Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [126]
Huber had placed the records in a box without studying them in detail and relocated them to the floor of her office. In January, when she was having new furniture placed in her office in the East Wing, she noticed the box of billing records that had been stashed under a table, and examined them more carefully. Immediately, Huber recognized that these were the Madison records for which the Senate investigators were so desperately searching. “Horrified,” she contacted the Clintons’ private lawyer, David Kendall, and White House Special Counsel Jane Sherburne; the attorneys immediately copied the documents before surrendering them to OIC and the Senate Whitewater Committee the next day. Hubbell, when asked by Senate investigators about the miraculous finding, said that when he learned that the records had appeared, “I just smiled.” Crisis management expert Jane Sherburne told Senate investigators that, on the day of the discovery, Carolyn Huber “was very confused and … her recollections were very imprecise.”
It was as if this story had been crafted by a mystery writer. Nobody on earth seemed to know exactly how the missing billing records appeared on a table in Room 319A of the First Family’s private residence, a room used to store gifts, photos, newspaper clippings, magazine articles, and other items that needed to be catalogued. During this period, Hillary Clinton had been working regularly in Room 323, writing her book It Takes a Village, approximately eight feet away. A confidential witness told the FBI that he or she had observed Mrs. Clinton “comfortably” carrying a brown cardboard box in her arms, in July 1995; the box contained a stack of papers that were “coiled or rolled up” like the Madison billing records. Mrs. Clinton, however, denied seeing the documents after moving to Washington and testified that she had “no idea” how the papers suddenly reappeared in Room 319A.
The documents revealed that Mrs. Clinton had billed around 59.8 hours on Madison Guaranty matters, between April 1985 and July 1986. The longest portion of that time—24.45 hours—was spent working on the Castle Grande venture. Mrs. Clinton’s fingerprints were on the documents. Tellingly, the FBI identified one fingerprint on the front upper right corner of a page near an entry showing a twelve-minute telephone conference between Mrs. Clinton and a key Madison Guaranty official on the Castle Grande deal (also known as the International Development Corp. project). Someone, apparently Vince Foster, had circled the name of the attorney on the entry: “HRC.” Something smelled rotten in the state of Denmark.
To add to the aura of mystery surrounding the billing records, there were reports that Foster had removed the same documents from the Rose firm in 1992, while doing Whitewater damage control during the campaign. Deputy Chief of Staff Harold Ickes, who helped manage damage control relating to Whitewater, stated candidly: “It is what it is.” Presidential aide John Podesta acknowledged that the discovery certainly added “spice to the gumbo.”
The New York Post ran a bold front-page headline: “Hillary Did It.” Senate Whitewater Committee Chairman Alfonse D’Amato (R-N.Y.) declared that the billing records “raise volumes of questions, serious questions as it relates to the first lady.”
Outwardly, the White House did its best to treat this newest revelation with a yawn, pointing out that Mrs. Clinton had acknowledged from the start that she had handled the documents during the 1992 presidential campaign, and that the billing records showed only a modest amount of work on McDougal-related matters. They also stated that she did not know the Castle Grande project as such, because it had been referred to as the Industrial Development Company, or “IDC,” property rather than by that name. Yet the First Lady’s fingerprints fueled whispers that she was involved—in some fashion—in the documents