“I didn’t think the Clintons should go to Washington tied in to McDougal,” Blair told NEWSWEEK last week. Blair, the general counsel for Tyson Foods, the giant Arkansas chicken firm, is one of Bill and Hillary’s best friends. He is the man who helped Hillary Clinton make a killing in the cattle-futures market in 1979. As he told NEWSWEEK, Blair had tried once before to help contain the McDougal problem. That was in the winter of ‘92, when Clinton’s campaign was underway and MeDougal was making damaging comments to the press. Blair paid him a call. “Shut up,” Blair says he told McDougal, adding that he could endanger the campaign.
But this time there was a problem. McDougal, who had escaped conviction in the demise of his S&L, was apparently broke. So Blair loaned McDougal the money–$1,000–to buy the Clintons’ shares. On Dec. 22, 1992, with Vince Foster handling the transaction, the deal was done. Blair says he never told the Clintons about lending McDougal the money. He also says McDougal never paid him back.
Blair’s loan, never before disclosed publicly, is one more sign of the Little Rock crowd’s strange sensitivity about the scandal that will not die. Aides to Sen. Alfonse D’Amato, the GOP’s point man on the Whitewater affair, say the Clintons may have violated financial-disclosure laws by failing to report Blair’s $1,000 loan as a gift to them. “This was really Blair giving a gift to the Clintons,” one D’Amato staffer said. But David Kendall, the Clintons’ lawyer, says that the Clintons disclosed the sale and that D’Amato’s staff is wrong. “The money came from McDougal,” Kendall said. “Legally, there’s no issue.”
But the matter gets curiouser. Notes taken during a meeting in Kendall’s office on Nov. 5, 1993, contain cryptic references to Blair. One of the notes, taken by the then White House lawyer William Kennedy, says, “Blair could have knowledge. Could be source of money to allow McD to purchase stock.” The timing is significant: Whitewater had just exploded on the front pages, and Clinton’s legal advisers were trying to get up to speed. One person who could have helped was Foster–but Foster had committed suicide four months earlier. To judge by evidence D’Amato’s committee has already gathered, his death threw the Clintonites into something close to panic. D’Amato’s theory, still unproven, is that they feared damaging disclosures from Foster’s files on Whitewater–and potentially even more embarrassing details about Hillary Clinton’s legal work as a partner in the Rose Law Firm for Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan, MeDougal’s failed thrift.
Indeed, D’Amato’s committee has recently uncovered more evidence about Mrs. Clinton’s relationship with Madison. Hillary Clinton represented Madison before state regulators appointed by her husband. She has stated under oath that her involvement with Madison as a client was “minimal.” But newly discovered notes taken in 1992 by Susan Thomases, Mrs. Clinton’s confidante, state that Mrs. Clinton had “numerous conferences” with McDougal and another Madison executive. Even more puzzling, the Rose Law Firm’s billing records–records that could clear up the con-fusion-have vanished. (The firm’s managing partner says any removal of files was unauthorized.)
During the ‘92 campaign–and since–Clinton’s aides have attempted to down-play the connection between Bill, Hillary and Jim. David Kendall dismisses this line of inquiry as “the same tired, tedious charges.” Still, the emerging record suggests that the Clintons’ friends were worried about something–and the behavior of the First Couple’s advisers, both before and after Foster’s suicide, looks like a bungled cover-up. Did Madison benefit from the fact that its lawyer was the governor’s wife? Did anyone, then or Later, act to conceal evidence of impropriety? Realists on D’Amato’s staff say we may never know the answers–but the appearance of a cover-up is what keeps the story alive.
