Contempt Page 6

  Unlike the attorneys, the FBI and IRS special agents were “on detail” to Whitewater from their respective organizations. For these financial-crimes investigators, Whitewater was just another assignment, rather than—as with all the lawyers—a heady interruption in their professional lives.

  The FBI field office was located on the second floor of Two Financial Centre, but most of the local special agents, who lived semipermanently in the community, were largely sealed off from the ever-expanding Whitewater inquiry. That was good. Those special agents and staff members could honestly answer questions by their curious neighbors with a simple response: “Don’t ask me. I don’t know what’s happening downstairs. I’m not part of the Whitewater investigation.” As the Fiske organization grew, with reinforcements arriving from around the country, it was better and safer not to be in the know.

  For eight months, they worked long hours and stuck to themselves socially. Most lived in one or two apartment complexes on Little Rock’s scenic west side. They wanted to get the job done and get back to their respective homes and careers.

  As I learned more about their wide-ranging work, I decided the best way to tackle the job was to pursue the twin goals of stability and continuity. This was a passing of the baton, not a reset or do-over. To carry on effectively, I wanted to keep the Fiske team intact and push their cases forward full throttle. No line of the Fiske inquiry would be jettisoned. No one would be let go. Fiske gave me no hint of having a problematic lawyer or investigator. They were all doing their jobs well.

  But doing so proved to be impossible. With my arrival, almost all the lawyers recruited by Fiske decided to pack up and leave. Fiercely loyal to their boss, they had signed up to work for him, not the new guy. They felt betrayed by the Special Division’s order abruptly ending his tenure.

  In addition, the Fiske folks weren’t entirely immune from the drumbeat of anti-Starr criticism from the Clinton White House and their friends in the media: the universally admired Fiske had been replaced by Senator Jesse Helms’s supposedly anointed right-wing lawyer.

  Day after day, I tried my best, urging and cajoling the few remaining Fiske team members to stay.

  “You’re carrying on a very important role,” I implored. “That function continues, and the best way for it to be done effectively, and in the process to honor Bob, is for you to remain on the job.” They were unpersuaded by my blandishments. For years, both in and out of government, my job had been to persuade, but my skills now failed me.

  Over a retention-focused dinner at the Black-Eyed Pea restaurant near the Little Rock office, one young lawyer patiently listened to my plea.

  “You’re trying real hard, but you need to respect our decision,” he said. “You need to let go. We’re leaving.”

  I was heartsick, but grudgingly abandoned the effort, feeling I had given it my best shot. I never asked Fiske to step in to help. Perhaps I should have. But my sense was that he would have politely said no. (Only years later did I learn from Fiske that he had in fact strongly encouraged his team to stay, for the sake of the country. But away they went.)

  I needed to restaff. Finding the right people was all-important. It was not just the complexity of the facts. The individuals being investigated were well known and popular in Arkansas. My prosecutors would be perceived as outsiders who had invaded Little Rock on orders of a faraway federal court.

  Fears abounded in Fiske’s office of a potential deep-seated bias against out-of-staters wielding federal power. To add fuel to the fire, the reconfigured Office of the Independent Counsel (OIC) was daily decried as a politically inspired witch hunt.

  My first priority was to bring a senior trial attorney on board in Little Rock. I would not be the lawyer trying the cases. Not only was I the ultimate outsider, my forte was the appellate arena, or more broadly, “issues and appeals,” as we called our specialty practice at the law firm.

  Fiske had already approached a renowned career federal prosecutor, Hickman Ewing Jr., then in private practice across the Mississippi River in his native Memphis. As U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Tennessee, first appointed by Ronald Reagan, Hickman had come to fame for relentlessly rooting out corrupt sheriffs, politicians, and crooked law enforcement officers.

  Unlike many U.S. Attorneys, Hickman tried key cases himself. He gained national notoriety for his role in successfully prosecuting the brother of Tennessee governor Ray Blanton, whose office had doled out pardons in exchange for cash and favors.

