Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [140]
Claudia recalled that Jim once “threw around furniture” after coming to see Susan. Increasingly, he became agitated and verbally abusive. Claudia summed up this period of erratic behavior: “Jim was two people. He was Bob Riley’s close friend. He protected me. But he was eruptive.”
She put down her glass of iced tea, sadness dimming her eyes. “I just felt that Jim was overmedicated and that he was fighting for survival,” she said. “Jim did have a terrible, terrible fear of going to prison and dying in prison. That was his fear.”
AS the date for Susan McDougal’s sentencing approached, OIC invited her to discuss a possible deal. Susan’s feeling at this point was, “I wanted to talk to them.… I wanted to go forward, really.” She and Claudia Riley drove to the office of her lawyer, Bobby McDaniel, in Jonesboro. He placed his boots up on the desk and dialed Ray Jahn, getting the Starr prosecutor on a speakerphone. McDaniel said, “I got two questions for you. One is, what do you want from her? And the second is, what are you going to give her?”
Susan recalled that Jahn said something like, “You know who this investigation is about, and we are willing to propose to the judge that Susan get probation.” The conviction and jail time “could disappear.” This would include the California charges involving Nancy Mehta. “With a snap of the fingers, that will just be gone.”
The gist of the conversation, according to McDaniel, was that OIC was “willing to make Susan substantial accommodations in exchange for testimony helpful to the Clintons’ prosecution. Claudia Riley heard the same thing: “We almost fainted. And he [Jahn] said,… ‘She will walk, she will never serve one day in jail.’” Claudia remembered praying, “Let her do this. Let her do this.”
Jahn rejected this account as a gross exaggeration. “I just basically said, ‘Look, you know what our job is. All we want from you is the truth.’” The Texas prosecutor would say of Susan McDougal: “She overdramatizes things to begin with, if you want to be polite about it. Otherwise she lies about them.… So that would be my reaction.”
Whatever precise words were transmitted over the speakerphone that day, it is clear that McDaniel eventually told Jahn, “My client’s overcome.” He was forced to discontinue the conversation.
Susan recalled her state of mind: “I am penniless. My family is absolutely traumatized. I am facing sentencing in three days for this conviction. I have a trial to go [to in California], where my insane, crazy boss, Nancy Mehta, is alleging things. I have no money, and I have a grand jury that is about to be impaneled to investigate me for income tax evasion, of which Jim McDougal has done all my taxes. So I am totally, totally without any defenses … I am beside myself.”
One option that Claudia and Susan discussed, taking a break to collect themselves, was for Susan to give the OIC lawyers what they wanted. She could say, “David Hale told the truth—Bill Clinton asked me to borrow three hundred thousand dollars from Hale, and we had that conversation, and I went down there and got that money, and Bill Clinton was supposed to have gotten [some of] it.” If she did that, Susan was fairly certain, “it would just be probation for me and they will have talked to the D.A. [in California] … and everything can go back to being somewhat normal.”
Claudia and Susan sat in Bobby McDaniel’s office, discombobulated. Claudia said, “If it were my daughter, I would advise her to do anything not to go to jail.” She began weeping and blurted out, “Susan, please don’t leave me. Please don’t go to prison for this.”
Susan looked at Claudia and said, “What would Bob say?” invoking the name of Claudia’s late husband. At that point, “we both cried a bunch more because her husband was, you know—he would be burned at the stake before he would have done anything that he considered to be without integrity.” Finally, Susan told McDaniel not to call Jahn