McDougal Prosecutor Has to Share Transcripts

In a dramatic development that brought tears to Susan McDougal’s eyes and her embezzlement trial to the brink of meltdown, a judge Wednesday sternly ordered a Los Angeles prosecutor to hand over hundreds of pages of federal grand jury transcripts that he had kept from the defense.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Jeffrey Semow protested vigorously but then immediately turned over previously prepared copies of the transcripts.

Working to avert a mistrial, Superior Court Judge Leslie W. Light ruled that McDougal’s defense was entitled to the transcripts because it had asked for them more than a year ago.

At the time, neither side had been able to obtain them because of strict federal grand jury secrecy rules.

The judge Wednesday grilled Semow at length, demanding to know how, when and from whom he had obtained the transcripts of testimony by two key defense witnesses and McDougal’s former husband.

The prosecutor reddened and scratched his palm and chin under the questioning, saying he could not recall with any precision. He said he pursued his request for transcripts with federal prosecutors in Los Angeles, where the grand jury was convened, and finally received them “a month or two ago” through the mail.

He said he believed that he was under no obligation to share them with the defense because they did not include evidence pointing toward McDougal’s innocence.

Defense attorney Mark Geragos was given less than 24 hours to read and digest the nearly 1,000 pages of grand jury testimony by McDougal’s former husband, her former assistant, and her fiance, who took the stand in her defense Tuesday.

Geragos said the circumstances under which the prosecutor obtained, then withheld, the transcripts “don’t pass the smell test.” The defense lawyer expects to formally request a mistrial in a written motion today.

The judge said the jury is growing impatient with delays in the trial, which already has lasted two weeks longer than anticipated.

Once again, Wednesday’s controversy left the jurors cooling their heels outside the courtroom. It was the third day this week that they had waited while the lawyers accused each other of grandstanding and underhandedness. In all, the jurors have heard less than three hours of testimony this week.

McDougal is accused of embezzling and evading taxes on $150,000 during the three years she worked as an assistant, and later as a bookkeeper, for conductor Zubin Mehta and his wife, Nancy.

The charges were filed months before the Whitewater probe was launched, and are unrelated to that investigation, which resulted in fraud convictions against McDougal and her former husband, James, who died in prison this year.

He turned prosecution witness before his death. But Susan McDougal spent 18 months in jail after refusing to talk about business dealings with President Clinton in the failed Arkansas land deal.

For the embezzlement trial, Light has declared his courtroom a Whitewater-free zone, forbidding any mention before the jury of independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr or his investigation of the McDougals and the president.

But the Whitewater connection has drawn clusters of conspiracy theorists to the courtroom, and they got an earful Wednesday.

Visibly angry, defense attorney Geragos accused Semow of misconduct for “sitting on” the grand jury transcripts. He suggested that local prosecutors were “carrying water” for Starr’s office to make life difficult for McDougal after she refused to cooperate in the Whitewater investigation.

He pointed out that a two-count case filed in 1994 had grown to 12 counts, including state tax charges. On the eve of her preliminary hearing in the Mehta case, McDougal received a letter informing her that she was a target of the federal grand jury investigation, he added.

Geragos accused prosecutors of using the grand jury to investigate his client’s tax status while the embezzlement case was pending. He said prosecutors launched an “illegal prosecutorial invasion of the defense camp” and convened “a federal grand jury to pin down witnesses’ stories and then play ‘hide the ball.’ ”

The defense attorney protested, “I’m telling you, judge, this is an absolute affront to the criminal justice system.”

But Semow denied any connection with Starr’s office and said he had conducted himself ethically. “The notion that there’s some sort of conspiracy afoot here is the result of a temper tantrum,” he said.

The transcripts in question include 450 pages of grand jury testimony by McDougal’s fiance, Eugene “Pat” Harris, who testified Tuesday for the defense. An additional 200 pages or so involve testimony by a former Mehta employee named Monique Graham, who had been scheduled to testify Wednesday. A third transcript includes the testimony of James McDougal.

Testimony is scheduled to resume today.