Whitewater runs deep - investigation into Bill and Hillary Clinton's real estate investments that may have involved abuse of government funds - includes satirical ideas for motion script that Oliver Stone could produce about the Clintons - Cover Story

National Review, March 21, 1994 by Richard Brookhiser

The nursing-home deal, all perfectly legal, offered a foretaste of the Clinton health plan: everyone was screwed, except the large medical corporations and the lawyers. But some Little Rock legal practitioners skated on slimmer ice.

Also in 1989, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation decided to sue the accounting firm that had presented a clean bill of health for Madison Guaranty to the Arkansas Securities Department in 1985. Vince Foster, another partner at Rose Law and later deputy White House counsel, wrote the FDIC offering Rose's services as outside counsel, declaring, in a careful present tense, that "the firm does not represent any savings-and-loan association in state or federal regulatory matters." Foster's statement was true, but so narrowly as to be false. The Rose Law Firm did not represent any S&Ls in 1989, but it had represented Madison Guaranty four years earlier-and in the matter under investigation. One seventeenth-century Jesuit, acting undercover in a Protestant country, when interrogated by the authorities denied that he was a priest, adding silently to himself, "... of Apollo." What was good enough for the Jesuits was good enough for the FDIC. Webb Hubbell, a Rose partner who is now associate attorney general--and hence number three man at the Justice Department--handled the FDIC's case, settling the accountants' liability for the $60 million debacle at $1 million.

Two years earlier, two Rose Law Firm partners had handled a similar case for the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation, in similar style. The feds were pursuing a bond trader who they claimed had defrauded a defunct Illinois S&L, First American of Oak Brook. The Rose Law Firm offered itself successfully as outside counsel, and assigned Vince Foster and Hillary Clinton to the case. No one seems to have mentioned their connection to the bond trader: Dan Lasater, a restaurateur and cocaine smuggler who was a friend of the Clinton family. Lasater met the Clintons because his box at the Hot Springs race track was next to that of Virginia Kelley, Bill Clinton's mother. Lasater ended up paying $200,000, in return for dismissal of the $3.3 million suit.

Vince Foster is gone, of course, but the other three lawyers are still on call. With so much legal advice available, you would think Bill Clinton-- himself a lawyer--would have handled his troubles more adroitly. But maybe he is doing exactly what they tell him.

Sex

NIGHTGOWNS! Saxophones! Garden hoses! Tennis balls! Hot stuff!. But don't waste any time on it unless it speaks to you personally, because it won't have any repercussions. As Richard Nixon might have said, we are all fornicators now. All you'll read about here is alleged behavior that reflects on the Arkansas-Yuppie political style.

The latest Clinton sexpose was a charge made last month by Paula Jones, a 27-year-old former secretary, that Governor Clinton, in 1991, had propositioned her. Since Mrs. Jones was a state employee at the time, she would have grounds to sue for sexual harassment, which she threatened to do if an apology were not forthcoming. No apology has come forth, neither has any suit. Mrs. Jones's story, if true, confirms reports by the Arkansas state troopers and others that Governor Clinton conducted a predatory sex life not unlike the Duke of Mantua in Rigoletto.