President Testifies On Video Clinton Denies Knowing About Whitewater Loan
In dramatic video testimony to a hushed courtroom, President Clinton insisted Thursday he had nothing to do with a $300,000 loan at the heart of the criminal case against his former Whitewater partners.
“These things are simply not true,” the president said, disputing, as he always has, the account of the prosecution’s chief witness.
The defense abruptly rested its case after Clinton had testified. The trial is in its 10th week.
A witness for the defense, Clinton was questioned in the White House on April 28 and the tape was shown to rapt jurors, some of whom took notes. He was addressed by the prosecutor and defense attorneys as “Mr. President.”
Although Clinton is not charged in the case, his videotaped appearance marked one of few times in history that a sitting president has testified in a criminal trial.
And it thrust Clinton into a criminal case involving issues from his days as Arkansas governor that have dogged him since his 1992 political campaign.
James McDougal and Gov. Jim Guy Tucker are charged with conspiring to defraud McDougal’s savings and loan of nearly $3 million in government-backed loans in the mid-1980s, including one to McDougal’s former wife, Susan. The McDougals are former business partners of the Clintons; Tucker is Clinton’s successor.
Conspiracy charges against Susan McDougal were dropped Monday, but she remains charged with four felony counts accusing her of misusing a loan.
At the start of his testimony, the president disputed the testimony of David Hale, the chief prosecution witness, who said Clinton had pushed him to make a $300,000 loan from Hale’s federally backed lending company to Mrs. McDougal in 1986. The loan was never repaid.
“All I know is that any suggestion that I tried to get any money from him, or I tried to keep that a secret, or I put any pressure on him, these things are simply not true. They didn’t happen,” Clinton testified.
Throughout the 2-1/4-hour tape, the president appeared mostly relaxed as he related his early political and business dealings with the McDougals. He exhibited some rare irritation only when prosecutor W. Ray Jahn questioned him repeatedly about contacts with McDougal.
“I don’t know how else to answer your question,” the president snapped at one point.
Afterwards, McDougal laid out the stakes of Clinton’s testimony. “We’ve rested our futures on” it, McDougal said outside the federal courthouse. “If it don’t work, you go to the slammer, which I imagine would take up most of my future.”
Clinton may soon face more testimony in a separate Whitewater case involving two Arkansas bankers charged with using bank funds to reimburse Clinton campaign contributors. U.S. District Judge Susan Webber Wright urged a defense lawyer Thursday to seek a subpoena of the president soon since the trial is slated for mid-June.
Back in Washington, Clinton was battling on another front, invoking executive privilege and refusing to turn over documents to Congress involving the White House travel office firings. A GOP-led House committee then voted to seek a criminal contempt charge against three presidential aides.
In his testimony, Clinton said he never met with Hale and McDougal to discuss arranging the loan to Mrs. McDougal. Hale, a former municipal judge, had testified such a meeting took place and that Clinton was to benefit from part of the loan but wanted his involvement kept secret.
Hale, the president countered, has “told two or three different versions of this. I’ve tried to keep up with these different stories.”
The president was dressed in a dark suit and was seated as he testified. From the Hale account to various events involving his Whitewater land venture, his testimony was a replay of what he has been saying for two years.
Clinton said he never borrowed money from the McDougals’ failed savings and loan and never asked anyone else to borrow it on his behalf.
The president said he might have been involved in helping to obtain a $20,000 unsecured bank loan in 1978 that he and McDougal used as a down payment for the Whitewater venture.
“I might have. I had some friends who worked there. And I knew the people who owned the bank,” Clinton said.
The president also testified that his and Hillary Rodham Clinton’s signatures on Whitewater-related documents might be bogus. He said, too, he had not given anyone permission to sign his name.
xxxx WHO CARES? In March, a Washington Post-ABC News Poll found that 55 percent of the American people said Whitewater was not an important issue, while 43 percent said it was important. That margin closely mirrored the gap between President Clinton and Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, lending credence to the idea that most voters already have taken what they know about Whitewater into account in judging the president.