Real Estate and Blue Dresses Part 2

The same day special counsel Robert Fiske released his report, President Clinton signed into law a bill to reauthorize the use of independent counsels, which had first been created after the whole Nixon-Watergate shitshow.  The difference was that while special counsels were named by the Attorney General, an independent counsel was appointed by a panel of judges.  The change in the law saw the ousting of Fiske and the appointment of Ken Starr, a former Solicitor General and one time candidate for the Supreme Court.  Where Fiske had been rather lukewarm as an investigator, Starr was if anything overzealous.  Upon taking up the position, Starr did away with all of Fiske’s conclusions, even re-opening the investigation into whether or not Vince Foster had committed suicide, even though the police stated that he mostly certainly had killed himself.

Right before the appointment of Starr, news of a leak to the media forced the White House to admit that Foster’s legal documents had been kept in their personal residence for five days before being handed over to the Clintons’ personal lawyer.  This was pretty big news considering that a number of documents, mostly related to Hillary’s time working as legal counsel for Jim McDougal’s bank, were reported to be missing from those handed over to investigators.  Unlike his predecessor, Starr saw Jim McDougal and his convoluted loans as the main avenue to proving any wrongdoing.  Targeting various people in Arkansas who had worked with McDougal, he began building a case which he hoped would force both Jim and Sue McDougal, who had since divorced, to turn state’s evidence and support David Hale’s claims that Bill Clinton used his political power as governor to solicit and coerce favors beneficial to his personal and campaign finances.  Within a little over half a year, Starr managed to get four people to plead guilty on various charges and to agree to cooperate with the investigation on the promise of lesser charges.  One of these was a banker who admitted to embezzling funds for Clinton’s political campaign, though no proof that the president knew about it could be found.  Another was Webster Hubbell, though he proved to be less cooperative than he had promised in his plea deal.

While Starr went after McDougal’s associates, the Republicans surged in the 1994 election, giving them control of the House of Representatives and Senate for the first time since 1955.  Both the newly Republican House and Senate soon after launched new investigations into Whitewater and other scandals, not trusting the results of Democratic Congressional led investigations the previous year.  The investigations quickly broke down into partisan bickering, but they did manage to keep Whitewater in the news cycle.  As political hissing filled the news, Starr continued his investigation, indicting Jim and Sue McDougal for bank fraud in August of 1995.  Starr’s ultimate goal was to force the Clintons to testify as witnesses in the McDougal cases, which would create on the record testimony which could lead to possible charges of perjury if it was proven that they were lying.  However, legal wrangling on whether or not the president could be called as a witness slowed everything down.  This stalemate ended in April of 1996, with the president forced by a court order to testify.  A month later, both McDougals were convicted.  Soon after, the president was forced to testify again in July, this time in the trial of two of Jim McDougal’s associates.

During this same period, Hillary was running into her own problems.  Under increasing pressure, she finally produced the missing documents pertaining to her time with the Rose Law Firm, claiming that apparently they had just been sitting on an end table in the White House the whole time.  This strange claim resulted in her being subpoenaed by Starr, the first time a First Lady had ever been subpoenaed.  Starr felt like he was getting close.  Though both Clintons continued to swear complete ignorance of the doings of their associates, both were now liable for perjury if it could be proven.  

With both McDougals convicted, but still waiting to be sentenced, Starr offered leniency in return for testimony.  Jim McDougal turned almost immediately, making grand claims that both Clintons had been involved in various schemes that benefited them both directly and indirectly.  He also claimed that he had been offered a pardon to keep his mouth shut.  Unfortunately, Jim McDougal was far from the perfect witness.  Aside from making many erratic and contradictory statements, none of his claims could be fully connected to the ones earlier made by Hale.  This left Sue McDougal as the key to Starr’s case, since her testimony could verify that of her ex-husbands.  However, Sue McDougal proved to be a harder nut to crack.  Not only did she refuse to testify, but also publicly claimed that Jim had told her to lie about the Clintons to get a more lenient sentence.  In an attempt to break Sue McDougal, Starr stacked more charges against her and had her transferred from one prison to another for over a year.  None of it worked.