  Furthermore, Hickman’s powers of recall were prodigious. Former U.S. Attorney Joe Brown of Nashville assured me that trying a case alongside Hickman was “like sitting next to a human computer.”

  And he wasn’t all brain. A Vietnam veteran, Hickman had seen combat in Southeast Asia on a Swift Boat with the U.S. Navy. A gifted raconteur, Hickman was spellbinding in the courtroom. His cross-examination skills were the stuff of legend. He connected brilliantly with juries.

  Perhaps most important for the needs of the investigation, Ewing, as they say, spoke “southern.” He had a Tennessee accent like a chicken-fried steak, dipped in batter, fried up, and covered in gravy.

  Down to earth, easygoing, Hickman had rock-ribbed integrity, a character trait that came shining through in the crucible of hard-fought litigation. The son of a renowned high school football coach in Memphis—and a varsity baseball player himself at Vanderbilt—Hickman was a superstar, a perfect addition to the team.

  We met over comfort food in Brinkley, Arkansas, halfway between Little Rock and Memphis. At the Sweet Pea’s Buffet, which doled out generous portions of fried fish, collard greens, corn bread, cobbler, and enormous glasses of sweet tea, Hickman and I immediately connected.

  In the South, at many restaurants you can go back for seconds in a buffet line. We did. As I chowed down, I was reminded of an old saw by a University of Arkansas law professor: “Over its glorious history, the South has suffered overmuch from two things: fried food, and oratory.”

  Hickman and I talked on into the evening about his experience in public integrity cases. I came away sensing that he would say yes; he would be coming on board to try the last big cases of his career. He became the heart and soul of the Little Rock operation.

  Immensely talented though he was, Hickman could not do the job alone. I was thankful that two of Fiske’s best attorneys agreed to stay on. They seemed to regard living in Arkansas as an adventure.

  Bill Duffey, deputy independent counsel, had relocated his young family from Atlanta, where he had practiced law at the right hand of former Attorney General Griffin Bell, one of my favorite people on the planet.

  Duffey wanted his children to complete a full school year in Arkansas, and the entire family seemed quite happy with their temporary arrangements. Bill and his son had taken up music lessons, and with the son playing fiddle, the Duffeys launched a family bluegrass band. His wife, Betsy, plied her trade as a professional writer. The Duffeys would chortle about living near Toad Suck and Pickles Gap, a world away from their familiar Georgia haunts of Buckhead and Sea Island. For the OIC, Duffey would master the complexities of the Whitewater investment.

  Gabrielle Wolohojian, who came to Fiske’s investigation from a leading Boston law firm, was a New Englander through and through. An Oxford Ph.D. as well as an accomplished young lawyer, Gabrielle found much of Arkansas life and culture charmingly exotic, like something out of an old Snuffy Smith cartoon. To get involved with the community, she began playing violin with the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra.

  Cultural considerations aside, Gabrielle had not become as personally tied to Fiske as her comrades. Above all, Gabrielle loved the work and believed in the mission. She had amassed substantial evidence in the cases against Governor Tucker, a business associate, and their corporate lawyer, who had devised a fraudulent bankruptcy scheme allowing Tucker to avoid paying millions in federal taxes.

  Our ranks were fu
rther augmented by two outstanding members of the Fiske team who had been “in waiting.”

  Amy St. Eve, a young woman with midwestern earnestness and Cornell training, was a rising star at Davis Polk before being recruited by Fiske. She had only a few years of experience, but was smart and eager to learn. Tim Mayopoulos, a senior associate at Davis Polk, brought his formidable talents to bear in a case involving two bankers; documents showed that they, along with attorney Bruce Lindsey, had laundered cash for Bill Clinton’s 1990 gubernatorial campaign.

  Also joining the team was Steve Learned, a renowned career prosecutor from the Fraud Section of the Criminal Division at Main Justice, who quickly mastered the various RTC criminal referrals. Bob Bittman, a rising young state prosecutor in Maryland, became a pillar of the entire investigation.

