Reprinted from The Washington Times , 5am -- April 17, 1998
No prisoners taken in Mr. Clinton's war
by Wesley Pruden
Kenneth Starr met his critics more than halfway yesterday, giving up his golden parachute into Malibu and offering to let someone else investigate an astrologer's claim that rich conservatives had tainted his star Whitewater witness.
But what Mr. Starr will soon learn, if he has not learned it already, is that Bill Clinton is not interested in righting wrongs or settling conflicts. He wants to destroy the investigator and his investigation because he knows the feds have at last got the goods on the Whitewater gang.
The closer Mr. Starr gets to laying out his case against the gang, the more reckless the gang will get in trying to protect their leader. If he goes down, they will, too.
The depth of their desperation is the gang's eagerness to pin their case against David Hale, the star Starr witness, on a yarn spun by Caryn Mann, the Hot Springs part-time astrologer, part-time psychic and full-time flake. Mrs. Mann first said she saw "right-wingers" press money onto Mr. Hale, then she said, well, no, she didn't actually see it herself, but her 13-year-old son did, and he told her about it. She thinks. Maybe. Mrs. Mann can't quite remember all the details, but she does remember that she directed U.S. troops in the Persian Gulf through mental telepathy. And she can turn the rain on and off through mind control. She's sure about that. She knows where Jimmy Hoffa is buried, too.
Mrs. Mann was the live-in girlfriend of Parker Dozhier, once a Little Rock television reporter, who opened a bait shop on Lake Catherine, near Hot Springs. He let Mr. Hale, an old friend, sleep in a shack on the property, and worked as a stringer for the American Spectator -- during the time that the prosecutor was not Ken Starr, but a Justice Department lawyer, and after, not before, he gave his statement to the FBI and the J-men. He was paid $1,000 a month for clipping stories from the local papers and sending the clips to the Spectator.
The Whitewater gang, through David Pryor and a local novelist, sometime book reviewer and part-time columnist named Gene Lyons, has attempted to portray this lavish ($1,000 a month! Wow!) outlay by the Spectator -- a fraction of what news organizations routinely spend in a day for a lot less -- as witness tampering, obstruction of justice, breaching national security and aggravated mopery. No one, and surely not someone smart enough to have got himself elected to the U.S. Senate, actually regards this as something to be taken as seriously as a discarded script from "Saturday Night Live."
But in the present climate, with the White House spin men in hot pursuit of anything to divert attention from Mr. Clinton's perversion and dissembling, grown men must act as if they do.
In a letter to Attorney General Janet Reno, Mr. Starr wrote that his office "has developed several proposed alternate mechanisms for investigating this matter." He didn't say what they were. How do you investigate a spurned girlfriend's spiteful fantasy? Mr. Starr acknowledged that there might be an "appearance of a conflict," but the Justice Department itself may have "multiple actual conflicts" because David Hale, tainted or not, provided information damaging to Mr. Clinton.
Mrs. Mann is the most credible witness against the Starr investigation that David Pryor, the former U.S. senator who went home to be Bill Clinton's surrogate as leader of the Whitewater gang, has turned up yet. Mr. Pryor seems to be indulging a taste for overage Spice Girls. His first trick was to try to charm Judge Susan Webber Wright into cutting a secret side deal for Susan McDougal, now languishing in prison in California for refusing to give evidence about the original Whitewater bank robbery. Mr. Pryor's charm, which captivated an entire generation of elderly women in Arkansas, was probably not wasted. Judge Wright didn't bite on his appeal for Susan McDougal, but she threw out Paula Jones' lawsuit against the president a few weeks later. Some ladies still melt at low temperature.
Mr. Pryor, acting as Mr. Clinton's surrogate, now appears to be working on another front. Gene Lyons was dispatched to wake up Henry Woods, the 80-year-old senior U.S. District Court judge in Little Rock who was thrown off the original Whitewater trial by the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals because he was thought to be unable to put aside a crush on Hillary.
The appeals court also took a look at Judge Woods' sordid past, particularly his manipulation of a state grand jury that was about to indict him years ago, when, as a governor's top aide, he was suspected of helping himself to money set aside to build highways. Millions are still missing.
Now Judge Woods wants someone to investigate how this effluvia from his past came to the attention of the appeals court. He thinks I'm the man responsible, and he's mad. More to come.
Wesley Pruden is editor in chief of The Times.Copyright 1998 News World Communications, Inc.
Reprinted with permission of
The Washington Times.
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