Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [324]
IN the wake of this unexpected April Fools’ Day development in the Jones case, Hickman Ewing convened his secret meeting at the OIC headquarters in Washington, to decide, once and for all, whether it was time to indict First Lady Hillary Clinton.
On Monday, April 27, the entire prosecution team—including Starr himself—was present in the large OIC conference room at 8:30 in the morning. This was Hick Ewing’s baby; he would be given the floor for three full hours to lay out the case against Mrs. Clinton. Just weeks earlier, Ewing had proposed notifying Hillary Clinton that she was a “target” of the investigation. That idea had been scuttled as potentially suicidal. Instead, Ewing was given a chance to persuade his fellow prosecutors that OIC should go directly to the grand jury and indict the First Lady.
Each of the lawyers in the room was flipping through a black binder approximately four inches thick, marked in bold letters on the exterior: “HRC Meeting,” referring to Hillary Rodham Clinton. Inside that binder was a memo dated April 22, 1998, directed to “All OIC attorneys” from the “HRC Team,” summarizing the criminal case against Mrs. Clinton. Following this were four documents for their review: a memo, dated April 10, that spelled out the “Theory of the Case;" an overview of the evidence against Mrs. Clinton; a draft indictment against Mrs. Clinton and her alleged co-conspirator; and a draft order of proof that listed all the witnesses the Starr prosecutors would call against the First Lady in a criminal trial.
Although nobody outside the room would ever know the details of the proposed indictment against the First Lady, it was captioned United States of America v. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Webster Lee Hubbell. It was to be filed in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas.
The Starr prosecutors, as they flipped through the voluminous materials, were already up to speed. The “Theory of the Case” memo recited: “The object of the conspiracy was to conceal, by unlawful means, the true facts relating to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s and Webster Lee Hubbell’s relationship with Seth Ward [Hubbell’s father-in-law], Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan and Madison Financial Corporation … [to] avoid and evade political, criminal and civil liability, fraudulently secure additional income for the Rose Law Firm and safeguard the political campaigns of William Jefferson Clinton.”
Hickman Ewing, according to those present, delivered a virtuoso performance. He strolled back and forth in the conference room, weaving together facts, holding up documents, discussing the potential criminal charges against the First Lady. The allegations—as compiled in the “Summary of Crimes” and the 206-page evidentiary summary contained in the black binder—fell into several groupings. First and foremost, Ewing pointed to Mrs. Clinton’s work as an attorney for the Rose Law Firm, where she billed hours on the questionable Castle Grande project orchestrated by Jim McDougal. These entries, circled on the billing records in red with notations in Vince Foster’s handwriting, included phone calls and meetings with Seth Ward, who turned out to be the straw man in the sham Castle Grande transaction. The First Lady had denied being involved in the Castle Grande deal. When her billing records mysteriously appeared in the White House living quarters, however, the numbers revealed that she had worked approximately sixty hours on Madison Guaranty projects over a period of fifteen months, including a portion on the Castle Grande matter—a relatively small chunk of time in the life of a busy attorney, but enough to suggest that she had been untruthful in her Resolution Trust Corporation interrogatories and Whitewater depositions.
Mrs. Clinton had tried to dig her way out of this inconsistency by testifying