Word: starrs
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...Clinton's resounding re-election all but guarantees that Whitewater and its many progeny, from Travelgate to Filegate, will continue to haunt this presidency. The election may have diminished Whitewater as a purely political issue. But the investigation of independent counsel Kenneth Starr marches on, divorced from electoral politics, its recent invisibility a measure not of weakness but of gathering strength...
Consider that Attorney General Janet Reno has formally recommended that Starr's jurisdiction be expanded on at least five separate occasions. Starr's mandate extends from the original Whitewater land deal to the activities of the failed Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan run by the Clintons' partners Jim and Susan McDougal, to other real estate ventures like Castle Grande, which Hillary Clinton allegedly worked on at the Rose law firm. That's just what is known within the independent counsel's office as the "Arkansas phase" of the investigation. In the "Washington phase," focusing on events that have occurred since...
Meanwhile, in Arkansas one of the main witnesses to the Whitewater transactions, Jim McDougal, is cooperating with Starr, and his ex-wife Susan remains under intense pressure to do so. While Jim's credibility will be assailed, whatever he has told prosecutors thus far has been deemed sufficiently important for Jim to have been moved into a "safe house," as he puts it, and he has cut off contact with the press and much of the outside world while he is being groomed for future testimony. This is much the same treatment previously accorded David Hale, the Arkansas lender...
Susan McDougal is in jail for contempt after refusing to answer Starr's questions before a grand jury. Having been granted immunity for anything other than perjury, Susan can no longer invoke the Fifth Amendment privilege. In various interviews since her conviction, including an appearance on ABC's 20/20, Susan has cited her fear and distrust of Starr and his prosecutors as her reason for silence. That distrust seems genuine, but it is hardly the full explanation...
...Starr's investigation continues, it seems worth remembering that it was Clinton who called for the appointment of an independent counsel in January 1994, in the midst of a furor over the removal of files from Vince Foster's office. The President's thinking was that by removing Whitewater from the political arena and putting it into the hands of an independent counsel, he would buy time for his legislative agenda and eliminate the burgeoning scandal as an issue in the midterm congressional elections and, if necessary, in his own re-election campaign...