When first asked about her telephone conversations with Hillary Clinton and Susan Thomases in the period leading up to when Nussbaum rebuffed the federal investigators, Williams said she had talked with the first lady about three times and Thomases, once.
But then the phone records, which were subpoenaed by a Senate committee, suggested that Maggie Williams had a very bad memory indeed. Thomases phoned or paged Williams nine times during that period, including five times on July 22 alone—just up to the time the Justice Department officials were turned away from Foster’s office.8 Even if—as Williams noted—that doesn’t prove Thomases actually spoke with Williams on each of those occasions, Williams’s recollection of a single conversation with Thomases during that period strains plausibility.
Williams’s ear wasn’t the only one Thomases wanted. She paged Nussbaum once and talked to him at least once, and she called Mack McLarty three times. In all, phone records showed that Thomases had made seventeen telephone calls to the White House in a forty-three-hour period following Foster’s death.
In the early morning hours before Nussbaum reneged on his deal with Justice, a flurry of phone calls established a daisy chain from the first lady to Nussbaum. First, at 7:44 AM, Maggie Williams called Mrs. Clinton at her mother’s home in Arkansas. Presumably, Williams would have known of Nussbaum’s agreement with the Department of Justice from the night before. Williams and Clinton spoke for seven minutes. One minute after that phone call ended, the first lady placed a three-minute phone call to Susan Thomases, who had come to Washington. One minute after that call, Thomases was on the horn to Nussbaum.
And a couple of hours later, of course, Nussbaum was rebuffing Justice Department investigators. Just minutes after the investigators left, Nussbaum and Williams were back in Foster’s office themselves, conducting their own search.9
Susan Thomases—mad phone-caller in the forty-eight hours after Foster’s death—had also handled the Clintons’ rapid response work on Whitewater during the 1992 campaign. As New York Times reporter Jeff Gerth was hot on the trail of the Clintons’ Whitewater and tax problems, Thomases flew to Little Rock, at the first lady’s request, and performed her own investigation in order to defend the Clintons from Gerth’s persistent questions. And Vince Foster had taken over both issues from Thomases.
Nussbaum did allow FBI agents and Park Police investigators into Foster’s office—but only to observe him search the office. Nussbaum refused to let them examine the files and leapt up at investigators when they tried to approach documents on their own. Instead, he let them watch from a distance as he separated the documents into three piles: personal, government, and the Clintons. It can no longer be determined exactly which files went where. Only Nussbaum knows—possibly Maggie Williams too, and possibly the Clintons.
Deputy Attorney General Heymann criticized Nussbaum’s performance art investigation as failing to constitute an “acceptably trustworthy and reliable process.” Heymann, who resigned about six months later, explained, “A player with significant stakes in the matter cannot also be referee.”10
In any event, even this limited access ultimately proved problematic for the White House. Five months later a Park Police investigator who had observed Nussbaum’s search recalled having seen Whitewater-related files among Foster’s papers. This forced the White House to admit that Whitewater files, as well as personal tax returns for the Clintons, had been turned over to the Clintons’ personal attorney, Robert Barnett. But as Senator Richard Shelby (R-AL), then a member of the Senate Whitewater committee, told Nussbaum, “You did it your way and the American people will never know really what was in there.”11
THE ODDITIES PILE UP
Maggie Williams herself has even admitted that she removed documents from Foster’s office. Williams testified that on the afternoon of July 22—just two days after Foster’s death—Bernard Nussbaum called her into Foster’s office and instructed her to take a box of files related to the Clintons’ legal matters, including Whitewater, and deliver them to Robert Barnett.12 (When Barnett’s wife, Rita Braver, became a White House correspondent for CBS about a month later, one of Barnett’s partners, David Kendall, replaced him as the Clintons’ personal lawyer.13) But, after consulting with Mrs. Clinton by telephone, Williams took the files to the family residence of the White House and placed them in a locked closet. Williams said she did not send them immediately to Barnett because she was exhausted and wanted to get home.14
It was a strange course of action: why not either let the files stay in Foster’s office until the next day or place them in her own office? Even Senator John Kerry (D-MA), who had been a Clinton loyalist throughout the hearings, said Williams’s explanation seemed to defy common sense.15 And, in fact, two White House aides testified that Williams had told them that the first lady had requested that the files be moved to the White House so that she could review them.16 Williams said that she herself had decided to put the files in the Clintons’ personal White House quarters on a temporary basis, and that the first lady never reviewed them.