  After being recruited by Fiske, Brad Lerman, a crackerjack prosecutor, had moved from Chicago to Little Rock with his wife, Rita, and their four children. The Lermans settled in the fashionable neighborhood of the Heights and were warmly welcomed by their curious but accepting neighbors. He focused primarily on the intricacies of the 825 loan, which his quick and analytical mind promptly mastered.

  As my new staff took shape, I set out a vision for recruiting the rest of the prosecutors: I wanted to create a microcosm of the Justice Department with top-notch, experienced litigators. In Little Rock and in Washington, I brought together prosecutors drawn not only from Main Justice but from U.S. Attorney’s Offices around the country. With the welcome cooperation of the DOJ, federal prosecutors began signing up.

  Prosecutors don’t do the job alone. Given the financial focus of the Whitewater investigation, our prosecutors needed experienced FBI and IRS agents and analysts who understood complex real estate transactions and elaborate bank financing schemes. Most of those who worked with Fiske decided to stay.

  Their leader was a native Arkansan, Steve Irons. Like most FBI agents, after basic Special Agent training at Quantico, Irons had been assigned to various FBI field offices around the country. A CPA with over ten years’ experience in the Bureau, Irons was superbly qualified for the assignment.

  “My state deserves better government than it’s had,” Irons told me not long after we began working together. He wasn’t talking about public policy. He was all about integrity. Arkansas had not had honest government, under either Republican or Democratic rule.

  Irons and I became quite close. We frequently took thirty-minute drives together, circling across the beautiful Arkansas River back to home base at Two Financial Centre.

  I loved the scenery. However, these driving adventures served as a relaxed and secure setting for backgrounder briefings away from prying ears or possible tape-recording devices. Irons would talk and reflect; I would ask questions and listen.

  Although his service in the FBI had taken him far away from home, Irons had maintained close Arkansas ties. But he purposefully kept a distance from the locals. He would not be compromised. He remained as lead Special Agent until the end of my service.

  At Irons’s right hand was a superb forensic accountant, Special Agent Mike Patkus, the go-to guy for unraveling deep financial mysteries. I thought of him as “Smoking Gun” Patkus, because he had a knack for ferreting out important documents. Along with experienced FBI and IRS financial analysts, he had built a convincing criminal case against the McDougals and Governor Tucker.

  David Reign, another superb Special Agent, served as handler for David Hale, who was living incognito in Shreveport. (Fiske wanted him to be out of state, but readily accessible.) Irons, Patkus, Reign, and their colleagues believed in the truthfulness of Judge David Hale. Time and again, Hale pointed the team to a particularly shady deal. Time and again, the documents backed him up. He was never proven wrong.

  Hale became the epicenter of the Arkansas investigation. Through his testimony, the mysteries of Whitewater and other financial crimes were illuminated. If Judge Hale was right, Bill Clinton was a potential felon, assisted by Hillary.

  After spending time in Little Rock getting the office restaffed, I turned my attention back to Washington, D.C., to a troubling area of Fiske’s investigation that I feared needed a reexamination.

  I was right.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Vince Foster Death Investigation

  On June 30, 1994, the same day Bill Clinton signed the independent counsel law reauthorization, Fiske issued two short reports. The first, from the Little Rock office, concluded that the evidence was inadequate to show improper political interference with the RTC investigation by the Clintons.

  The second report, from the Washington office that Fiske had opened, was brief. In summary, according to Robert Fiske’s later autobiography, it said: “Vincent Foster committed suicide in Ft. Marcy Park on July 20, 1993. Although the contributing factors to his depressed state can never be precisely determined, there is no evidence that any issues relating to Whitewater, Madison Guaranty or CMS played any part in his suicide.”

  Often referred to as courtly, regarded as one of the most talented lawyers in Arkansas, Foster had been at the vanguard of the incoming Clinton administration. A smooth professional who carried himself with great dignity, Vince Foster was perfectly situated to be a franchise player. Smart and experienced in Arkansas legal matters, he went way back with the Clintons.

