Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [127]
Ken Starr’s office, in a shot across the bow, summoned Hillary Clinton before the grand jury, making her the first First Lady in the nation’s history to suffer that ignominy. Although Mrs. Clinton denied having knowledge of how the billing records had surfaced, she appeared rattled. Numerous sources inside the White House identified this as a “real affront” and a “turning point” in the Clinton-Starr imbroglio. Said Deputy Chief of Staff Harold Ickes, Whitewater had now “metastasized” into so many areas that it created a “f——you” attitude by those encamped around the Clintons.
Behind closed doors, the White House crisis team was preparing for nuclear warfare. Jane Sherburne was secretly constructing a plan in the event that Hillary Clinton was indicted. “A good crisis manager prepares for all of the contingencies,” she later confirmed. “And that was one of them.” An assault on the First Lady, in the eyes of the disaster-prevention team, was tantamount to “an assault on the presidency.” They were prepared to launch a political counterattack aimed directly at Ken Starr and his underlings, far more ferocious than OIC had ever imagined.
In the meantime, public skepticism relating to the Clintons continued to rise to new heights. A Washington Post/ABC News poll reported that nearly half of the respondents believed that the First Lady was “not telling the truth about Whitewater.” Said one chemist from Kentucky, who responded to the random poll, “It just doesn’t add up.” To worsen the situation for the president and First Lady, David Hale was now popping out of his hole. The former Little Rock municipal judge, who had been held in protective custody by Starr’s office for nearly two years, was reportedly ready to take the witness stand. There was rampant speculation that he was going to spill his guts about the McDougals and Governor Jim Guy Tucker and that he might even point his pudgy finger directly at President Bill Clinton.
ON April Fools’ Day of 1996, David Hale finally took the stand, testifying inside a packed federal courtroom. Now a confessed felon, he offered up a sitting governor, a sitting president, two McDougals, and others in his alleged scheme to defraud the federal government.
Hale was a “short, flabby guy with a round face” who “wore a rug” (a wig), according to one observer. He “desperately wanted to be liked,” and so he poured it on for the jury.
On the first day, he testified that he had gone for a drive one night in the fall of 1985 with Jim Guy Tucker and Jim McDougal in McDougal’s Jaguar, to check out a piece of property south of Little Rock, later dubbed Castle Grande. When Hale inspected the swampy land in the twilight, asking how McDougal “pawned that turkey off” on Tucker, Tucker had chuckled that McDougal “made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.”
Later that night, Hale testified, the three men drove back to Tucker’s home and “visited” in the kitchen. (In an earlier version of the story, Hale had stated this meeting took place at the Black-eyed Pea restaurant.) Hale alleged that McDougal confided that they were going to have to take care of “some members of the political family,” in arranging financing for the deal. When asked by OIC’s prosecutor Ray Jahn what he understood McDougal to mean by that phrase, Hale stated that he believed “it involved Bill Clinton and maybe some of his aides and political associates, and Jim Guy Tucker.”
Hale next testified that—while seated at Tucker’s kitchen table—they had hatched a plan to have Madison Guaranty make an $825,000 loan to Hale’s company, Capital Management Services. They would sell off the real estate to a straw buyer at an inflated price and then use the profits to obtain $2 million in Small Business Association (SBA) funds that they could illegally loan to Tucker, the McDougals, and other members of the “political family.”
Prosecutor Ray Jahn pressed Hale to tell the jury why it was so important to cook