The real blood sport: the Whitewater scandal machine - Cover Story

Washington Monthly, May, 1996 by Amy Waldman

During the Tucker/McDougal trial, witnesses trooped to the stand in Little Rock and testified, one after the other, that what Hale said could not be believed. You might expect that the defense would try to make Hale look bad--but these have been witnesses for the prosecution. Hale himself has admitted to lying to the FBI and the SBA. He also recently conceded on the witness stand that when he entered his guilty plea before a district judge in 1994, he lied when he said that none of the many businesses he owned had received SBA money. Hale continued to tell that false story as late as his sentencing hearing--before the same judge--this March. (W. Ray Jahn, the associate independent counsel, insisted after Hale's testimony that his star witness had not told a lie, but rather made a mistake.)

The trial's spotlight on Hale's "mistakes" posed something of a problem for papers, like The Washington Post, that have used Hale to hint at wrongdoing by then-Governor Clinton. So one couldn't help being curious: After dutifully repeating Hale's charges for years, how would the Post report evidence showing that he doesn't appear to have put his problem with the truth behind him? Here's how the Post played Hale's testimony: After prominently featuring stories about Hale's anti-Clinton allegations on the witness stand, the Post managed to avoid running a story on April 10, the day after Hale had admitted lying to the judge who heard his guilty plea and sentenced him. (The putatively anti-Clinton Washington Times, to its credit, put the story on the front page.) The next day, April 11, the Post ran a prominent story about Hale's double-hearsay-based embellishment of his charges against Clinton ("Hale Says He Was Told of Clinton Meeting; Whitewater Witness says Then-Governor Discussed Loan at Mansion"). Finally, on April 21, the Post ran a story on Hale's dissembling and less-than-perfect credibility.

Like most non-Arkansas papers, the Post invariably accompanies references to Hale with the fact that he has been "in hiding for two years." It doesn't seem to have occurred to them to investigate exactly what he was hiding from. The Arkansas Times, in contrast, has made repeated, and unsuccessful, attempts to find any state or federal law enforcement agency investigating the alleged threats against Hale's life.

Security at the Little Rock trial, where Hale has been the government's chief witness, has been minimal; each night Hale has left the court alone, or with his family, seemingly unconcerned for his safety. Arkansas Times editor and columnist Max Brantley asked deputy independent counsel W. Hickman Ewing Jr. whether he had evidence that Hale's life had been threatened. "I don't have any evidence," Brantley says Ewing replied, but Ewing added that his office had believed Hale's tales of people calling his house and hanging up and mysterious cars driving by his house.

As a municipal judge whose cases were mostly traffic violations and drunk driving complaints, Hale was known for demanding security precautions, such as double metal detector's, that seemed somewhat excessive to his fellow Arkansans. Some of them, accordingly, suspect that Hale imagined the threats that have kept him in hiding. Of course, it's also possible that the threats were concocted or exaggerated to give Hale's allegations greater weight and to keep him sheltered from scrutiny. The independent counsel's office has conducted some 40 interviews with Hale, but officials of the SBA, the main victim of his deceptions, haven't been allowed anywhere near him.