Williams testified that when Robert Barnett came to look at the documents in the White House residence five days later, on July 27, she merely bumped into him. Barnett stated in a letter to a congressional committee that Williams led him to the files and did not leave his side as he examined them.17
There are other oddities surrounding the White House’s actions in the wake of Foster’s suicide. After the suicide note was discovered on July 26, 1993, for example, Mrs. Clinton directed Mack McLarty and others not to inform the president about the discovery. She asked Bernard Nussbaum and Steve Neuwirth to research whether executive privilege could be asserted to cover the suicide note. Consider that there was nothing exceptional about the note—apart from the delay in its discovery. The note defensively denounced the press for its interest in the White House’s actions in the Travel Office firings, and famously asserted that in Washington “ruining people is considered sport.” Still, no one called Mrs. Foster the evening the note was discovered, and President Clinton did not learn of it until after Mrs. Clinton met with Nussbaum and Neuwirth to discuss their research on invoking executive privilege to cover the suicide note. No smoking gun, certainly, but it is damned peculiar.
Throughout the Clinton scandals in which he was involved, Nussbaum has taken the position that there is no legally relevant distinction between the interests of the president as president and the interests of the president as citizen and defendant (a view President Clinton clearly shares, having employed Foster as his personal tax and Whitewater lawyer). On this view, a publicly salaried White House counsel has the same duties as a privately paid outside counsel. But few legal experts other than Richard Nixon have agreed with this view.
For instance, the New York Times editorialized on March 4, 1994, while Nussbaum was still White House counsel:It is, of course, long past time for Mr. Nussbaum to be dismissed. He seems to conceive of his being the President’s lawyer as a license to meddle with the integrity of any federal agency…. When Vincent Foster, the deputy counsel, committed suicide, Mr. Nussbaum interfered with the investigation by the National Park Service and transferred secret files to Mr. Clinton’s private lawyer. All this paints a picture of a White House dedicated to short-cutting justice if that is what it takes to shield the financial affairs of Mr. Clinton and his wife from scrutiny.18
As Clinton’s deputy attorney general asked, “[A]re you hiding something?”
THE WHITE HOUSE HIDES THE TRUTH
Foster’s death occurred during the period when the Whitewater investigation was heating up. Foster had been heavily involved with Madison’s affairs at the Rose Law Firm; at the White House he had been the designated water-carrier on the Whitewater/Madison issue. After his death—and by the White House’s own admission—tax and business files pertinent to the Clintons were removed from his office.
Indeed, some months after Foster’s death, Associate White House Counsel William Kennedy and Clinton adviser Br
uce Lindsey met with Clinton’s personal lawyer, David Kendall, and his staff to bring them up to speed on Whitewater. At first the White House asserted attorney-client privilege to protect notes taken by taxpayer-funded White House lawyer Kennedy at the November 5, 1993, meeting. When the twelve pages of notes were finally produced, the reason for the White House’s reluctance became clear. Among other intriguing entries, Kennedy had written: “Vacuum Rose Law Firm files. Never know go out. Quietly.” The White House tried to explain that “Vacuum Rose Law Firm files” simply referred to an existing vacuum in the files. And oral sex is not adultery.
