What difference? No difference. Moot case. The establishment in Arkansas is just as corrupt as the lying rapist.
Cooking up a verdict down in Arkansas
Bill Clinton and his friends came through yesterday for Susan McDougal. She got a mistrial on two counts in Little Rock, and an acquittal on a lesser charge.
The verdict, and how it came about, would stink up the courthouse anywhere else, but in Arkansas all the funny stuff -- intimidation of federal judges, tampering with the jury -- is regarded only as innocent coincidences.
Mzz McDougal was charged with obstruction and criminal contempt for refusing to testify to the Whitewater grand juries. She said she refused because she was afraid Ken Starr would charge her with perjury unless she implicated her old friends Bill and Hillary. The logic of this reasoning is not clear, since Mr. Starr then charged her with contempt and obstruction, and put her on trial, anyway.
Most people assumed that her loyalty to the state's most celebrated boar was the price of a presidential pardon, and maybe they were right. If so, the verdict yesterday makes it moot. But others said no, Mzz McDougal was merely paying a spurned woman's tribute to the remembrance of flings past. Her late husband, Jim McDougal, thought Susan was ol' Bill's sometimes doxy.
The known facts are clear enough. Mzz McDougal testified at her latest trial that she just didn't remember much about what she did as an officer of Madison Savings and Loan, which financed the Clintons' real-estate scam. The president said he never borrowed money from the McDougals' S&L, but this was said under oath, so he may not have intended for anyone to take him seriously. But then prosecutors produced a cashier's check from the S&L payable to "Bill Clinton," and handwritten notes from Madison S&L files make references to a loan to "Bill Clinton." Mzz McDougal helped pay off the Clinton loan, writing a $5,081 check in 1983. She testified that she didn't remember that, either.
Mzz McDougal couldn't have been surprised by yesterday's verdict. The courts in Arkansas have been very nice to her. U.S. District Judge George Howard, who presided over the trial, had released her from an earlier conviction because her back hurt.
Her trial strategy, which appears to have been worked out with the Arkansas political establishment, was to distract the jury from the germane facts by putting Mr. Starr, his office and the "guv-a-mint" of the hated yankees on trial. When Judge Howard allowed this, he doomed the government's case. At one point, Hick Ewing, the deputy prosecutor, the son of an old Arkansas family who now lives in nearby Memphis, asked that the record show that he is not a yankee.
The jurors had been softened up for months before they were called as jurors. Mr. Clinton's friends demonized Ken Starr, even calling him a yankee. (He was raised in Texas and educated in Arkansas.) David Pryor, who retired three years ago after faithful service as Mr. Clinton's bagman in the U.S. Senate, returned to Arkansas for further duties as a special pleader. He got caught pleading Susan McDougal's case in a private meeting -- unethical and maybe illegal -- with U.S. District Judge Susan Webber Wright. Explanations, and then sheepish apologies but no inquiry by the bar association, followed.
The McDougal trial took a turn that would be bizarre in most places but it hardly lifted an eyebrow in Little Rock. One of the jurors reported for deliberations one morning with a law book citing how and when, underlined for emphasis, a jury could disregard evidence -- a book written by John Purtle, a former member of the state Supreme Court, a contributor to Clinton campaigns and a public defender of Webb Hubbell. Judge Purtle's card was in the book.
Judge Purtle, who stood trial for fraud a decade ago, at first said he didn't know the juror. Later in the day he said, well, yes, actually he had sold his house to him several years ago. (There's something in the water down there that dissolves memory.) The law book must have been left there. That's how the juror got it. Judge Howard ruled it another Arkansas coincidence.
Not all Arkansas juries are rigged, but the downtown establishment has, in fact, been caught cooking verdicts. Years ago several white segregationists were charged with planting dynamite bombs at one of the silk-stocking law firms, and under the city-owned car of a fire chief who had turned fire hoses on white demonstrators. A relative of the fire chief was put on the jury. Quick convictions followed. Public outrage ran so deep that two years later, when a bomb was planted at an abandoned building at a black college, the father of one of the Little Rock Nine was convicted of putting it there to foment trouble. White segregationists sent word to the appeals court judges that an innocent man had been framed and they should look for a way to overturn the convictions. And so they did. What a wee, wee world.
washtimes.com
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