The only major event in Whitewater for the rest of was a ruling from Starr's office in July that Vincent Foster's death was definitely a suicide. The Whitewater investigation continued, but with no new revelations public interest declined. Public interest in scandal and the Clintons was revived in , but not the way anyone had planned. Tripp also alleged that Clinton had told Lewinsky to deny the affair if she was questioned by lawyers for Paula Jones as part of her pending lawsuit against Clinton.
Tripp produced audiotapes of her secretly recorded conversations with Lewinsky, which corroborated her story. Starr received permission to expand the scope of his investigation, to determine whether Clinton had in fact asked Lewinsky to lie under oath.
Starr had not forgotten Whitewater, however. McDougal's cooperation was particularly welcome, but he died in March On April 23, , prosecutors called Susan McDougal before a grand jury. She refused to cooperate, claiming that she did not trust Starr and his investigators. At her April appearance, she once again refused to answer questions.
She said that she was convinced the Starr investigators were determined to convict President Clinton at any cost, and she added that she would only answer questions before the grand jury if Starr and his team resigned and were replaced with what she felt was truly independent counsel.
The case was tried in a U. District Court in Little Rock. At trial, McDougal testified that Starr and his prosecutors had tried to pressure her into lying about having an affair with President Clinton. After months of testimony, the federal grand jury acquitted McDougal on the contempt charge and deadlocked on two counts of obstruction of justice. The judge, George Howard Jr. In May , Starr said that he would not seek to retry McDougal on those charges. In June , Webster Hubbell, another Clinton friend and Whitewater partner, agreed to admit to one of 15 charges against him.
Hubbell made a point of insisting that Hillary Clinton had committed no crime associated with her Whitewater dealings. Meanwhile, Starr was going through his own legal difficulties. In February , the White House had filed a criminal complaint against the Office of the Independent Counsel for leaking information to the news media.
An article that appeared in the January 31, , issue of The New York Times stated that Starr was considering whether to indict President Clinton for perjury and obstruction of justice. Moreover, Starr had decided that he had the authority to make the indictments. Starr's spokesman, attorney Charles Bakaly III, told the press, "We will not discuss the plans of this office or the plans of the grand jury in any way.
That rule limits the amount of information attorneys can divulge about grand jury cases. Bakaly denied that Starr's office had provided any information to the Times. The idea was that they were going to develop this land and build a bunch of vacation homes to sell those homes and earn a pretty profit.
Real estate is big, big money, and the Clintons were looking to earn an honest living selling houses. The vacation homes were supposed to provide access to awesome outdoor activities like fishing.
However, even the best-laid plans can fail thanks to Mother Nature. A short time after the loss, Bill was elected Governor of Arkansas. His business would go on to come under federal investigation.
If there's one thing we all know financial institutions love doing, it's playing fast and loose with taxpayer dollars. On the same day that Foster killed himself, Paula Casey, the new U. The next day, FBI agents raided the offices, and on September 23, a federal grand jury indicted Hale. After his indictment, Hale alleged that Clinton had a secret interest in one of his illegal loans and had pressured him to make it, although no records ever showed that Clinton had any transaction with Hale.
In January , Clinton capitulated to the Republican clamor over Whitewater and told Attorney General Janet Reno to appoint a special counsel to investigate. Reno appointed Robert B. Fiske Jr. He was given broad authority to investigate Whitewater and any related activity. When David Hale complained that the U. In the summer of , after Fiske concluded that Foster had committed suicide, conservative groups and Republican senators complained that his investigation was not diligent enough.
A three-judge U. Court of Appeals panel replaced Fiske with Kenneth W. Starr, a former federal appeals court judge and already a harsh critic of Clinton. The switch raised ethical questions because the chairman of the panel, Judge David B.
In the meantime, the Republican-controlled Senate appointed the Special Whitewater Committee to look into all the Whitewater-related matters, and the Banking committees of both the Senate and the House of Representatives undertook extensive hearings on Whitewater and Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan Corp.
Numerous officials of the Clinton administration and associates of the Clintons from Arkansas were subpoenaed to testify. The Senate Whitewater hearings and the House Banking Committee hearings on Whitewater lasted more than a year but found no illegalities.
Starr, the Whitewater special prosecutor, eventually concluded that Foster had committed suicide and that no laws were broken in the travel office firings or the FBI files case. Starr and Fiske obtained indictments against seventeen persons in Arkansas, fifteen of whom either pleaded guilty to offenses or were convicted. Most did not go to trial. Comptroller of the Currency, as a federal narcotics law required. Many hired lawyers to advise and represent them in the grand jury proceedings in Little Rock and Washington.
Clinton testified that he never heard about the loan. While she stubbornly refused to testify before the grand jury and went to prison for it, Susan McDougal publicly maintained that she never apprised Clinton of the loan because it had nothing to do with him. He died in a federal prison in Fort Worth, Texas, on March 8, Tucker was convicted of mail fraud and conspiracy in his dealings with Madison Guaranty and Hale, and he also pleaded guilty to filing a sham bankruptcy for a cable television company he owned in Texas.
He served no time for either and tried unsuccessfully for years to reverse both convictions, losing finally with the U. Supreme Court. We use cookies and other tracking technologies to improve your browsing experience on our site, show personalized content and targeted ads, analyze site traffic, and understand where our audiences come from. To learn more or opt-out, read our Cookie Policy. To understand why the Clintons have a reputation on the right as secretive schemers, and on the left as victims of vindictive witch hunts, you have to know a thing or two about the Whitewater scandal.
The story started in , when Bill served as Arkansas's attorney general and would be elected governor, at age 32, that November.
Bill and Hillary began scouting opportunities for investment income to supplement his government salary and her earnings as an attorney at the Rose Law Firm. Some of these efforts were successful. That gain came in for considerable scrutiny during Bill's presidency; one analysis estimated that even under the most generous of assumptions, the odds of a return that large during the period in question are about one in 31 trillion.
A later White House investigation into the trades found no evidence Hillary committed any trading violations. Ultimately, none of the many investigations found that the Clintons did anything criminal. But some investments didn't go well — and that's what the Whitewater scandal is about. Also in , Bill and Hillary formed the Whitewater Development Corporation with James and Susan McDougal, intending to buy up acres of riverfront land and sell it as lots for vacation homes. Jim McDougal, a real estate entrepreneur, was an old friend of Bill's and cut the Clintons into a deal where they wouldn't pay any upfront investment — but could still stand to profit from the home sales.
The Whitewater project was a failure.
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