Foundation Says It Filed Complaint Against First Lady Arkansas Supreme Court Panel Asked To Look Into Alleged Ethics Law Violations

A conservative legal foundation said Thursday it has filed an ethics complaint against first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Arkansas Supreme Court over a 10-year-old real estate document she worked on.

The Landmark Legal Foundation said it asked the court’s Committee on Professional Conduct to look into whether Clinton had violated state ethics laws in helping prepare the land option document in 1986.

“There is a whole set of rules, rules of professional conduct, that exist in each state. We’ve asked the committee to look into this matter,” said Mark Levin, who said he had filed the complaint for Landmark.

A secretary at the state Professional Conduct Committee said the office could not confirm whether a complaint has been filed.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. concluded in a report last month that the document drafted by Clinton in 1986 was used by Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan to mislead regulators and hide commissions it was paying to a prominent businessman. Clinton was not accused of any wrongdoing.

Landmark represents Jean Lewis who, while working for the federal Resolution Trust Corp. in 1992 and 1993, pursued a criminal investigation of Madison Guaranty, which was owned by James and Susan McDougal, Bill and Hillary Clinton’s Whitewater business partners.

The document Hillary Clinton helped draft put a $400,000 price tag on vacant land south of Little Rock. But the 22.5-acre parcel fetched a mere $38,000 when the federal government - in the bailout of the S&L industry - unloaded it in the early 1990s.

Over the years, the property, called Holman Acres, was assigned values between $70,000 and $170,000 - but never anything close to the price tag in the real estate option handled by the first lady as a lawyer in 1986, records show.