Secrecy, blocking official investigative work, phone calls involving Mrs. Clinton, executive privilege research, failing to call Mrs. Foster, delivering files to the family quarters of the White House—all these suggest, at a minimum, a panicked effort to suppress incriminating documents, possibly on Whitewater, possibly on Travelgate, possibly on both, or on other scandals. Congressional committees, and later Special Prosecutor Robert Fiske and Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr, would have had a legitimate interest in these documents. Deliberately preventing their discovery is an act of obstruction of justice.
Of course, it’s hard to prove documents have been destroyed once they’ve been destroyed. Or vacuumed. It is evident that officials high in the Clinton White House hierarchy at least wanted to make sure that reliable political spear-carriers—not law-enforcement agents—took the first cut at Foster’s papers. This suggests an interest in obstructing justice, or at least in taking a peek to see if there was any justice there that needed obstructing.
There is a reason the law imposes severe penalties for obstruction of justice. Criminals have incentive enough to destroy incriminating documents. The law needs to create a strong counterweight.
Members of Clinton’s splinter party of defenders continually insist that they do not believe the president should be above the law, but he shouldn’t be below the law either. Well, other citizens can’t turn the FBI away when it drops in for an investigation. Other citizens go to jail for carting off documents from an office subject to an investigation. Other citizens apparently do not have as much to hide as the president.
The president and first lady, it seems, wanted to obscure something about Foster’s work on Whitewater, which may have revealed presidential corruption, or Foster’s work on the Travel Office firings, which may have revealed presidential abuse of power. But now “the American people will never know really what was in there.” Their abuse of power in permitting the White House counsel to repel FBI investigators and spirit documents out of Foster’s office is itself an abuse of power, a “high Crime and Misdemeanor.”
Chapter Sixteen
Webb Hubbell: Friend of the Voiceless
After the 1992 election Webster Hubbell joined his close friends and law partners, Hillary Clinton and Vince Foster, in the move from Little Rock to the nation’s capital, to take a job with his golfing partner, President Clinton. Hubbell assumed the number three position at the Department of Justice, associate attorney general. Just a little more than a year after moving to Washington, Hubbell was forced to resign because of a criminal investigation into his billing practices at the Rose Law Firm, charges that eventually led to his guilty plea and prison sentence.
On the occasion of his resignation, Attorney General Janet Reno heaped praise on her felonious associate attorney general as a friend of the underdog. Hubbell helped those, she said, “whose voices have not always been heard.” Soon, Hubbell’s efforts on behalf of those “whose voices have not always been heard” would include such major corporations as MacAndrews & Forbes and Sprint, as well as the multibillion-dollar conglomerate the Lippo Group. Perhaps out of empathy, Hubbell would soon become voiceless himself.
He would also become a wealthy man. Clinton friends and administration officials arranged for Hubbell to receive more than $500,000 in “consulting fees” in the eighteen months following his resignation. This turn of events couldn’t help but suggest the possibility that Hubbell’s profitability and voicelessness were connected.
A FELON IN THE DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE
In early 1994 Special Prosecutor Robert Fiske had been nosing around the prestigious Rose Law Firm trying to locate certain records from Mrs. Clinton’s work on various disputed land transactions for Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan. In stirring up Rose billing records, Fiske unearthed billing records that indicated Hubbell had bilked his former partners out of about half a million dollars.
With his indictment imminent, Hubbell resigned from the Department of Justice on March 14. He was looking at a long prison sentence. The special counsel would have a strong hand if he offered Hubbell leniency in return for cooperation on the scandals collectively known as Whitewater. The question was: Who at the Rose Law Firm had done what to enable James McDougal to loot the taxpayer-backed S&L for his personal Rube Goldberg investment schemes? Hubbell would know. (As we now know, the missing Rose Law Firm documents discovered in the White House residence in January 1996 revealed that none other than Hillary Rodham Clinton had authored the fraudulent Castle Grande document. But back in 1994 the only possible lead the prosecutors had was Webb Hubbell.)
