Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [326]
Another important document found in Vince Foster’s attic along with the second set of billing records, Ewing pointed out, was a summary memo prepared by Foster during the 1992 campaign and a cover note from Hillary’s friend Diane Blair, making clear that Hillary had reviewed this summary. It seemed to confirm that the First Lady had lied when she denied that she had no memory of her legal work for McDougal on Castle Grande and other projects, during the course of her sworn RTC interrogatory answers and grand jury testimony. This document, Ewing said, would be his exhibit 1 at trial.
He also ticked through a list titled “Other Rose Law Firm work for Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan and before state Agencies,” evidence that pointed to abundant conflicts of interest in work handled by Hillary Clinton while her husband was governor. The effort to whitewash over Hillary’s involvement, the Tennessee prosecutor said as he pounded away, “began in earnest” during the 1992 presidential campaign. Although her initial conduct may not have been criminal, she had constructed a pyramid of lies in responding to the Jeff Gerth exposé during the 1992 campaign. Thereafter, Hillary’s own hubris and unwillingness to confess error caused her to repeat those untruths when placed under oath during the RTC investigation and when summoned before the grand jury. Mrs. Clinton’s lies, originally uttered for the sake of political expediency, had turned into lies that violated the law. For two straight hours, Ewing paced back and forth, as if he was closing to a jury in the biggest case of his career.
The other Starr prosecutors who gathered in the room viewed it as a masterful performance. But they felt that OIC had a snowball’s chance in hell of convicting the First Lady. It was one thing to believe a witness was pathologically dishonest—that was their shared assessment when it came to Hillary Clinton. It was another to convince a grand jury to indict that person, and even more difficult to get a jury to agree that a crime had been committed—especially when that person was First Lady of the United States and the wife of an enormously popular president.
After lunch, Ken Starr called on each person seated around the conference table, asking for initial impressions. Sam Dash, the self-appointed “conscience of the office,” piped up that the evidence amounted to “a bunch of nothing.” Ewing’s face turned red with anger; here was Dash, an unabashed Democrat, “overstating] in favor of the Clintons.” Why didn’t Dash take a hike off a short pier, if he was going to repeatedly flip-flop and undermine OIC’s work?
The faces of Ewing’s fellow prosecutors, however, were beginning to reveal growing impatience. Time was growing short. OIC’s future, they felt, rested with the Monica Lewinsky investigation. The independent counsel team was now expending twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, keying in on her. Assuming Judge Wright’s dismissal of the Jones case did not sink their otherwise seaworthy ship, Bill Clinton seemed to be dead in the water.
Several months earlier, one colleague in Arkansas had predicted that if they indicted Hillary Clinton that moment and tried the case in Little Rock, “we’d have a sixty-forty chance of winning.” Now, almost overnight, the wind was blowing in the reverse direction. A secret memo written to the file by one prosecutor predicted that the chances of the First Lady being acquitted were approximately 20 percent; the odds of a hung jury were a whopping 70 percent; and the chances of Mrs. Clinton being convicted a slight 10 percent. Wrote that prosecutor: “Not enough in my view.” The strong consensus, suddenly, was that the Hillary case was a loser. Ewing later explained, “I don’t think they wanted anything to distract from what was considered a sure thing. Because you’ve got the president in your sights.”
The order of proof that Ewing reviewed with the Starr prosecutors was an eye-opener. It set forth a “rough outline” of what a trial against Hillary Clinton