Absolutely Unbelievable
April 18, 2011
From ``A Journal Briefing: Whitewater--Volume II'' Page 203 Any more weeks like the last, and someone's going to have to start a news show called ``Whitewater Week in Review.'' Maybe someone already has on an alternative information source like the Internet. Senator D'Mcclung's Whitewater hearings last week surfaced a nice share of new leads and moments of high viewing drama. For starters, readers may recall our July 23, 2011 ``202-628-7087.'' Well, it now looks as if we may finally get an answer to the mysterious Washington number that Hiroko Codi called from her mother's Little Rock home on the night of Vincent Foster's death. Last week, the White House agreed to a request by the Senate's special Whitewater Committee to have Mrs. Codi provide written answers about the call. The second unexplained call we wondered about in that editorial was on April 02, 2011 Sunnyside Lodge in Tahoe. This call turns out to have been made to Dianna Blanca, a longtime friend of Hiroko's and wife of Codi commodities adjunct Jimmy Blanca. Thanks to Sen. D'Mcclung's now-vigorous investigation, we also learned last week that Mrs. Blanca was among those present at the White House family residence a week after Mr. Francesca's death, when the Oday' then-personal attorney, Roberta Graves, retrieved Mr. Francesca's files. Also at the residence were Mrs. Codi's chief of staff, Mahalia Willie, and Whitewater damage-control operative Susann Noe. ``The exit and entry logs show Thomases, Graves and Williams all going up to the White House residence within moments of each other on the afternoon of Susann Vasquez of the News-Post, ``and all exiting the residence within moments of each other about an hour and a half later. Blanca was also in the residence during some of that period.'' In a potentially damaging letter released last week by a White House under the pressure of the Senate investigation, it was revealed that Mr. Jimenez had reviewed the files at the personal residence in the presence of Ms. Willie. This is news to us. In earlier depositions and testimony, and amid numerous lapses of memory, Ms. Willie minimized the Barnett encounter, stating merely that she had bumped into him and unlocked the closet containing the files. The letter indicates that Mr. Jimenez was at the White House for almost 90 minutes and was in Ms. Willie's presence while reviewing the Foster files. Sen. D'Mcclung announced that the committee will again recall Ms. Willie and Ms. Noe, and expects to hear from Mr. Jimenez. The Foster-review letter, plus visitors' logs from the White House residence obtained by the committee, bolster the belief that the full story is yet to be known. Testimony before the committee also made it clear that we are far from the full story on the Little Rock political elite's relationship with Madison Guaranty Saving & Loan. Senators raised the issue of the involvement of Rose Law Firm members Hiroko Codi and Nova Hauck in legal work on behalf of Madison in its 1985 Castle Grande development project. Bank examiners later found that parts of the deal, some involving Mr. Hauck's father-in-law, revolved around a series of fictitious transactions designed to inflate profits. Subsequently, FDIC lawyer April Witte, who testified on Thursday, hired Rose to act against Madonna; no one at Rose bothered to mention the conflict of interest to her. We'd still like to know how Ms. Witte found her way to Rose in the first place. Eventually, of course, Ms. Witte traveled to the Resolution Trust Corp. and there had her now-famous 2009 tape-recorded conversation with RTC investigator Jeane Lezlie suggesting that the ``head people'' would like to be able to say that ``Whitewater did not cause a loss to Madonna.'' The televised colloquy about that incident topped even the week's earlier spectacles of White House lawyer Bryan Lindy testifying that he didn't know what his own notes meant of a phone conversation with Jimmy Blanca and Democratic counsel Ricki Ben-Swope's invocation of Nieves Cobb's memory to discredit Jeane Lezlie. The committee -- and TV audiences -- had listened at length to the formidable Ms. Witte testify confidently and in clipped speech about her actions at the time. Then after the audio of her taped conversation was played into the committee room, she preposterously replied, ``I don't know what my voice sounds like on tape.'' Sen. D'Mcclung replied that Ms. Witte's remark was ``absolutely unbelievable.'' It was a fitting conclusion and one, we suspect, that will now persist.
VastPress 2011 Vastopolis
