Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [308]
That prosecutor was Hickman Ewing, Jr.
WHILE the rest of the world was focused on the Lewinsky story, Ewing was debating whether he could indict Hillary Rodham Clinton before May, when the Little Rock grand jury expired. One piece of his strategy, as Ewing raced against the clock, was to push harder on Webb Hubbell to see if he would crack. Ewing also wanted to tighten the screws on Susan McDougal, who was now in prison in Los Angeles. If he could force these witnesses to corroborate the information provided by Jim McDougal—still locked up in Texas but scheduled to be paroled soon—he might be able to ensnare both the president and the First Lady while their attention was diverted by the Lewinsky pandemonium.
Most of Ewing’s colleagues in the swelling OIC Washington offices now viewed Hillary and Whitewater as moot issues. The prevailing sentiment was, “Forget about that. We have the president in the sights. We got him.”
Ewing saw it differently. Jim Guy Tucker had just pleaded guilty on February 20. Ewing had conducted nearly fifteen sessions with the former governor, who had produced smidgens of information that were “helpful on some of the Hillary issues.” As Ewing sized it up, Tucker “pretty much agreed with [Jim] McDougal” when it came to confirming that “she [Hillary] is unethical” and that she had “used her status” improperly in carrying out certain legal work for Madison Guaranty and others. Ewing was confident that the fallen governor, however recalcitrant, would add a sprinkling of detail in building a case against the ever-evasive Mrs. Clinton.
The most important witness, however, was still Jim McDougal. Inside the walls of the federal prison in Forth Worth, McDougal had found religion and had directly contradicted President Clinton on key points crucial to the Whitewater and Madison Guaranty investigations. Among other things, McDougal now insisted that Clinton was lying when the president denied meeting with him and David Hale at McDougal’s office-trailer to discuss a loan designed to benefit the “political family.” He also told Starr’s prosecutors that Clinton had lied in denying knowledge of the Madison Guaranty check that was marked “Payoff Clinton” and was found in the trunk of an abandoned car. McDougal was equally helpful when it came to Mrs. Clinton, particularly relating to her legal work on the Castle Grande development. McDougal didn’t flinch when it came to serving up the First Lady to OIC. He seemed eager to prove her a liar, Ewing felt, with respect to “what she did and [how] she had denied things.”
Ewing understood that McDougal had serious “credibility problems.” He was a convicted felon who had ripped off the federal government and lied compulsively under oath. OIC’s own prosecutor, Ray Jahn, had torn McDougal to shreds when he took the stand in the Whitewater trial. Yet Ewing was spending more time on the phone with McDougal in prison these days; the two men were starting to bond. Ewing had come to trust the great S&L con artist, at least when it came to his account of the myriad sins committed by Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Ewing was actively assisting McDougal in his bid to be paroled in the spring. If all went well, the Memphis prosecutor hoped the pieces might finally come together like a spectacular jigsaw puzzle that finally locks into place. Assuming Jim McDougal was released in April as planned, just as his book hit the bookstores and McDougal became a national TV celebrity, the eccentric former businessman would be able to rehabilitate his image and speak the truth about those long-ago days in Arkansas. In the process, he might also provide the final key to indicting the First Lady, just as the world collapsed around Bill and Hillary Clinton in the peripheral Lewinsky probe.
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37
LAST NIGHT IN SOLITARY CONFINEMENT
Richard Clark, during his psychological evaluation meetings with Jim McDougal in early 1998, observed that the Arkansas prisoner was increasingly tormented with thoughts that powerful people were out to destroy him. At first, McDougal attributed these