As time dragged on, public interest in the Whitewater case began to wane.  The whole thing was complicated as hell with all sorts of strange legal nuances which did little to capture the public imagination.  In November of 1996, Bill Clinton was elected president for a second term.  In April of 1997, facing imminent news reports, the White House was forced to admit that aides had funneled money to the defense fund of Webster Hubbell.  Despite this, Starr’s investigation continued to lose steam throughout the rest of the year.  Sue McDougal either would not break or was telling the truth.  Though Starr drafted an impeachment referral that fall, he never released it.  Instead he only announced that investigations had shown that Vince Foster had most definitely committed suicide.  In March of 1998, Jim McDougal died in prison of a heart attack.  The Whitewater investigation was dead in the water, but it didn’t matter, Starr was making one last ditch effort in a different direction.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ken_Starr_testifying_before_the_House_Judiciary_Committee.jpg

Real Estate and Blue Dresses Part 1

On January 20, 1993, Bill Clinton was inaugurated the 42nd president of the United States and probably almost immediately began to partially wish that he had never taken the job.  A resurgent Republican delegation in Congress, led by Representative Newt Gingrich, unhappy with losing the presidency for the first time in twelve years, was all sorts of hot and heavy about knocking Clinton down a notch or two.  To their way of thinking, Clinton was a political outsider who had all sorts of questionable skeletons in his closet.  The Clinton administration did little to dispel this notion. Within months of taking power, the general bungling of several key Clinton officials caused a multitude of scandals, leading to the Republicans calling for and getting a multitude of investigations, to which the administration responded by being as completely unhelpful as humanly possible.  It was a completely ridiculous shit show on all sides of the equation.  One of the largest and most remembered of these investigations was Whitewater.

In the 1980’s, Bill and Hillary Clinton and their shifty as shit friends Jim and Susan McDougal invested in a real estate venture called Whitewater.  The McDougals were long time associates of the Clintons.  Jim McDougal often held fundraisers to help Bill’s political career and he also retained the services of the Rose Law Firm, of which Hillary Clinton was a partner.  Unfortunately, the deal didn’t quite work out, leading to a desperate Jim McDougal trying to cover the partnership’s losses via an illegal government loan to his wife, which he coerced out of another shifty as shit associate named David Hale.  The loan failed to save Whitewater, but this was just one of many shady deals that Jim McDougal was involved in, pretty much all of them including convoluted and illegal loans from a bank owned by Jim to various shady folks and ventures.  Jim’s bank eventually went insolvent in 1989, mostly due to the sheer volume of crazy/illegal schemes, which promptly resulted in a wide ranging investigation.

While all of this was going on, Bill Clinton did quite well for himself, serving first as the governor of Arkansas and then getting himself elected president.  Aside from some brief headlines during the Democratic primaries, Whitewater was not even mentioned during the campaign.  However, the investigation into Jim McDougal’s failed bank kept chugging right along, eventually resulting in a referral to the Justice Department in the fall of 1992.  The referral stated the need for a criminal investigation against the McDougals and naming the Clintons as possible witnesses and/or beneficiaries of illegal actions.  The referral pretty much just sat ignored on a desk for a year, causing the investigators to send a second referral in the fall of 1993.  The Justice Department responded to this second referral by reviewing and rejecting the first referral, declaring it to be without merit.

Some people must not have been too happy with this chain of events, because soon after news of the rejection leaked to the press.  This raised some eyebrows since several of the rejecting officials had close ties to the Clintons, chief amongst them Webster Hubbell, who had worked with Hillary in the Rose Law Firm.  The eyebrows went even higher when David Hale, recently indicted for a completely unrelated charge of insurance fraud, publicly claimed that Bill Clinton had used his position as governor to coerce Hale into giving Susan McDougal the illegal loan to try and save Whitewater.  The Republicans went wild, screaming about a possible cover up.  At first the Democrats called it a bunch of malarkey, but then the press struck again.  Earlier that summer, the Deputy White House Counsel, Vince Foster, had committed suicide, after which members of the White House staff had blocked investigators from entering his office for two days, during which time sources claimed a large number of Whitewater and other legal files had been removed.  The news overwhelmed what resistance the Democrats could muster, and at the start of 1994, Robert Fiske, a private attorney, was appointed special counsel to investigate.

Robert Fiske pretty much sat right in a shit sandwich and pretty quickly got in over his head.  Though a subpoena had resulted in the Whitewater files from Foster’s office being handed over by the Clintons’ personal lawyers, rumors were claiming that the documents had been in the possession of the Clintons themselves for several days.  An idea which in turn sparked speculation that Vince Foster had actually been murdered.  Not having many leads, Fiske chose to focus on claims that Webster Hubbell had illegally alerted the Clintons of the criminal referrals to the Justice Department.  Hubbell had only just been recently indicted for unrelated charges of embezzlement, and it was hoped that a deal could be struck.  However, Hubbell adamantly refused to have anything to do with the special prosecutor.  After six months of lackluster investigation, Fiske released his report which concluded that Foster’s death was a suicide, the same conclusion of the police and FBI, and that there was no proof of the White House interfering with any investigation regarding Whitewater or the McDougals.  However, things were far from over.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hillary_Clinton_Bill_on_stage.jpg

