Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [180]
One thing that appealed to Rosenzweig about working for OIC was that Ken Starr seemed committed to keeping politics out of his investigation. From his perch inside the House Transportation Committee, he had watched the congressional Whitewater hearings taking place across the hallway and felt that the Republicans “were kind of wasting their time.” When Rosenzweig applied for the job, Starr required him “to prepare a memo listing all the projects I had worked on [in the House]” and then to disclose whether any of them “were characterizable as partisan in any fashion. So I wrote them about a six-or seven-page memo about why I wasn’t a raving right-wing lunatic and he could hire me,” Rosenzweig said, chuckling. “That was a very comforting thing, that he asked me to approve my bona fides.”
The second day Rosenzweig reported to work at the OIC offices in Washington, in early November 1997, he was handed an initial copy of the hundred-page draft referral that Stephen Bates had just finished, relating to possible impeach-able offenses committed by President Clinton in the Whitewater/Madison matters. The curly-headed lawyer nearly fell over. When Rosenzweig had been hired, he had been told he was going to work on a different question: whether Hillary Clinton should be indicted for her Whitewater/Madison-related conduct. Now this? He recalled his reaction: “I must say it kind of floored the crap out of me. I mean, I knew I was being hired to think about indicting the First Lady, so I wasn’t exactly an ingenue, but I walked in and then the second day they say, ‘Oh, and let’s think about impeaching the president, too.’ And I’m like, okay. ‘Okay. Where are we here?’”
The principal evidence against Bill Clinton, spelled out in this initial draft referral that remains locked in the OIC archives, boiled down to three major allegations. None of them was remotely conclusive, as confidential sources later acknowledged.
First, there was the assertion that President Clinton had lied in his videotaped testimony during the Tucker-McDougal trial, in denying that he had ever borrowed money from Madison Guaranty. OIC now had the infamous cashier’s check dated November 15, 1982, in the amount of $27,600, made payable to “Bill Clinton,” which had been found in the trunk of Henry Floyd’s junked car. Was this a loan directly to Bill Clinton from Madison, perhaps flowing from some other shady McDougal-Hale deal? There was another check dated August 1, 1983, from James B. McDougal Trustee account to Madison, signed by Susan McDougal, in the precise amount of $5,081.82, which matched the amount outstanding on the previous Clinton loan. The notation on the check indicated “Payoff Clinton.” OIC prosecutors could now establish that proceeds from both of these checks had been used for the benefit of the Whitewater project.
On one hand, the evidence found in the car’s trunk seemed to corroborate Jim McDougal’s story. On the other, “neither his [Clinton’s] signature nor his fingerprints were on either check.” That raised the question, Who was conning whom? “We know from experience that Jim McDougal often created phony companies, phony accounts and moved money around in other people’s names without their ever knowing about it,” Rosenzweig acknowledged. “So it sure wouldn’t surpass my belief that McDougal, you know, was making it up.” Did Bill Clinton himself know that the McDougals were making this payment? Rosenzweig concluded, “I don’t know… because Susan McDougal