McDougal Jury Sees Tape of ’96 ABC Interview

Kenneth W. Starr’s prosecutors sought Monday to challenge key testimony by Susan McDougal, showing jurors a 1996 TV interview in which she made no mention of allegations that she had been pressured to say she had an affair with Bill Clinton.

As McDougal’s Whitewater-related criminal contempt trial entered its fourth week, prosecutors rolled a videotape for a jury in federal court.

Nowhere in the several hours of outtakes from the ABC interview did McDougal refer in any way to the most sensational testimony so far in her trial. She testified that her ex-husband, who has since died, asked her in 1996 around the time of the ABC interview to say that she had an affair with Clinton as a way of helping Starr’s office “get” Clinton before the presidential election. James B. McDougal had alleged that his former wife had an affair with Clinton during the 1980s.

After playing the videotape, prosecutor Mark Barrett got McDougal to admit to differences between her 1996 interview with ABC and what she says now. She conceded she made no mention in the TV interview of her ex-husband’s trying out various fabricated stories with her that he was planning to tell Starr’s office. She also conceded that in the TV interview she didn’t mention being pressured by her ex-husband to say she’d had an affair with Clinton.

Last week, she testified James McDougal had tried out various scenarios implicating President Clinton in a fraudulent $300,000 loan. She says she never discussed the loan with Clinton.

In the ABC interview, McDougal referred to the possibility that she would be talking with prosecutors soon, even though she refused just five days later to answer any of their questions. In one outtake, she turned to an ABC producer off-camera and said that First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton’s role in a real estate development called Castle Grande near Little Rock was the kind of topic that she could talk about with prosecutors, but not on television.

McDougal told ABC she had been subpoenaed by Starr’s office, but she had not decided whether to answer the questions. She said she feared Starr’s office would retaliate against her if she did not give evidence that implicated the Clintons in wrongdoing.

Riddled with fraudulent transactions, Castle Grande failed at a cost to the McDougals’ federally insured savings and loan of nearly $4 million. Mrs. Clinton prepared a real estate document that was used to deceive federal regulators who were looking into sham transactions at Castle Grande, prosecutors say.