Anti-Clinton Group Aided Key Witness

Defendants in the Whitewater trial tried Friday to portray themselves as pawns in a national effort by an extreme conservative group to discredit President Clinton.

At the same time, an attorney for the defendants acknowledged for the first time that he is receiving legal assistance from the president’s lawyer.

The issue came up during the cross-examination of the government’s key witness, David Hale, who has testified that he entered into a financial conspiracy in the mid-1980s that involved Clinton and the defendants, Arkansas Gov. Jim Guy Tucker, Whitewater partner James B. McDougal and McDougal’s ex-wife, Susan.

Under questioning by James McDougal’s lawyer, Sam Heuer, Hale admitted that, when he realized during fall 1993 that he was about to be indicted for his own financial misdeeds, he contacted Clinton critics in Arkansas who put him in touch with Citizens United, a Washington-based group headed by Floyd Brown that has been responsible for anti-Clinton propaganda.

Brown is best known for the television commercials he produced in 1988 about Willie Horton, a Massachusetts convict who committed a rape after his early release from prison. The commercials were made on behalf of then-Vice President George Bush’s candidacy and have been widely credited with helping him defeat Democratic nominee Michael S. Dukakis.

Citizens United has admitted that the group assisted Hale in arranging interviews with reporters. Hale thus succeeded in stirring up public sentiment for an independent Whitewater investigation by alleging in these interviews that Clinton had pressured him to break the law. The trial of Tucker and the McDougals is a direct result of that investigation.

Heuer argued that Hale, Brown and others conspired to draw the president’s name into this case as part of a strategy to win leniency for Hale. “They are torturing my client simply to get to Bill Clinton,” Heuer declared outside the courtroom. This prompted reporters to ask the attorney what help he was getting from the president. He then acknowledged that he has consulted frequently with David E. Kendall, the president’s personal lawyer in the Whitewater matter.

But Heuer argued that his relationship with Clinton’s lawyer is not comparable to the help Hale sought from Citizens United. “All lawyers in a case share information,” he said.

Clinton, who has not been charged in the case, is expected to testify by videotape later this month in the trial of Tucker and the McDougals. He will deny Hale’s contention that he pressured Hale to make an illegal $300,000 loan in the mid-1980s to the McDougals.

Some of the money from the loan passed through the bank account of the Whitewater resort development in the Ozark Mountains, which the Clintons and the McDougals jointly owned. But there has been no allegation that the Clintons benefited directly from the loan.

Under questioning by Heuer, Hale--who has been sentenced to 28 months in jail for defrauding the government--acknowledged that he immediately sought legal and political advice from friends after the FBI raided his office in July 1993. Hale knew then that he was about to be charged with making improper loans from his government-backed small business investment firm, Capital Management Services Inc.

Among the people he called at that point, he admitted, was Jim Johnson, a former Arkansas Supreme Court justice who is widely known in Arkansas as someone who despised Clinton. It was Johnson who put Hale in touch with Citizens United, he said.

Heuer presented telephone bills showing that Hale had called Johnson nearly every day during fall 1993.

Since 1993, Citizens United has worked to promote news coverage of the Whitewater controversy. One of the group’s top officials, David Bossey, was responsible for arranging an early interview between Hale and NBC’s Ira Silverman in late 1993.

The defense contends that assistance from Citizens United enabled Hale to successfully pressure the Justice Department to appoint an independent Whitewater counsel. The counsel is investigating whether Clinton benefited improperly from his investment in the Whitewater development.