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Authors: Ann Coulter

High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton (27 page)

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Though Hubbell wouldn’t talk to the prosecutors, he did talk to his wife—in taped telephone conversations from prison. He knew his conversations were being taped, and curtly informed his wife of that when she probed him for information about the first lady’s legal vulnerability. Still, even knowing that his every word on that phone could be heard by Independent Counsel Ken Starr, Hubbell and his wife exchanged some intriguing remarks:
 
SUZANNA HUBBELL:
I’m the one that has to try and explain to Marsha [Scott, longtime Arkansas FOB and chief of staff in the White House personnel office]. She said you’re not going to get any public support if you open up Hillary. Well, by public support I know exactly what she means. I’m not stupid.
WEBSTER HUBBELL:
And I sat there and spent Saturday with you saying I would not do that. I won’t raise those allegations that might open it up to Hillary, and you know that. We talked about that.
SUZANNA HUBBELL:
Yes. But then I get all this back from Marsha, who’s ratcheting it up and making it sound like, you know, if Webb goes ahead and sues the firm back, then any support I have at the White House is gone. I mean I’m hearing the squeeze play.
WEBSTER HUBBELL:
So I need to roll over one more time.
3
 
What might that mean?
Some of Mr. Hubbell’s remarks on the tape-recorded phone conversation are seemingly self-serving, to say nothing of demonstrably false. For example, after he mentions that “most of the articles are presupposing that I—my silence is being bought,” Mr. Hubbell launches into a soliloquy—to his wife—about how broke they are. In case his wife was unaware of the family’s finances, he says, “[W]e’re dead solid broke and getting broker, you know?”
4
In fact, in the eighteen months following his resignation, amazing amounts of money came Hubbell’s way, mainly in the form of “consulting fees” arranged by various Clinton administration officials and advisers. In all, Hubbell was paid about half a million dollars by friends of the Clintons, more than he had ever earned for a comparable period in his life—and this was when he was facing a criminal indictment. There is no evidence, apart from a few phone calls, that he performed any work for these generous payments. Hubbell refuses to discuss any aspect of the nature of the work he allegedly performed for the more than half-a-million dollars on the grounds of attorney-client privilege.
Within a few months of resigning, Mr. Friend-to-the-Voiceless was suddenly flying first class and taking golf vacations in exotic locales such as Bali and Indonesia. This is when Hubbell not only was facing a criminal indictment, but also had no visible means of support.
5
While in prison he would effortlessly foot the bill for his children’s college tuition.
THE WHITE HOUSE ACTS SUPPORTIVE
 
It would not be revealed
until three years after Hubbell resigned that on March 13, 1994, the day before Hubbell was to announce his resignation, there had been a high-level meeting at the White House regarding the Whitewater investigation. Present at the meeting were the president; the first lady; White House Chief of Staff Mack McLarty; Deputy Chief of Staff Harold Ickes; the first lady’s chief of staff, Margaret Williams; and David Kendall, the Clintons’ personal lawyer.
According to the administration’s account of what happened, as the meeting was breaking up McLarty informed Mrs. Clinton that efforts would be made “to try to help” Hubbell and to be “supportive” in his time of need. Mrs. Clinton expressed her approval and perhaps gave thanks. McLarty said he told the first lady this out of earshot of the rest of the group. The administration could not confirm or deny whether McLarty had a similar conversation with the president. As Lanny Davis reported, McLarty “thinks he might have also mentioned it to the president, but his memory is less clear about that.”
6
Remember, this is what the White House has admitted to.
In fact, top administration officials did spend that spring diligently fishing for lucrative “consulting” fees for Whitewater target Hubbell. The massive undertaking to be “supportive” of Webb included the efforts of then-White House Chief of Staff McLarty, soon-to-be White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles, U.S. Trade Representative Mickey Kantor, and informal Clinton adviser Vernon Jordan.
Impressively, Webb’s little helpers managed to get him more money than he had ever earned in a single year of his life. This is not the typical effect of coming under a criminal indictment.
THE LIPPO GROUP CHIPS IN
 
