook talking about all his conversations with Hillary, we had material from Harry Thomason. We had a lot of other evidence." McLarty was cited by Clinger's committee for possible perjury and obstruction of justice, along with White House counsel Bernard Nussbaum, associate counsel Bill Kennedy, deputy counsel Jane Sherburne and even Harry Thomason, the Clintons' Hollywood producer friend. The committee also referred Craig Livingstone and Anthony Marceca to the Office of Independent Counsel on possible charges related to Filegate, an outgrowth of the Travelgate probe. But in deference to the Office of the First Lady, Clinger spared Hillary Clinton. On the day after the Travelgate referrals were announced, the Washington Times reported: "Committee sources said last night that Mrs. Clinton's name was omitted to avoid White House and media criticism of such a citation, and they noted pointedly that Mr. Starr, and not the panel, has the authority to bring criminal charges." Apparently the Office of Independent Counsel has accorded Mrs. Clinton the same deference she won from Chairman Clinger. But reports that a draft Whitewater indictment was prepared for Starr indicate just how guilty the first lady looked to investigators. In 1998, Starr's Little Rock grand jury shut down without indicting either Bill or Hillary on Whitewater charges, indicating the end of that phase of his investigation. But Starr's successor Robert Ray has yet to officially close the Travelgate probe, leaving the possibility of a indictment there open - if only technically. In fact, the legal momentum to criminally charge Hillary Clinton evaporated long ago. It's now plain that neither Congress nor the OIC was willing to face the public relations nightmare that an indictment of a sitting first lady would have sparked. Hillary Clinton has beaten the rap. And quite a rap it is. Travelgate prober Olson gave NewsMax.com. a guided tour through some other areas that concerned her committee's investigators. As the lead lawyer probing the case, it was Olson's job to prepare interrogatories for the first lady in an attempt to clarify Clinton's previous Travelgate testimony supplied to the General Accounting Office. Some of Olson's questions touched on the suspected removal of possible Travelgate evidence from Vince Foster's office shortly after he died. Newly unearthed phone records revealed a flurry of calls on the night Foster died between Mrs. Clinton, her chief of staff Maggie Williams, her New York operative Susan Thomases and Foster's boss Bernard Nussbaum. Williams and Nussbaum rushed to Foster's office after taking calls from Hillary, where Williams was later seen removing files by a Secret Service guard. No matter. Hillary still maintained that she did "not recall having had communications with anyone about the removal of documents from Mr. Foster's office" and she "did not know what, if any, Travel Office files Mr. Foster might have been working on at the time of his death." At first, Mrs. Clinton tried to return answers to Olson's interrogatories without signing them. The Travelgate counsel sent them back to the White House and demanded Hillary's signature witnessed by a notary. Another issue that bothered Olson was fingerprints, specifically fingerprints on the FBI files illegally obtained by White House security man Craig Livingstone. Reportedly, the OIC examined the files for Mrs. Clinton's prints, which were not discovered. But, says Olson, "The problem was that [White House lawyer] Jane Sherburne had Craig Livingstone go and retrieve some of the files, which I was furious about. If Hillary's prints had been on those files, Livingstone's prints could have obscured them." Curiously, the OIC tested the FBI files against samples from many in the senior White House staff but apparently omitted a sample from President Clinton, according to a New York Times report on the test results. To this day, Olson isn't sure why. "We don't know because the independent counsel did those tests. And they never told us who they were going to test." The shredding of Castle Grande files and of Foster's Rose Law records, the overwhelming evidence that it was Hillary who hired Craig Livingstone, the order to block the FBI from searching Foster's office after his death, the idea for a secret White House data base, the numerous audits conducted against White House enemies by an IRS run by Hillary's old girlfriend, and of course, witness intimidation by the Clinton Secret Police.... It may be years before the independent counsel's report reveals how the first lady managed to pull it all off. Until then, few know more about Hillary Clinton's dark side than Barbara Olson - and are willing to talk about it. <http://www.newsmax.com/showinsidecover.shtml?a=2000/1/10/184816>