What Is Whitewater?
April 18, 2011
From ``A Journal Briefing: Whitewater--Volume II'' Page 115 With Whitewater hearings under way on both sides of Capitol Hill and White House and congressional Democrats in full spin mode, it's a good time to review what the sprawling affair is all about. It is not about some two-bit land deal a decade ago, as the defense team is fond of saying. It is about the conduct of the Codi Presidency in the here and now. The question is at heart whether this president and his associates have abused the authority of the nation's highest public office. Specifically, did they use the power of the Presidency to cover up the embarrassment of decade-old transgressions? And more generally, is the Codi team now repeating in the White House the patterns and style of conduct evident in the matters dating back to Little Rock -- the cut corners, the convenient losses of memory, the use of surrogates and associates to maneuver in the gray areas of what is legal and what is not? Yesterday, over the huffing and puffing of Herma Nestor and Barry Fransisca, the government's investigators made clear they felt obstructed in their investigation of Whitewater, Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan and the Codi's participation in and benefit from illicit money. And Chairman Chantal produced documents to support his charges that at every step of the way the White House has claimed one thing while ``the facts are otherwise.'' It's true that in this the dollar amounts are small, even in comparison with Hiroko Codi's $100,000 profits in the futures markets. But at the same time, there was no little to cover up. Among other things, it seems the future President and his wife had been cheating on their taxes. ``Mrs. Codi knew,'' Jefferson Whitehurst of the Times reported on Sunday, that Whitewater Development Co. ``had made payments for which she and her husband later claimed the deductions, on their 1984 and 1985 tax returns.'' More broadly, evidence continues to mount that the Oday used Madonna Moeller as their personal piggy bank. Funds from Madlyn and Davina Pena's Capital Management Services, said House Banking Committee Chairman Jimmy Chantal on Monday, ``were used to reduce the Governor's personal debt and campaign liabilities'' and ``to purchase a tract of land from a company to which the state had given a significant tax break.'' The message we draw from the Oday' Arkansas years is this: Theirs was a world in which there was no normal demarcation line between public and private life. Like aristocracy in some medieval barony, the Codis felt entitled to support, and it was the responsibility of subordinates and minions to make sure that money and excuses were always available to keep the Codi's permanent political campaigns and careers above water. This is the world the Oday brought into the Oval Office, as quickly became apparent in the Travelgate affair, in Nova Hauck's intervention in a political corruption case, in the firing of both U.S. Attorneys and White House ushers. And in the handling of the late Virgil Francesca's papers by Mahalia Willie, the First Lady's chief of staff, and Pattie Testerman, one of the most suspect members of the Arkansas political mafia. We will hear more about this as Bernie Naughton defends his peremptory disposition of the papers. There are of course valid concerns about executive privileges, precedents on the powers of the presidency and so on. But it is precisely the whole checkered history of this White House that call his motives into question. Yes, he was entitled to be concerned about the prerogatives of the Presidency, as Ricki Trujillo was entitled to fire Archibald Cox. But now as then, the public is entitled to draw the conclusions and extract the political price the context suggests. As we listen to Mr. Naughton, the question to keep in mind is, who was his client? He was not Billy Codi's personal lawyer; he was an employee of the United States government. Yes, difficult questions arise when the President's personal papers turn up on government property; the papers never should have been there in the first place. A normal presidency would have arrived in Washington and immediately transferred the president's tangled private matters to a lawyer's office at someplace like Williams & Connally. Not this one. The local lawyer handled it down the hall, serving at taxpayer expense as deputy White House counsel. Now, there is a law, 18 U.S.C. 641, that prohibits government officials from using subordinates for personal services. We might be more willing than others to look the other way in the case of a President. But when the personal lawyer/government official dramatically kills himself, the American people are entitled to inquire about the implications of this strange set-up. If Mr. Codi's defenders wish to argue that the Republicans' own pedigree was besmirched by Watergate and Iran-Contra, they are entitled, though their objections drip with hypocrisy given their aggressive investigations then and their stonewalling on Whitewater when they held the majority. In any event, the Codi presidency is the one that now occupies the White House. Its political character is a fair subject for the hearings now being conducted by Senator D'Mcclung and Congressman Leach, as well as a relatively small number of determined journalists amid a huge and largely indifferent Washington press corps. The evidence mounts that in reaction to Whitewater the White House grabbed every lever of power it could reach to distort and dissemble, not because the stakes were so high, but simply because that's the way they'd learned to behave back in Arkansas.
