Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [41]
After five such calls from Jean Lewis in the RTC office, the Arkansas U.S. attorney finally lost his cool. He would later explain: “I was born at night, but not last night. It didn’t take me long to figure out why somebody is really interested in trying to get this out here and get this rolling, and get this going before this presidential election is over with.”
Banks got on the phone and shouted at the pestering RTC official, “Not me! I’m not going to use this office that way. If the President [Bush] goes down, he goes down. That’s just the way it’s going to have to be.’”
Later accounts confirm that Sheffield Nelson had been one conduit carrying the Whitewater story to federal authorities. Moreover, records establish that the Bush Justice Department contacted FBI headquarters in Washington to verify that such a case existed and that it involved the Clintons. The machinery was being set in motion to derail candidate Bill Clinton by using Jim McDougal’s questionable business dealings to knock the Clinton Express off its tracks.
On October 16, Charles Banks wrote a sharply worded letter to the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Little Rock office. He noted that although the allegations against Jim McDougal might have some superficial appeal, “combined with Mr. McDougal’s previous acquittal, his present mental state along with no prospect of recovering lost monies from the institution,” there was absolutely no reason to recommend a prosecution. Banks went on to castigate his fellow federal officials, contending that “lapse of time [and] the insistence for urgency in this case appears to suggest an intentional or unintentional attempt to intervene into the political process,” which “amounts to prosecutorial misconduct and violates the most basic fundamental rule of Department of Justice policy.”
The Little Rock office of the FBI sent an urgent teletype to bureau headquarters in Washington, warning them that U.S. Attorney Banks felt strongly that “the alleged involvement of the Clintons in the wrongdoing was implausible, and he was not inclined to authorize an investigation.” Indeed, Banks made it clear that he would resign if forced to abuse his power in this fashion. He would reflect a decade later: “I agree there are a lot of things about [Bill Clinton] that I can totally do without, and I never approved of him when he was president. But to use the grand jury to get him politically, if that’s the practical effect of what you’re going to do, that’s not my way of thinking.”
President Clinton would later commend Banks’s forceful stand on the eve of the 1992 election: “He played it straight. He was an old-fashioned Republican. It wasn’t ideology or theology with him; it was based on the evidence.… In retrospect, it was a courageous decision by him.” The former president cleared his throat and added, referring to the RTC officials who dredged up the McDougal case as a means to come after him, “They just sailed on, you know. It was morally and legally wrong, but nothing happened to them.”
And so the Whitewater scandal flared up in the waning days of the presidential election of 1992, cooling off quickly because a Republican U.S. attorney refused to touch it. Yet that glowing spark was fanned back to a flame soon enough.
AS President-elect Bill Clinton and his wife were packing up their boxes in the Arkansas governor’s mansion and preparing for the move east to Washington, they resolved to clean up the last debris of the Whitewater mess. Jim Blair, a family friend and attorney, had scheduled a trip to Arkansas to handle that closing of the books. In an odd