by Ken Starr
The wooing process authorized by Heuer went quickly and smoothly. Our initial ambassadors were Ray Jahn and Amy St. Eve, who made their way to Arkadelphia to visit Jim at home.
Amy had been fearless yet charming in the courtroom. Body language throughout the long trial suggested that Jim had a fondness for Amy. After their first meeting with Jim, Ray and Amy returned to our office enthusiastic about the possibilities. Having fought and lost, Jim was at long last ready to turn state’s evidence.
Jim was on medication, but lucid and possessing a strong memory. His new attitude of cooperation didn’t seem grudging. He said simply that he could corroborate Hale’s account, and thereby implicate the president. Indeed, Jim seemed relieved that he was now free to tell the truth.
Encouraged, I made a trip by myself to Arkadelphia one hot summer afternoon to sit down with Jim and confirm in person our understanding that we should go forward with a formal cooperative arrangement.
I knocked on the trailer-home door. Jim answered and welcomed me in. Jim’s trailer was situated under the shade of towering pine trees. Oscillating fans whirred with little effect on the heat.
Jim was surprisingly friendly and amiable. He invited me to sit down in his simply furnished living room. Two photographs were on prominent display: Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt. These iconic men were his two great heroes. To break the ice, I recalled that my parents had high admiration for Churchill, so much so that they had given me the middle name “Winston” in honor of the great man. (They were not so keen on Roosevelt.)
A student of history, Jim relaxed and expressed admiration for the two men who together had saved Western civilization. We talked as Southerners do—friendly, open, relaxed, with a fair amount of swapping yarns. We didn’t venture at all into the specifics of Whitewater or Madison Guaranty. We were simply establishing a relationship.
Jim was taking the measure of me, which had to be a challenge for him in light of my professional role and, perhaps even worse, my Republican credentials. To southern Democrats like Jim McDougal, Republicans were snooty country-club types. I didn’t fit that profile. For one thing, I had never joined a country club. Nor did I play golf.
Trying to build empathy, I expressed my sincere admiration for another of his heroes, JFK, and shared a poignant story of having been within arm’s reach of the president on the day before he was assassinated in Dallas. The president had visited San Antonio to inaugurate the Brooke Army Aerospace Medicine Center. In the crowd, I stood near the president, but didn’t get to shake his hand. That evening, Kennedy traveled on to Fort Worth, and then, fatefully, to Dallas the following morning.
We spent a couple of hours chatting, avoiding all unpleasant subjects. I assured Jim that we were looking forward to working with him. We were only interested in the truth, whatever it was. Nothing was conditioned on Jim pointing an accusatory finger at anybody. The truth, and nothing but the truth, that’s what we wanted. Jim seemed to believe me.
I drove back to Little Rock, convened my colleagues, and gave a full report based on my memory of the conversation. We were determined to treat Jim with dignity and respect, so I had deliberately taken no notes, nor had I recorded the conversation.
The formal process began. Most interviews took place in Jim’s trailer home, with Hickman, Amy, and FBI agent Mike Patkus doing the lion’s share of the questioning. The results were encouraging as we delved more deeply into Jim’s financial dealings.
Especially provocative were Jim’s revelations about the president. During one of the White House depositions, Hickman had watched Jim while the president answered questions. At one moment during Clinton’s testimony, Hickman spotted Jim avert his gaze away from the president, bow his head down, and rest it on his cane.
“Why did you do that, Jim?” Hickman inquired during one debriefing session.
“Because I saw the president of the United States commit perjury,” he said, “and he did so in the Map Room.” The Map Room, to Jim McDougal, was hallowed ground because of his admiration for FDR. But that sacred soil, so to speak, had been polluted by the self-interested perjury of his hero’s successor. Despite his own crimes, Jim was morally outraged by the lies under oath of the Man from Hope.
Jim told Hickman that Madison Guaranty had loaned Clinton about twenty-five thousand dollars. The loan was intended to pay off another bank controlled by McDougal, which had loaned thirty thousand dollars to Hillary to build the sales office/model home.
