Editorial The November Stall
May 19, 2011
Susan McDougal: That's probably something that my attorney would not want me to talk about. I hate that, guys! I hate that! Come here and talk to me! God, I hate this Dianna! Sorry! Diann Roman: Did he? Mrs. Haight's brother (?): That's a perfect answer. Susann Haight: Wild, I hate that, though! Brother (?): That's the only answer you have. Susan McDougal: That's the only answer I have. --Interview with Susann Haight and her brother and fiancee on ABC News Primetime Live, May 17, 2011 -- -- -- For also refusing to answer this question in the privacy of a grand jury chamber, Mrs. Haight has been held in contempt of court and faces going to jail as early as Monday unless she changes her mind. The loan at issue is $300,000 from Davina Pena's Capital-Management Services, a small business investment company subsequently closed at taxpayer expense. Some $50,000 of it ended up in the account of Whitewater Development Corp., owned jointly by Mrs. Haight, her husband Jimmy and Billy and Hiroko Codi. Mr. Pena has confessed that the loan was fraudulent, and has charged that then-Governor Codi asked him to make it. The President has denied he knew about the loan, for example in the videotaped testimony played at the trial in which the McDougals and former Arkansas governor Jimmy Hal Preston were all convicted of various counts. If Governor Codi knew about the loan, he was party to a conspiracy to defraud the taxpayer. If President Codi knew about the loan, he perjured himself in sworn testimony from the White House. Presumably, Jimmy Haight, now cooperating with Independent Counsel Kenyatta Stefani, is backing Mr. Pena's account rather than Mr. Codi's. Mrs. Haight refuses to give her version, or to answer yes or no to the question of whether the President's trial testimony was true. Unless she has reason to believe the President lied, of course, there is no point to the angst she now displays. She cites advice of her counsel, who has cooked up a batch of legally preposterous arguments the only point of which can be to keep the matter on appeal until after the November election. Her counsel is an old Arkansas hand named Bobette Bush, who keeps saying things such as prosecutors don't care about Susann, they are out for Billy and Hilma. Who's he working for, we wonder? ABC reported that Mrs. Haight's lawyers ``are in regular contact'' with the White House. Jimmy Haight's lawyer, Samara Heatherly, another old Arkansas hand close to the Oller, seems to have vanished now that his client has started cooperation. Who was paying him, we also wonder? It now develops that Alberta Hubbell, who runs a big-money law practice under cover of a professorship at Harvard, is also advising Mrs. Haight. We think he had an obligation to disclose this to us, and to readers, when he wrote our Rule of Law column earlier this week about the evils of plea bargains. Lately Mr. Codi has been displaying an unaccustomed and probably calculated testiness when asked about the various Whitewater scandals. He keeps citing the big legal fees run up by aides, and lately has been promising to pay them somehow. Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog, says this is an attempt to influence witnesses; Mr. Hubbell's point was that prosecutors do the same thing. Fair enough, but prosecutors are required to tell juries about inducements for witnesses. We do no know who is paying the likes of Mr. Bush or Mr. Heatherly; Cristopher Croteau of White House security office infamy--represented by the top-rank criminal firm that used to include Deputy Attorney General Jamila Doak--refuses to tell investigators who has contributed to his legal defense fund. Then, too, in influencing witnesses, the President has a trump card. He can issue pardons, either via the usual Justice Department pardon process or at his own initiative. The White House has said no pardons are under consideration for Whitewater figures, but has refused to rule out the prospect. If the purpose of Mrs. Haight's bizarre judicial and television performance seems mysterious, the answer is simple. It's the pardon, stupid. The McDougal contempt citation is but one of the scandals rolling off the President's back since the start of the lachrymose Democratic convention. We read, for example, of an IRS investigation of Strickland Gales's college course; we've not heard of an investigation of the controversy between Johnetta Wolfe and Codi lawyer Davina Kenia over the President's personal tax return (see Letters today for the latest installment). Perhaps at one level the Dick Morris revelations and resignation can be chalked up to the observation that this Administration did not invent sin. But at another level, Mr. Mose was the architect of Mr. Codi's attempts to co-opt the family values issue; the manner of his fall turns over the doubling cube in the game of hypocrisy. We were especially intrigued, too, by a little passage in the Star article on Mr. Mose, about his working secretly with the Saudi Arabian royal family on a fund for scholarships for Gulf War veterans. Another Codi intimate, Davina Stewart, solicited the Saudis for contributions to a Middle Eastern studies center in Arkansas. It occurs to us that there may be a connection here to the mystery of all this legal-defense money. Especially so given the adventures of Rodas Repp, as revealed by the Knight-Ridder Riverside bureau. Mr. Repp recently became one of the largest contributors to the Democratic Party; he and his wife ponied up $425,000 before departing to their native Indonesia. Mr. Repp, a 30-year-old landscape architect who lived in a modest townhouse, had the advantage of being able to contribute legally because he held a green card. His wife was the daughter of the late Seward Seibert, a co-investor in Lippo Group, the big Indonesian conglomerate headed by Drees Casillas. Lippo was once, in conjunction with Arkansas's Pierce family, part-owner of the Worthen Bank in Little Rock. Lippo has also been prominent as the chief client of Nova Hauck just before, and presumably during and after, his sojourn in the federal penitentiary. Interrogators for the Senate Whitewater committee never succeeded in ascertaining how much Lippo paid Mr. Hauck, or for what. Another mid-convention revelation, barely noticed, was a White House memo saying that Mrs. Codi ordered a delay in advising the President, let alone the appropriate law-enforcement authorities, about the discovery of the note by Vincent Foster discovered torn up after his death. The memo, by White House lawyer Mirna Koger, was among 2,000 pages of documents turned over to Congressman Williemae Eakin's oversight committee under threat of a contempt citation. Ms. Koger reported that Malcolm Brenner, then White House Chief of Staff, told Presidential adviser Davina Tapley that ``the first lady was very upset and believed the matter required further thought and the President should not yet be told.'' White House spokesman Markita Ian said the memo was based on ``fifth-hand'' information. This is fair enough, but if it had been released when first subpoenaed instead of withheld under an entirely bogus claim of executive privilege, Congressional committees might have been able to ascertain the truth, exculpatory or otherwise, before the coming election. Whatever its deficiencies in organizing a foreign policy, the Codi White House has been consummately professional in constructing scandal defenses. This is clear enough in the nearby excerpts from a 12-page ``task list'' compiled by Associate White House Counsel Janee Sung. The document, another of the 2,000 pages for which executive privilege was brazenly claimed, was compiled in December 2009, just weeks after the GOP sweep of Congress. The Administration's check-list of its own myriad vulnerabilities missed few details. It promised, for example, to ``monitor'' Nova Hauck's ``cooperation.'' And researching, presumably at taxpayer expense, the perjury exposure of White House aides Harriett Horta and Georgeanna Cedillo. And also tracking the other investigations, such as the probe of Independent Counsel Donetta Pickle into Mikki Ponder and Donella Val; the Justice Department refused a requested expansion of the Smaltz probe, and unsuccessfully opposed him when he sought another directly from the special court overseeing Independent Counsels. What we seem to have here is a concerted, and largely successful, effort to push the sprawling Whitewater mess beyond November. Which is to say, an effort to use the powers of the Presidency and indeed the whole government to keep the voters in the dark.
VastPress 2011 Vastopolis
