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By Root 1721 0

Hot Springs—a fellow Clinton enemy who had spent time with Clinton at Oxford and had grown to despise him. Lately, Jackson was making a name for himself by disseminating a story about then-Governor Clinton’s purported misuse of Arkansas state troopers to arrange sexual trysts. Jackson, said the retired judge, had good media contacts. Although Johnson considered Jackson “a peculiar duck” who liked to “fly his own boat,” they could use Jackson to Hale’s advantage. Years later, Johnson described Jackson’s tenacity: “Cliff will work vigorously like a hog rooting under the gate to get into the act. He was flexing his little muscles trying to make himself prominent, maybe for some federal appointment later on. He was a smart boy.” Johnson was also willing to contact Sheffield Nelson, head of the Arkansas Republican Party and longtime foe of Bill Clinton. Through this combined effort, they could surely get Hale’s allegations pumped into the national media.

As usual, Johnson hit pay dirt. The Hale story was swiftly picked up by the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and other major publications. For Justice Jim, it was the least he could do for a friend. Even if Hale were guilty, “damn it, he oughtn’t to have to carry the whole load.” As the judge told Hale, the key was to go public in a big way. “If the whole ship goes down,” he theorized, “these people [including Bill Clinton] will have to come to your rescue.”

“I’ve got a back room here,” he added. “If you and your family want to move in, come on.” So David Hale moved to the Johnson farm, turning his fate over to the judge’s experienced hands.

President Bill Clinton, looking back on these events after Hale had pleaded guilty to multiple felonies and assumed a new identity in Louisiana, felt it was abundantly clear why Hale had suddenly implicated him. “Oh, he was trying to save his backside,” said Clinton. “And I think he figured out that he could probably get a better deal if he made it a bigger story.” Clinton would note that it was his administration’s own SBA that uncovered Hale’s misdeeds. “What he did was the biggest rip-off in the history of the Small Business Administration. And so, you know, he began spending a lot of time with Jim Johnson and others, and all of a sudden he had me involved in this, with these crazy stories, none of which were true.”

One of the first pitches Hale made, with Johnson’s wise counsel, was to the U.S. attorney in Arkansas. Paula Casey had been appointed to this top federal prosecutorial post by Clinton. Hale and his team sensed a whiff of a conflict here. Their first line of attack was to have Hale’s attorney set up an appointment with Casey and promise that if she allowed the municipal judge to plead to a “simple misdemeanor,” his client would “give us a lot of information” and even “wear a wire.”

Casey found the whole proposal ludicrous. She would later say, “Wear a wire to do what?” The whole country knew Hale was under investigation. “I mean, the very notion that we were going to send David Hale to the West Wing, you know, to the Oval Office, wearing a wire,” and that the president would incriminate himself, “was just silly.”

Yet Hale was crying “conflict of interest!” He had also convinced Jeff Gerth from the New York Times to take his side. So Casey recused herself and the entire U.S. attorneys’ office in Arkansas.

Reflecting on Hale’s successful maneuver to knock her off the case she said, “I have absolutely no respect for [Hale]. I think that he was willing to do anything that he could possibly do to avoid the consequences of his own misconduct. He didn’t want to go to prison. I don’t blame him. I wouldn’t want to go there, either, but I didn’t embezzle from the FDIC.” She sized it up: “There was nothing honorable about his original conduct. And there was nothing honorable about the way he dealt with it afterwards.”

It was through this sequence of events—by which U.S. Attorney Paula Casey was forced to bow out of the entire Hale prosecution—that Independent Counsel Robert Fiske took over the case.