“Do you have a loan document?” Hickman asked.
“I don’t think so. He was the governor.” Even with the duo of Hale and Jim McDougal, a reasonable prosecutor would be deeply skeptical of bringing charges based only on their testimony. We needed more.
We sent federal investigators back to an old garage in Little Rock that stored documents from Madison Guaranty. It looked like that warehouse in the last scene of the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark—hundreds of boxes stacked with no rhyme or reason.
One day, they emerged with a piece of microfilm: a check from Madison to Bill Clinton for $27,600. It had been deposited in the bank to pay off the Whitewater loan, but was not endorsed.
That seemed to corroborate McDougal’s information. But we didn’t have the original check. Back into the records. Eventually agents found a hard copy of another check written on a Madison account in Susan’s handwriting for about five thousand dollars. “Pay off Clinton” was written in the subject line. We asked Jim what it meant.
To our chagrin, he said, “You’ll have to ask Susan.” That did not bode well for getting to the bottom of the Whitewater transactions. The dizzying array of institutions and individuals was baffling. The key point was that in all the machinations, Clinton was determined by hook or by crook to get money into Whitewater. It was deliberately designed to defy detection by sophisticated regulators.
We speculated that if Susan wanted to continue to protect the president, she could say Jim made a loan to Clinton but didn’t tell him about it. But Susan McDougal refused to talk to us. Over the long summer of 1996, she rebuffed all our efforts at outreach.
“Starr wants me to lie to get the Clintons,” she told the press. “I won’t do that.”
Absurd. We just wanted her to tell the truth, whatever it was. It soon became apparent that we would secure Susan’s testimony only in the formal setting of the federal grand jury in Little Rock.
On September 4, 1996, she stubbornly refused to answer all questions, including queries posed by the grand jurors themselves.
That afternoon, we went before Chief Judge Susan Webber Wright and sought a grant of immunity, so Susan’s truthful testimony, whatever it might be, could not be used against her in any later proceeding.
The judge agreed to our request. It was no longer a question of Susan choosing to cooperate or not. The judge had ordered her to. But back in the grand jury room, she defiantly refused.
Susan was again brought before Judge Wright, who ordered Susan to testify truthfully. Susan was respectful in court. Never did she in any way show disrespect for the judge, who gave her the long Labor Day weekend to consider her options: testify or go to jail.
Susan took the opportunity to fly to Los Angeles and go on Larry King Live, repeating her mantra that Starr wanted her to lie. The fawning King didn’t ask the key question: “You were convicted of serious felonies, weren’t you?”
Watching that night, I was outraged. Susan was thumbing her nose at the citizens of the grand jury, showing outright contempt for the rule of law. But I was powerless; there was literally nothing I could do. I simply vented to Alice and my colleagues.
Susan flew back to Little Rock, went to the courthouse on Tuesday morning, and again refused to testify before the grand jury. Federal agents hauled her back to the courtroom of Judge Wright, who remanded her to custody. This was not only appropriate, but standard procedure for a judge to warn a recalcitrant witn
ess that she was required to testify, and if not obeyed, to follow a time-honored process that goes back centuries.
Susan was shackled with handcuffs and leg restraints, a highly demeaning procedure, particularly for a nonviolent, nondangerous witness. However, the shackles are used on everyone taken into federal custody.
In Washington, working on several other aspects of the investigation, I watched the Susan McDougal contempt drama unfold on TV. Susan the convicted felon now became a stoic Joan of Arc resisting the evil powers of Ken Starr, her pitiful photo splashed across the front pages of newspapers around America.
The optics were undeniably negative. But we weren’t thinking, “How’s this going to play in Peoria?” I thought of it as just another impediment in our quest to finish our investigation.