Hubbell had been close to the late Vince Foster and Hillary Clinton and, more importantly, had worked with Mrs. Clinton on some of the transactions at the center of the independent counsel’s investigation. In particular, Hubbell had worked with Mrs. Clinton on the fraudulent Castle Grande land deal and had done work at the law firm for Madison. Indeed, Hubbell’s father-in-law had been the phony “purchaser” in that deal. Consequently, part of any plea agreement with Hubbell would have to include his pledge to cooperate in the Whitewater inquiry.
On December 6, 1994, Hubbell pleaded guilty to two felony counts of tax evasion and mail fraud for stealing from the Rose Law Firm. The court sentenced Hubbell to eighteen months in prison and ordered him to pay $135,000 in restitution to the Rose Law Firm for the $484,000 he admitted stealing. On April 24, 1995, the man who had been the third highest-ranking lawyer at the Department of Justice had his license to practice law revoked.
Hubbell’s plea agreement seemed to spell trouble for the Clintons. Their Whitewater partner, James McDougal, certainly thought so. Years later, on Larry King Live, McDougal had this exchange with a caller:
CALLER: Mr. McDougal, of all the characters associated with Whitewater—Hillary and Bill, Webb Hubbell, Kennedy, Foster, Nussbaum, some of the other legal guys—who do you think holds to a large degree the key to unlocking the prosecutor’s case, not only with their knowledge, but with documents they might have?
MCDOUGAL: Webb Hubbell. Webb Hubbell is a person who had all the documents in his personal possession when they cleaned out the Rose Law Firm to come to Washington. He knows all the twists and turns…. And to sum it up, he knows where the bodies are buried. Webb Hubbell is the guy they have to get to talk.
(McDougal also remarked during the interview that if Hillary is “saying in the grand jury what’s she’s saying publicly about the circumstances [that] led to my hiring her as an attorney, then she’s perjured herself.”1)
But despite the plea agreement, Hubbell never gave the prosecutors any useful information in their investigation. (By the time the plea agreement was struck, Ken Starr had been appointed independent counsel, replacing Robert Fiske.2)
Just three months after his resignation, however, Hubbell began receiving a series of lucrative job offers from various FOBs, who had been alerted to Hubbell’s need for “consulting fees” by top Clinton staffers. It looked a lot like someone was trying to buy his silence. People who don’t have anything incriminating to say tend not to increase their market value as a result of a criminal indictment.
Though Hubbell wouldn’t talk to the prosecutors, he did talk to his wife—in taped telephone conversations from prison. He knew his conversations were being taped, and curtly informed his wife of that when she probed him for information about the first lady’s legal vulnerability. Still,
even knowing that his every word on that phone could be heard by Independent Counsel Ken Starr, Hubbell and his wife exchanged some intriguing remarks:
SUZANNA HUBBELL: I’m the one that has to try and explain to Marsha [Scott, longtime Arkansas FOB and chief of staff in the White House personnel office]. She said you’re not going to get any public support if you open up Hillary. Well, by public support I know exactly what she means. I’m not stupid.
WEBSTER HUBBELL: And I sat there and spent Saturday with you saying I would not do that. I won’t raise those allegations that might open it up to Hillary, and you know that. We talked about that.
SUZANNA HUBBELL: Yes. But then I get all this back from Marsha, who’s ratcheting it up and making it sound like, you know, if Webb goes ahead and sues the firm back, then any support I have at the White House is gone. I mean I’m hearing the squeeze play.
WEBSTER HUBBELL: So I need to roll over one more time.3
What might that mean?
Some of Mr. Hubbell’s remarks on the tape-recorded phone conversation are seemingly self-serving, to say nothing of demonstrably false. For example, after he mentions that “most of the articles are presupposing that I—my silence is being bought,” Mr. Hubbell launches into a soliloquy—to his wife—about how broke they are. In case his wife was unaware of the family’s finances, he says, “[W]e’re dead solid broke and getting broker, you know?”4