McDougal's loss is Starr's loss

0 Comments | Insight on the News, March 30, 1998 | by Jamie Dettmer, | Jennifer G. Hickey

Now that President Clinton's former business partner James McDougal is dead -- the flamboyant 57-year-old Arkansan died in federal prison after a heart attack -- where does Independent Counsel Ken Starr go to press forward with the Whitewater part of his probe?

With McDougal's death, Starr has been robbed of one of his most important cooperative witnesses. Without him and facing the obstinate noncooperation of McDougal's former wife, Susan, Starr would appear to have little to go with in making a winnable Whitewater case against the president.

And sources close to the Whitewater inquiry say not to expect former Arkansas governor and convicted felon Jim Guy Tucker to become the star witness now. "Tucker has a lot of useful information about Clinton, but it's not firsthand stuff," a source tells news alert!.

Even with McDougal, Starr probably didn't have much of a Whitewater case against Clinton. At the heart of it was McDougal's testimony that Clinton (as Arkansas governor) helped him pressure former municipal judge David Hale to give Susan McDougal an illegal $300,000 Small Business Administration loan, some of which was used by her husband to buy property for the troubled Whitewater land venture. Hale corroborated McDougal's version but Starr prosecutors never thought the word of two convicted felons was going to be enough to secure a conviction against Clinton, who always has adamantly denied he ever was involved in the illegal loan scheme.

Tucker, who recently became a cooperating witness to escape a second fraud trial, wasn't privy to the alleged 1986 meeting between Clinton, Hale and McDougal that resulted in the loan to Susan McDougal. And any information he has on Clinton is more on the order of tittle-tattle, sources say. Tucker and Clinton were never close buddies and there was no love lost between them. Back in the 1970s, Tucker saw himself as the state's new political golden boy but was quickly outdone by the younger Clinton. The rivalry between them always was sharp and it reached the height of animosity in 1990 when Tucker challenged Clinton for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination and went out of his way to collect dirt on his opponent.

During the primary campaign, Arkansas state troopers L.D. Brown and Larry Patterson -- they were both on Clinton's security detail -- went to see Tucker about what he would do for the police if he were victorious in the battle for the governorship. Both were officers in the state police association. Tucker was "very direct and characteristically intense," according to Brown. He promised the police association the Earth and then demanded to know everything the two could tell him about Clinton's extramarital affairs. "He launches into this litany that he knows Clinton's done that, he's done this," according to Brown. "Tucker kept on asking, `What do you know about Clinton?'" Patterson confirms Brown's memory of that meeting and says he too told Tucker he couldn't oblige.

Tucker pursued other state troopers and is thought to have been successful in soliciting a lot of information about Clinton -- but about women and not business deals. And despite also being a business partner with McDougal -- the two, for example, were part-owners of the Bank of Kingston, Ark., when it lent Hillary Rodham Clinton $30,000 in 1980 -- McDougal apparently was careful in keeping his dealings with various political figures in the state tightly compartmentalized.