Under our legal system, when an immunized witness is sent to jail for contempt, the old saying goes that “the witness holds the keys to the jailhouse door.” In contrast to a criminal sentence, in civil contempt, all the person needs to say is: “Okay, I give up. I’ll testify.” The person is promptly released from jail and becomes a free citizen, required to live up to her civic obligations.
Susan adamantly refused.
What followed was a media field day, shamelessly promoted by the president.
He responded provocatively to Susan’s claim that Starr’s investigators were not really trying to get at the truth: “There’s a lot of evidence for that,” he told a reporter.
This lie was an insult to Judge Wright, who was simply enforcing long-settled principles of law.
In fact, the irony was that Susan had been remanded by Judge Wright into the custody of the U.S. Marshals Service, which is part of the DOJ. The marshals report up the chain of command ultimately to the Attorney General, who, of course, was appointed by the president and thus could be fired for any reason whatsoever, including for the mistreatment of federal prisoners.
A simple order from the president could have changed Susan’s custodial wardrobe and “jewelry,” removing the handcuffs and leg-irons, although he couldn’t overrule the chief judge’s underlying order holding Susan in contempt.
But Clinton had every reason to encourage her to stand firm. Susan’s honest testimony, we felt confident, could strike at the heart of the president’s protestations of ignorance. From the president’s perspective, no doubt, Susan should go into contempt and remain there at least until after the election, just a few months away.
America loves an outlaw. Susan became, with the president’s encouragement, exactly that. We tried without success to employ White House channels to end the stalemate. On five separate occasions, we wrote to the new counsel to the president, Charles Ruff, a respected defense lawyer in D.C. and former U.S. Attorney in the District, requesting that the president encourage Susan to cooperate with the grand jury’s investigation.
President Clinton refused.
Susan kept her mouth shut and went to prison. With the OIC team, her actions had the opposite effect of her intentions. What was so important to hide that she would tolerate being imprisoned?
Then we had a little help from a tornado.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Raven and the Bad Boys
Week after week in late 1996 and early 1997, Hickman and Mike Patkus made twenty-five trips to Arkadelphia, forging a strong bond with Jim McDougal. Hickman always made sure to go by McDonald’s to pick up an Egg McMuffin for Jim. He seemed isolated and lonely.
Sentenced to three years, Jim was sent to a federal prison in Kentucky in June 1997. I was deeply ambivalent about Jim going to prison. At Jim’s request, Hickman lobbied the Bureau of Prisons to move him to Fort Worth, to be closer to friends.
Meanwhile, I was spending most of my time in Washington, while our investigative agents were scouring the Little Rock warehouse and other sources for records pertaining to Madison Guaranty and Whitewater.
In July 1997, we got one of those breaks that seemed like a miracle—or a plot twist in a bad movie.
A deputy U.S. marshal walked into our Little Rock office. “I have something for you,” he said.
He dumped a mailbag marked Madison Guaranty on Hickman’s desk. Inside had been found the original check for $27,600 made out to Bill Clinton. This was the check we had seen on microfilm. Hickman didn’t touch anything. He called one of the FBI’s forensic agents.
In the strange but true category, a tornado had blasted through several small towns outside Little Rock in March and hit a lot where an auto repair shop stored vehicles that had been abandoned by owners who decided the repair fees outweighed the value of their cars. The tornado destroyed many of the vehicles. In the cleanup operation, the lot owners looked inside the trunk of one car and found two Madison Guaranty mailbags filled with canceled checks and other documents. A CPA who had worked for the shop owner identified the contents, saw the check, and realized it was made out to Clinton.
“You need to report this to Ken Starr,” he told the shop owner.
While the documents were tested, Hickman sent some agents to check out the car, which belonged to a man named Henry Floyd. He had taken the vehicle for repair in 1988 but never returned to pick it up.
Inside the trunk were twenty 45-rpm records in sleeves that said “Raven and the Bad Boys,” with the picture of a young black man on the front and a small caption that read: “I want to thank God and the people at Madison Guaranty for loaning me the money to get this record produced,” signed by Henry Floyd—the car’s owner, aka “The Raven.”
