Holding court in Starr's chamber

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Feb 19, 1996 | by Jamie Dettmer, | Stephen Goode

When Hillary Rodham Clinton walked into the federal courthouse on Jan. 26 to testify before Starr's panel of 23 grand jurors, the initiative was snatched from her and the first lady was just an ordinary citizen.

The media talk shows had an immediate question when the explosive news emerged belatedly that Hillary Rodham Clinton had been subpoenaed by Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr to appear before his Washington-based grand jury - along with four White House aides and her private lawyer. The question was: Do think the first lady should testify?

As if she had any choice. And that's what worried the White House. Until Starr served his front-page-grabbing subpoena on the first lady, the Clintons may not have been in charge of their Whitewater destiny but they had been able to dictate when and where they would talk about their Arkansas past.

Since 1992, Mrs. Clinton's venues of choice have been carefully planned magazine or television interviews. Only at the famous 1994 "pink press conference" did she open herself up to questions on Whitewater from the general press - and even then she selected which journalists to answer. Those she chose tended to be the nonexperts among the assembled media corps, critics say.

And Starr - prompted by "appropriate deference," according to friends - was cautious until last month about doing anything that would rock the political boat for the first family. Instead of calling either before the grand jury, he trailed with his senior staff to the White House on three occasions to conduct informal interviews with the Clintons under oath. That all changed when Starr decided the White House was abusing his kid-glove treatment, say sources close to the Whitewater inquiry. Irritated by the sudden and mysterious "discovery" in the White House of documents he long had sought, including the first lady's Rose Law Firm billing records from the mid-1980s, the former Bush solicitor general got the Clintons' attention by demanding a grand-jury appearance. "Because of the peculiar circumstances of the discovery of her billing records, I think he felt the time had come for more routine treatment"' says Joe diGenova, a former federal prosecutor and a close friend of Starr. "Prior to that he had been exceptionally deferential to the first family by having them interviewed at the White House."

When Mrs. Clinton walked into Washington's concrete slab of a federal courthouse on Jan. 26 to testify before Starr's panel of 23 grand jurors, the initiative was snatched away from her, and the first lady was just an ordinary citizen stripped of her government aides, highly paid attorneys and other trappings of White House power.

The full details of her testimony in the same courthouse that figured prominently in both the Watergate and Iran-Contra scandals remain secret - grand jurors are forbidden to leak case information - but Start sources say the first lady was questioned about the arguably convenient disappearance and then abrupt reappearance of her long-subpoenaed billing records and was asked about her general work on behalf of Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan, the now-defunct Arkansas thrift once owned by Clinton business partner James B. McDougal. Starr's prosecutors also asked about a Madison spin-off - the 1,000-acre development at Castle Grande, south of Little Rock, a property speculation that federal regulators have tagged bogus and possibly illegal. Nothing dramatic or earth-shattering happened inside the windowless and tightly sealed grand-jury room and Mrs. Clinton kept firmly to her public claims that she saw no evil, heard no evil and committed no evil, say Whitewater-inquiry sources. The questioning, primarily conducted by Start himself, was phrased softly and marked by Southern courtesy.

The first lady's grand-jury testimony never was likely to be a make-or-break test for her as she is, after all, an experienced attorney trained at prestigious Wellesley College and the Yale Law School. Starr did not anticipate trouble. Whitewater independent-counsel sources tell Insight they never planned for a gun-slinging high-noon confrontation between themselves and Clinton. That was not the object of the exercise nor, they say, will it mark the end of the first lady's relationship with this particular grand jury

What is significant is that Starr broke the pattern he had established for his dealings with the first family - a departure that thrust him into a full-scale political firestorm, one every bit as fierce as those that periodically punctuated Lawrence Walsh's Iran-Contra investigation into the Reagan administration's alleged guns-for-hostages deal. Shocked Democratic lawmakers and Clinton-supporting seers of the media maintained a creeping barrage of criticism against Starr from the moment the subpoena was announced, accusing him of partisanship to please Republicans as part of a bid to land a Supreme Court appointment in a future GOP administration.

Starr's motives have been subject to debate ever since he was selected to replace Robert Fiske, the first Whitewater independent counsel. His critics have pointed to his stint in the Justice Department under Ronald Reagan, as solicitor general in the Bush administration, and his long involvement in Republican politics - he came close last year to challenging Oliver North for the GOP nomination to contest a Senate seat from Virginia - as evidence of an inherent lack of impartiality. When Starr was appointed independent counsel, Democratic Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan questioned whether he could be fair given his past "highly visible partisan politics." And a congressional brouhaha erupted when it was discovered that just two weeks before Starr's selection, D.C. Circuit Judge David Sentelle - who was part of the judicial panel that appointed Starr - had lunch with two Republican senators who had been pushing for Fiske's removal. Democratic-led attacks attempting to cast doubt on Starr's independence have ebbed and flowed as the Whitewater inquiry has progressed.