Lend Me an Ear

In 1888, Paul Gauguin was a struggling forty year old painter who mostly survived by taking menial jobs and figuring out ways to scam government assistance programs.  A former wealthy stockbroker and arts dealer, Paul had lost pretty much all of his money during a bad economic downturn a few years before.  For whatever reason, this experience made Paul decide that he should totally be a full time artist, much to the chagrin of his Danish wife, who was left to be the sole breadwinner for the family.  Not really being down with a grown man just moping around the house, Paul’s wife suggested that if he wanted to be a painter he should totally just go to Paris, probably figuring it was better to have him gone.  After all, the woman had five children to raise, she didn’t need a sixth.  Paul, happy as a clam at the suggestion, did just that.

Things were not easy for Paul in Paris, home to pretty much all struggling artists in the late-nineteenth century.  Though he had managed to sell some paintings, by all appearances he was doomed to flounder about in obscurity.  However, his luck finally changed when quite by a chance a man saw some of Paul’s paintings at a small gallery.  Falling completely head over heels for the paintings, the man declared that Paul was one of the finest painters in the world and convinced his brother, a well known art dealer, to purchase several of them and hang them at the brother’s posh art gallery.  This was quite a big break for Paul, since thanks to the well-known art dealer his work would finally be seen by a wealthier class of clientele.  The name of the art dealer was Theo van Gogh, and the name of the brother was Vincent.  Yeah, you can probably guess where this is going to go.

By 1888, Vincent was a struggling 35 year old artist who mostly survived thanks to the financial help of his brother Theo, who for some reason loved Vincent more than anything in the world despite the fact that Vincent was often times nuttier than a pile of squirrel shit.  Vincent was known for manic episodes, during which he would create hundreds of paintings to the detriment of his health, surviving mostly on alcohol and pipe tobacco, and forgetting to eat to the point that his teeth would start to loosen.  Vincent was also known for his passions.  For a time he had wanted to be a priest, but he had given it up in favor of stalking his cousin to the point that his family had to stage an intervention, to which he responded by lighting his arm on fire and then living with a prostitute for close to a year.  The two brothers then lived together for a time, until Vincent got thrown out of art school and became such a pain in the ass that Theo bought him a house in the town of Arles, 465 miles from Paris.

Anyways, when Paul Gauguin came into the picture, Vincent was all hot and heavy for his new idea of starting an art commune.  Completely enraptured by Paul, Vincent convinced his brother Theo to convince Paul to move in with him.  While less than enthusiastic about the idea of moving in with someone with severe mental issues, Paul eventually relented, giving in on the promise of free rent and the implied threat of Theo no longer displaying Paul’s work.  Amazingly enough, things started out pretty fine.  The two men got along well, sharing a studio, painting each others’ portraits, and visiting local brothels together.  However, that only lasted a few weeks.  It’s hard to say exactly when things went wrong, but it probably had something to do with the notoriously dickish Paul being rude about Vincent’s art.  Vincent, who thought Paul was his new BFF, responded by see-sawing wildly between super clingy and out of his mind angry.  Paul would often awaken in the middle of the night to find Vincent watching him sleep, and Vincent once threw a glass at Paul’s head, to which Paul responded by threatening to strangle Vincent in his sleep.

After nine weeks, Paul decided that enough was enough.  On an appropriately dramatic rainy day, he packed his bags to move back to Paris.  Vincent, watching his dreams of a commune collapse right before his eyes, went after his former friend with a straight razor.  After Paul left in a bit of a hurry, Vincent decided he might as well kick things up a notch.  He used the razor to cut off his ear, and then walked down to the brothel to give it to his favorite prostitute.  This whole episode was a little much for Theo, who had his brother committed.  Vincent would be in and out of asylums for the rest of his life, which wasn’t long since he shot himself a year and a half later.  Theo, missing his brother terribly, went crazy and died six months later.  As for Paul, being the classiest of dudes, he traveled to Tahiti, where he spent his time painting and fucking 14 year old local girls, some of which he impregnated, and all of which he gave syphilis.  Paul lived out the rest of his total shitbag life in a thatched hut he called the House of Orgasms, dying of a likely opium overdose at the age of 54.  Neither Paul or Vincent became famous artists until after their deaths, but their lives did inspire a lot of future aspiring artists to be as crazy and/or shitty of people as possible.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vincent_van_Gogh_-_Self_portrait_with_bandaged_ear_F529.jpg