The agents tracked Floyd to Austin. It turned out that he had worked as a messenger shuttling mail and other documents between the McDougals at Madison Guaranty and their lawyer, Hillary Clinton, at the Rose Law Firm and the Governor’s Mansion. Floyd had abandoned the car, forgetting about the mailbags in the trunk. Floyd was subpoenaed. He complained that he didn’t want to fly to Little Rock.
“The Raven doesn’t fly,” Hickman’s secretary reported. “He’s afraid to fly.”
We sent him an Amtrak ticket. Floyd arrived in Little Rock with a bad attitude.
“Ya’ll are just after the Clintons,” he said. “I like the McDougals and I like the Clintons. I’m not saying anything. I know my rights.” Hickman asked him what rights he was talking about.
“My rights under the Fifth Amendment,” he said.
“I’m going to take you up to the judge,” Hickman said. “If you don’t answer, you’ll be in contempt.”
“Well, I’m standing on my other rights.”
“What other rights?” Hickman said.
“My rights as a Christian,” Floyd said. “My daddy’s a pastor. You aren’t supposed to judge other people.”
“Well, you may not believe this,” Hickman said, “but I’m a Christian, too. Our main FBI agent is a Christian. So is our IRS guy.” He quoted several Scriptures about honoring the king, about telling the truth. Floyd looked perplexed.
“All right, what do you want to know?”
The Raven turned out to be a gold mine of information. He described being at Madison when there was a surprise audit by federal regulators.
“We were scrambling,” Floyd said. “The head cashier rented a shredder and we were shredding documents. I remember it well. I lost two ties.”
When I heard the story of the tornado, I thought, “This gives fresh meaning to the familiar legal concept of ‘an act of God.’” David Kendall was astonished at the news. “It’s like saying Elvis is still alive.”
We had the elusive check. But the FBI could find no fingerprints on it, and thus no proof Clinton had handled it.
The Raven became a staunch defender of our office, and eventually a witness against Susan McDougal in her trial on criminal contempt charges, saying, “I didn’t want to cooperate, but they said they just wanted the truth.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Shift to Washington, D.C.
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We appeared to be wrapping up the lion’s share of our business in Little Rock by mid-1997. Most of our attorneys in Arkansas had returned to the private sector or to their DOJ offices, though Hickman remained. I felt the jury was still out on the Clintons. There was much we did not know. Documentation of financial relationships remained a challenge. Above all, we did not have the cooperation of the remaining Big Two: Webb Hubbell and Susan McDougal.
But meanwhile, we had important work to finish in Washington.
We had reopened the Vince Foster investigation in 1994. We released our report on his death in October 1997. We had harnessed a formidable array of experts on homicide and suicide to settle the question of how Foster died.
But our investigation into Foster’s death had gotten off to a strange start.
I had hired Miguel Rodriguez, an Assistant U.S. Attorney from Sacramento, in the fall of 1994. He came recommended to me by my law partner Paul Cappuccio, because Miguel, his Harvard Law classmate, had significant experience handling civil rights cases, which often involved forensic evidence. I assigned him to the Washington office to work the death investigation.
Miguel began bringing witnesses before a Washington grand jury, but raised eyebrows by his accusatory questioning of U.S. Park Police officers and other witnesses. He seemed to believe—before hearing all the evidence—that Foster had been murdered in a different location, then dumped at Fort Marcy Park. This was the stuff of the conspiracy theories that flourished immediately after the reports of Foster’s death. We were after the truth and only the truth, yet there was no justification for browbeating or mistreating any grand jury witness.
My D.C. deputy, Mark Tuohey, was outraged by some of the stories he heard about Miguel’s strange demeanor and off-the-wall questions in the grand jury room. Even grand jurors were complaining.
One day in early 1995, I spent several hours with Miguel walking around the Mall and talking, trying to understand his viewpoint and strategy. But his answers made little sense, as if he were listening predominantly to pundits, not to the witnesses.