  In the 1980s, the three Rose Law Firm partners—Webster Hubbell, Hillary Clinton, and Foster—not only had worked together as attorneys, but were all close friends. Hubbell and Foster were staunch Hillary champions in a part of the country where she was viewed with disdain or suspicion by more traditional southern women.

  Hillary Rodham had grown up in Chicago as the daughter of a hardworking Republican business owner and went off to her freshman year at Wellesley in 1965 as a “Goldwater Girl.”

  But in the tumultuous ’60s, she shed her midwestern upbringing and became an antiwar Democrat. Many students in the Ivy League did the same thing, a common reaction to their revulsion as images from the Vietnam War dominated the media.

  Hillary was profoundly influenced by the radical Saul Alinsky, whose “rules for radicals” included tips for budding community activists such as: “Keep the pressure on, never let up,” “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon,” “Go after people and not institutions,” and “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”

  She’d written her ninety-two-page senior honors dissertation on Alinsky, whom she quoted as saying that gaining and holding on to power “is the very essence of life, the dynamo of life.” While researching her paper, she met three times with Alinsky, who offered her a job when she graduated. She declined. “After a year of trying to make sense of his inconsistency,” she later wrote, “I need three years of legal rigor.” Alinsky’s loss was Yale Law School’s gain.

  But Hillary had absorbed many of his ideas. At her commencement ceremony, Hillary listened carefully to the keynote speaker, Senator Edward Brooke, an African American Republican from Massachusetts. She then got up in front of her fellow seniors and denounced him. Her rude grandstanding at a revered rite of passage garnered attention. For this “soft” form of contempt, Hillary was written up in Life magazine as a voice for her rising generation.

  Once they achieved national prominence, the Clintons often deployed Alinsky’s strategies. But it hadn’t always served them well. Our files were filled with examples of wrongdoing by both Clintons that could have been avoided if they’d followed the Golden Rule instead of Alinsky’s rules for radicals.

  During their years in Arkansas, Hillary worked at her husband’s side during campaigns and launched her own legal career at the Rose Law Firm in the late 1970s. She had found in Hubbell and Foster true companions who helped her navigate Arkansas politics and culture.

  Now, Hillary was paying them back. Both men had come to Washington at her behest to play pivotal roles in the new administration, Hubbell as the third-
highest official at the DOJ and Foster in the White House Counsel’s office, as the deputy to the counsel to the president, first the rough-and-tumble Nussbaum, then Lloyd Cutler.

  Once in Washington, Foster became the new administration’s point man for key issues, including vetting Cabinet nominees. In its first six months, the young administration suffered its fair share of political setbacks, including the failed nomination of Zoë Baird as Attorney General. Baird was terrific, and would have been the nation’s first woman to serve in that post. But “Nannygate” scuttled her nomination when it was revealed she’d hired an undocumented nanny to care for her children, as well as an illegal immigrant as a chauffeur, then failed to pay their Social Security taxes. The nominations of Kimba Wood as Attorney General and Lani Guinier as an Assistant Attorney General also failed.

  Foster got blamed.

  Then there was the matter of the nine hundred errant FBI files that ended up in the office of a colorful Clinton operative named Craig Livingstone. A former bouncer who had dressed up like a chicken or Pinocchio to disrupt Bush campaign events, Livingstone had been rewarded with a position of singular authority and sensitivity: reviewing background checks of political appointees.

  The White House assured the press that the misuse of the files was a simple bureaucratic snafu. But many of the files related to Republicans who had served in past administrations. It looked more like dirty tricks than an accidental dump of documents in the wrong place.

  Fiske also subpoenaed numerous documents, including Hillary Clinton’s billing records from the Rose Law Firm. Strangely, those records had disappeared. Mrs. Clinton insisted she had no knowledge of their whereabouts. This was highly suspicious. Billing records under subpoena don’t get up and walk out of law firms. Some investigators suspected that Foster or Hubbell had stolen them for the First Lady.