The most curious
“consulting fee” paid to Hubbell came from a subsidiary of the Lippo Group, an Indonesia-based conglomerate owned by the Riadys, the ethnic Chinese family at the heart of many Clinton campaign fund-raising scandals.
A little more than three months after Hubbell resigned from the Clinton administration under threat of indictment, James Riady of the Lippo Group was particularly anxious to talk consulting fees with Hubbell. Riady did so between his numerous telephone calls and visits to the White House. Riady had already been to the White House about two dozen times since Clinton had become president, but Riady’s flurry of White House meetings the week of June 20 may have set new records.
Riady met with President Clinton himself at the White House on Tuesday, June 21, 1994. That Thursday, June 23, Riady had a 7:00 AM breakfast meeting with Hubbell. A few hours later, Riady attended a White House meeting. Immediately after his White House meeting, he repaired to the Hay Adams hotel, across the street from the White House, for his second meeting of the day with Hubbell.
By Saturday negotiations had concluded. Two days after Riady had been shuttling between meetings with Hubbell and the White House, a Lippo subsidiary paid Hubbell $100,000. Before Hubbell received the Lippo payment, he was down to $6,780 in his bank account.
7
Little was expected of Hubbell in return for these payments, according to unnamed sources cited by the
Washington Post
.
8
The $100,000 payment was arranged by John Huang, who attended the June 23 meeting with Riady at the White House. (Huang is also responsible for raising about $3 million for the Democratic Party during the 1996 campaign, of which over half had to be returned.) The following month, the Clinton administration granted the Riadys’ long-standing request that Huang be given a post at the Commerce Department.
President Clinton later said he knew nothing about the Riady payments to Hubbell until 1996, when he “read about it in the press.”
9
Lanny Davis loyally supported his leader, saying Clinton “did not know about any business relationship between Lippo and Mr. Hubbell until he read about it in the newspapers.”
10
It’s funny that James Riady would have neglected to mention that he was hiring Clinton’s former number three man at the Justice Department during his June 23, 1994, White House meeting—squeezed in between breakfast and lunch meetings with Hubbell. It’s also funny that Riady would forget to say anything about it during any of the other visits he would pay to the White House every day that week, leading up to the June 25 $100,000 payment.
During the period of his amazingly profitable consulting fee racket, Hubbell played golf with Clinton on at least one occasion and went to Camp David with the Clintons twice. He also had numerous meetings with White House officials and played golf with Vernon Jordan. Hubbell donned his prison blues in August 1995. In his waning days as a free man, White House aides threw him a party, attended by Bruce Lindsey, among others. But in all this time Hubbell’s financial situation never came up.
In late 1997 lawyer and FOB Douglas Buford stepped forward to tell House investigators that he, and he alone, had been responsible for arranging the $100,000 Lippo payment to Hubbell. Buford is a partner at Wright, Lindsey & Jennings, where Bruce Lindsey was a partner, and where Clinton had worked for two years after losing the governorship in 1980. In an October 23, 1997, deposition, Buford said that Hubbell had called sometime after resigning in disgrace from the Justice Department, and asked Buford to propose that the Lippo group—a Buford client—hire him as a consultant. Buford said he passed the suggestion along to John Huang, and the rest is history.
Buford insisted in his deposition that, despite his “frequent contact” with both Lindsey and the president himself, the White House was completely in the dark about Buford’s efforts on Hubbell’s behalf. These he made strictly “as a friend.”
11
“I wanted to make sure,” he explained, “that nobody would confuse the message.” One person who might have confused the message was James Riady, who visited the White House every day for a week before granting Hubbell the $100,000 lump sum payment. Another person who may have confused the message is President Clinton, who one month later acceded to Riady’s request to have Huang placed at the Commerce Department.
MONEY, MONEY
 
