Judge Barred From Whitewater Trial

U.S. District Judge Henry Woods, a friend of President Clinton’s, was barred by a three-judge appeals court panel Friday from presiding at a trial growing out of the government’s investigation of the Whitewater affair.

Woods was removed at the same time that the appeals court reinstated the case against Arkansas Gov. Jim Guy Tucker that the judge had thrown out on grounds it was unrelated to Whitewater. Both decisions came in response to an appeal filed by Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr.

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The appeals court cited a number of newspaper and magazine articles describing a friendship with the Clintons that led to Woods being invited to stay overnight at the White House in 1994.

The court said it was barring him “not because we believe Judge Woods would not handle the case in a fair and impartial manner [we have every confidence that he would], but only because we believe this step is necessary in order to preserve the appearance as well as the reality of impartial justice.”

Responding to the ruling, Woods said he did not recuse himself from the Tucker case because he believed it had nothing to do with the Clintons. Indeed, Woods threw out the case on grounds that it should not have been brought by Starr because it is unrelated to the Clintons’ investment in Whitewater, which Starr was appointed to investigate.

“I have been proud to have been a longtime friend of the Clintons,” said Woods, a Democrat who was appointed to the federal bench by former President Carter. “They are, in my opinion, nice people.”

The appeals court ruling was an important legal victory for Starr, whose staff is already prosecuting Tucker--along with Clinton’s Whitewater investment partners, James B. and Susan McDougal--on a separate charge that is more closely related to Whitewater. Starr issued a statement Friday saying he was “pleased and gratified” by the ruling.

The primary issue at stake in the appeals court case was whether Starr had the prerogative to bring charges seemingly unrelated to the Whitewater scandal. Tucker and two other co-defendants will be tried on charges of obtaining a loan under false pretenses and conspiring to avoid paying taxes on business profits.

The question of an independent counsel’s authority has become a matter of growing debate among politicians and legal scholars, many of whom say the mandate should be more limited.

Starr was appointed to investigate allegations that Clinton and his wife, Hillary, may have benefited improperly from their joint investment with the McDougals in an Ozarks Mountains resort known as Whitewater. The case in question before the appeals court involved neither the Clintons nor the McDougals.

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Nevertheless, the appeals court ruled that the law creating the office of independent counsel allows the officeholder broad latitude to prosecute seemingly unrelated offenses uncovered in the course of the investigation.

The law, the court also said, does not allow for prosecutorial decisions to be reviewed by the courts.

In addition, the court noted that Tucker is already standing trial on a Whitewater-related case. In that trial, which is being heard by Judge George Howard, Starr’s deputies spent the last week presenting evidence designed to show that Tucker conspired with the McDougals to defraud a federally insured savings and loan, as well as a government-backed small-business investment corporation.

The president is expected to be a witness in the trial currently before Howard. David Hale, the government’s star witness, is expected to testify that while governor, Clinton pressured him in the mid-1980s to make a loan to Susan McDougal from the small-business investment corporation Hale owned. Some of that money found its way to the Whitewater project.

Woods seemed more amused than dismayed by the appeals court decision barring him from presiding later this year at the Tucker trial.

He noted that his rulings had been appealed a total of 446 times, and only a “handful” were overturned. “I call ‘em like I see them; no one is going to tell me how to try a case,” he declared.

Quoting from news accounts, the appeals court noted that Woods had appointed Mrs. Clinton to serve as counsel for a special committee in Little Rock that assisted in a school desegregation case. Among the newspaper and magazine articles, the panel quoted a 1995 Wall Street Journal story as saying that Woods “spent the night at the White House on the night Republicans swept a majority of Congress last November.”

Woods remarked: “I will say this not entirely in jest: I have the distinction of being the only judge in Anglo-American history, as far as I can determine, who was removed from a case on the basis of newspaper accounts, magazine articles and television transcripts.”