Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [143]
Judge Wright, her hair pulled back in a pragmatic bun, allowed that McDougal’s argument was “novel,” but there was no legal basis for refusing to testify simply because one didn’t trust a prosecutor. Judge Wright tapped her gavel—she was giving McDougal five days to reconsider. Otherwise, the judge stated matter-of-factly, the Whitewater defendant should pack her toothbrush, because she would be heading to jail for contempt.
In explaining, years later, why she chose prison over answering OIC’s questions in the grand jury, McDougal narrowed her eyes and said, “An abiding, unrelenting hatred and distrust of the independent counsel.” She continued, “They believed that they could manipulate anything I had to say.” Already Starr’s prosecutors had succeeded in getting David Hale and Jim McDougal to say that Clinton was involved with the three-hundred-thousand-dollar loan, which she knew was false. It also sickened her that “Starr was spouting his Christianity night and day,” while OIC was busy turning Jim into a “craven liar.” She went on: “Jim McDougal was making up stories about innocent people and laughing about it, and this man [Starr] was aiding and abetting … [Jim] had been on drugs, marijuana, acting absolutely outlandishly during the trial. He was making up these stories, and yet they were willing to use him as a witness against the president of the United States.”
Susan understood that Judge Wright viewed her refusal to testify as irrational. In theory, if she just “told the truth” she would be spared incarceration. Yet Susan’s mind saw it differently. She posed a rhetorical question: “Was I protecting Bill Clinton? If I’d known that Bill Clinton did something illegal, would I have gone to jail? And hurt my mom and dad? And all my brothers and sisters, who were crying day and night? And would I have left Claudia, who’s begging me not to go?” Her answer was, “No, I’d have said everything I knew that he’d done. If I had known anything Hillary had done after she had acted so crazy, I’d have told everything I knew about her, too. I had no trouble telling anything that I knew.”
Susan paused to take a breath. “And what I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt was that Bill and Hillary did not ask me to get that loan. That is not negotiable; it’s not something I might have forgotten. It never happened. And so … the fact they’re believing David Hale, who had stolen so much money from the SBA—he’s lied, cheated, and stolen, and Jim McDougal…” she inhaled and said, “I’m going to go in there? No way… There’s no way.”
Her eyes becoming puffy, Susan McDougal said that she had not taken the stand at trial to rebut Jim’s testimony “because I had no self-confidence that I could speak for myself, no self-confidence. Jim had always taken care of everything for me. And I didn’t think I could talk.”
Standing in front of Judge Wright on that day in the Little Rock federal court house, Susan felt that she needed to get her voice back. “It was time,” she concluded, “for me to say no.”
YEARS later, having spent time in federal and state prisons stretching from Arkansas to California and having recovered from the trauma of Jim McDougal’s dying in solitary confinement in Fort Worth, Texas, Susan McDougal would settle herself on Claudia Riley’s couch. McDougal now directly answered the questions that she had refused to answer for the Office of Independent Counsel in the grand jury.
First, when it came to OIC’s question “Did you ever discuss your loan from David Hale with William Jefferson Clinton?” she replied firmly, “No. It is absolutely untrue that it was ever discussed.”
In response to OIC’s related question, “To your knowledge, did William Jefferson Clinton testify truthfully during the course of your trial?