Lippo’s $100,000 “consulting fee”
was only the beginning of Hubbell’s post-resignation profits. After the March 13 Whitewater meeting at the White House, Clinton’s subordinates managed to scare up all manner of “consulting fees” for Hubbell.
Just days after that meeting, McLarty began calling potential Hubbell benefactors from the White House. Among McLarty’s solicitees was Truman Arnold, an FOB in Arkansas. McLarty “expressed his concerns about Webb,” asking Arnold “whether Webb might be useful to Arnold in any of his business enterprises or to any of his associates.” This, again, is the White House’s own account, offered up years later, in response to inquiries from an impertinent press.
Arnold put Hubbell on the payroll and prevailed on others to do the same, including Democratic donor and Texas businessman Bernard Rapoport, who put Hubbell on a $3,000-a-month salary for six months. Hubbell’s work assignments for Arnold and Rapoport were unspecified. Lanny Davis insisted that “any suggestion there was a linkage in Mr. McLarty’s mind between Whitewater-related issues and his call to Mr. Arnold is without foundation.”
12
Vernon Jordan lined up consulting fees for Hubbell in 1994 at two major corporations—MacAndrews & Forbes Holdings, Inc., and Time Warner. MacAndrews owns the cosmetics company Revlon, where Jordan sits on the board; Jordan is also close with MacAndrews owner Ronald Perelman. MacAndrews paid Hubbell more than $60,000 in fees. Time Warner put Hubbell on the payroll at $5,000 a month—a job that lasted only one month.
13
Jordan told the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee under oath, “I told the president in an informal setting that ‘I’m doing what I can for Webb Hubbell,’” and “the president said, ‘Thanks.’” (Would discussions of hush money ordinarily take place in a
formal
setting?)
The fast-rising head of the SBA, Erskine Bowles, called at least three men to seek consulting fees for Hubbell: Will Dunbar of Allied Capital Corporation, as well as Sam Poole and Reef Ivy, both attorneys at North Carolina’s Sanford Law Firm. Hubbell got a meeting with Dunbar but no payments from any of Bowles’s contacts. The Sanford Law Firm was no Rose Law Firm.
Mickey Kantor has strenuously denied arranging any “consulting fees” for Hubbell. But he admits that he did create a trust fund to pay for Hubbell’s children’s educations (one of three private funds set up for Hubbell
14
), hitting up Democratic donors for contributions. He also gave Hubbell’s son a job in the U.S. Trade Representative’s office, and then helped him get his next job.
15
In addition, Kantor stepped in to ensure that the city of Los Angeles paid Hubbell his $24,750 “consulting fee,” despite the inconvenient discovery by City Controller Rick Tuttle that Hubbell had performed little or no work for the payment.
The inspector general of the Department of Transportation (DOT), Mary Schiavo, confirmed Tuttle’s conclusion, finding that Hubbell’s work for Los Angeles consisted of one or two fiveminute phone calls to the DOT general counsel. Hubbell had apparently been recommended for the $2,000-a-minute lobbying job by then-Deputy Mayor Mary Leslie. Leslie had been a political appointee at the SBA under Erskine Bowles.
But Los Angeles got off easy. Some of Hubbell’s other post-resignation jobs defy a straight-faced description.
The Consumer Support and Education Fund, a private foundation in California, gave Hubbell a $45,000 grant to write a report on the scandal-mongering media’s oppression of government officials. (Hubbell never wrote anything, so the man who had recommended Hubbell for the project, lawyer John Phillips, ended up reimbursing the fund out of his own pocket.)
SunAmerica, Inc., owned by major Democratic donor Eli Broad, paid Hubbell undisclosed sums of money “to generate public interest in a national policy to encourage saving for retirement,” as the
Washington Post
put it.
16
The Pacific Telesis Group (Pac-Tel), a telecommunications company, paid Hubbell undisclosed amounts of money at the same time that Sprint—a competitor—also had Hubbell on its payroll for undisclosed amounts of money and for undisclosed services. Lobbyist Jack L. Williams had arranged the Pac-Tel payments to Hubbell. In March 1997 Williams was convicted for making false statements in the federal investigation into whether former Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy and his aides accepted illegal gratuities from agricultural companies. Williams had also arranged payments to Hubbell from the Mid-America Dairymen’s Association.
BOOK: High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton
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