title:  Who is Susan McDougal?
by: Micah Morrison
source: July 1 Wall Street Journal, page A14
From her jail-house home at the Sybil Brandt Institute for Women in
Los Angeles, Whitewater felon Susan McDougal has waged an aggressive
media campaign to convince the public she is a 'political prisoner' of
Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr.
To the Bunco-Forgery Division of the Los Angeles Police Department,
however, Ms. McDougal is just a common thief.  Indeed, the LAPD first
swore out an arrest warrant for her in October 1993, months before
there was an independent counsel for Whitewater.  At this point
charges by police and prosecutors are only allegations, to be sure,
but Ms. McDougal will shortly go on trial here on 10 counts of grand
theft, forgery, fraud, making false financial statements and income
tax evasion, crimes she allegedly committed while a 'trusted employee'
of conductor Zubin Mehta and his wife, Nancy.  While the case has
encountered numerous delays, a pretrial hearing next week at the Los
Angeles County courthouse in Santa Monica appears likely to set a
trial date in August.
The trial will surely flesh out the character of one of the original
Whitewater players - partner with her former husband, James McDougal,
and Bill and Hillary Clinton in the original land development deal.
The attention to Ms. McDougal will also cast a new light on the recent
controversy over Mr. Starr questioning Arkansas state troopers and
women who may have been romantically involved with Mr. Clinton when he
was governor.
Ms. McDougal is currently in jail for contempt of court for refusing
to answer grand jury questions from Mr. Starr's office.  One question
was whether Mr. Clinton was aware of the illegal loan to her that lies
at the heart of the Whitewater felonies - a $300,000 advance from
David Hale's Capital Management Services to Master Marketing, a front
company Ms. McDougal ran as a subsidary of her husband's Madison
Guaranty S&L. The second question was whether President testified
truthfully in the 1996 Arkansas trial, at which she was convicted of
four felony counts related to the Master Marketing loan.  Ms. McDougal
could end her current jail term by answering either yes or no, but
instead she refuses to answer and chooses jail.
Surely Mr. Starr has a legitimate prosecutorial interest in the
motives behind Ms. McDougal's silence, a bizarre obstruction of the
investigation into matters at the heart of his charter.  And it's
logical to suspect that some part of these motives revolves around the
long-standing rumors that Mr. Clinton and Ms. McDougal were having an
affair at the time of the loan and the Whitewater transactions.  In
the course of such a relationship, indeed, she might have confided in
- or even conspired with - Mr. Clinton about the loan she refuses to
discuss before the grand jury.
By Now the Clinton-McDougal relationship is beyond the stage of idle
rumor.  Jim McDougal says that he discovered in 1982 that his wife was
having an affair with Mr. Clinton, according to James Stewart's report
in the Feb. 17 issue of the New Yorker. Mr. Stewart noted that in an
early interview with Ms. McDougal, before her incarceration, she said
that "she was on the phone with Clinton nearly every day, and that he
was giving her much-needed emotional support at a time when she was
separated from her husband and their financial world was collapsing."
He also reports that Mr. Starr has obtained phone records showing
"numerous calls" in 1986 and 1987 between Gov. Clinton's office and
the Lowrance Heights housing site being developed by Ms. McDougal, a
project under scrutiny by Mr. Starr.
... Caution: The Clintons are role models to the impressionable.
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