Newsmax-Inside Cover Thursday June 29, 2000; 1:02 AM EDT Another Clinton Witness Caught in Whitewater Hush Money Bombshell For any who still wonder how Bill Clinton has survived in office through eight years of wall-to-wall, non-stop scandals, Wednesday's Wall Street Journal report about the Lippo Group's payoffs to former Arkansas Governor Jim Guy Tucker is a must read. There was a time, before Monicagate proved that even smoking gun evidence against Clinton cut no mustard with Democrats, when such a story would have sent shockwaves through newsrooms across America. But now even the fourth estate seems resigned to the fact that the Whitewater fix was in almost from day one. When it emerged that Lippo paid Clinton insider and one-time de facto attorney general Webb Hubbell $100,000 in 1994 as Whitewater storm clouds gathered over his head, media smoke alarms went off everywhere. The next year, in a conversation with his wife taped by prison officials, Hubbell complained, "I guess I'll just have to roll over one more time." Hubbell's recorded promise to withhold evidence from prosecutors was meant to reassure wife Suzy that he wouldn't finger Hillary Clinton in any further Whitewater wrongdoing as part of his own legal defense. To this day, Whitewater probers have little doubt there was a connection between the Lippo cash Hubbell collected and his promise to "roll over one more time." Now comes the Journal report that fellow Whitewater convict Jim Guy Tucker was, and still is, on the Lippo payroll - as part of a sweetheart deal that could make the former Arkansas governor the Internet cable connection baron of Indonesia. The nifty plan was actually instigated by Clinton crony and Lippo scion James Riady himself, just after Tucker was convicted of Whitewater-related fraud along with Clinton's Whitewater business partners, James and Susan McDougal. "When Mr. Riady contacted Mr. Tucker from Indonesia and asked if he would invest in a cable TV network here, he took the bet," the Journal reported. "He and his wife bought $6.5 million in cable equipment, which was subsumed into a telecommunications company affiliated with Lippo Group. The group guaranteed the Tuckers a minimum 5 percent return on their investment and Mr. Tucker received a 'consulting fee.'" Even without that "consulting fee," Tucker was guaranteed a cool $325,000, more than three times what Lippo paid to seal Hubbell's lips. And that doesn't include the ritzy digs at Indonesia's Aston Hotel, where the Tuckers bunked for free during the early months of their Jakarta junket. What the Journal left unsaid in Wednesday's report was the extent to which Tucker could have damaged the president had he decided to fully cooperate. In 1992, RTC investigator L. Jean Lewis named both Clintons and Tucker in a criminal referral that had bounced around the Justice Department for almost a year. It said they were possible witnesses to and beneficiaries of a Whitewater scheme to defraud the government. When the RTC in Washington illegally leaked word of Lewis' referral to White House consigliere Bruce Lindsey in September 1993, Lindsey immediately gave Clinton a heads-up. In turn, Clinton immediately summoned Tucker to Washington for an emergency meeting where they say Lewis' criminal referral never came up. Tucker and Clinton, who were once political rivals and were never friends, met again in Seattle weeks later, ostensibly for reasons unrelated to Whitewater. Investigators always suspected the meetings were part of a "getting our stories straight" strategy. But Tucker would never say so. In May 1996 Governor Tucker was convicted on mail fraud and conspiracy charges linked to the Castle Grande deal. The conviction forced him from office. At the same trial prosecutors netted convictions of the Clintons' Whitewater business partners, James and Susan McDougal. In November 1997 another telltale bit of Whitewater evidence emerged that suggested Tucker knew more than he had told investigators. A treasure trove of documents were discovered in the trunk of a car abandoned at Little Rock's Johnny's Transmission Shop years earlier. Its owner had been a courier for McDougal's Madison Guarantee Savings and Loan. Among the reams of records probers discovered a Madison Guarantee check made out to Bill Clinton in the amount of $27,000. The discovery set off rampant media speculation that Clinton had perjured himself when he denied a year earlier ever borrowing money from McDougal's bank. Also in that trunk was another Madison check, this one made out to Tucker. Publicly investigators never made much of the Tucker find. But after news of the find got out, James McDougal, who was cooperating with probers while serving his Whitewater sentence at a Texas Federal Prison Medical Center, told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette that prison officials had begun harassing him with bogus drug tests. He linked the harassment directly to the evidence found at Johnny Lawhon's transmission shop. Five months later McDougal suffered cardiac arrest when prison guards threw him into solitary confinement after taking his heart medicine away. Three weeks after McDougal's death Lawhon was killed when his Corvette hit a tree. Whatever the significance of the Clinton and Tucker checks, within months of their discovery the two witnesses who could put that evidence in context and establish a chain of custody were dead. This year prosecutors publicly admitted that had McDougal not died, they would have used his testimony to indict Hillary Clinton. If Tucker knows anything big about those checks, he sure didn't tell investigators, who have apparently let the matter drop entirely. After his Whitewater conviction, Tucker came down with what his doctors said was a near-fatal liver ailment. He needed a transplant and suitable recovery time, during which Whitewater Judge George Howard declined to enforce his jail sentence. Days before McDougal's death, Independent Counsel Ken Starr cut a deal with the former Arkansas governor that would keep him out of jail if he told all. As with Hubbell, Starr didn't get much for the trade. In the end Tucker implicated Clinton in nothing and set off to Jakarta to collect his Whitewater winnings from the Riadys. "Obviously, it's a concern to any prosecutor when a major cooperating witness is being paid large sums, whether for legitimate work or not, by a crony of a person being investigated," a Starr deputy admitted to the Journal. Do tell. The Office of the Independent Counsel has been had, first with Hubbell, now with Tucker, and undoubtedly in countless other ways throughout much of the rest of its investigation of the Clintons. That's worth remembering the next time the OIC announces it doesn't have enough evidence to indict either Bill or Hillary. ================================================================= Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, YHVH, TZEVAOT FROM THE DESK OF: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> *Mike Spitzer* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ~~~~~~~~ <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> The Best Way To Destroy Enemies Is To Change Them To Friends Shalom, A Salaam Aleikum, and to all, A Good Day. ================================================================= <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! 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