How Vulnerable is Hillary?

by Alexander Cockburn

It's true that she's been the target of investigation before, but the venues of combat have been depositions, a grand jury session and one appearance before Congress to justify her health program, where the legislators treated her with ermine gloves. Besides, Bill has always been the numero uno target, with Hillary clucking that they're the victims of an unending and illegitimate hate campaign generated by right-wing nuts. So what are her immediate vulnerabilities, after seven years of close scrutiny?

Remember, 80 percent to 90 percent of the Whitewater scandal had HRC's fingerprints all over it. She was the corporate lawyer who finagled the lucrative land swaps and mortgage scams. It was the billing records from that phase of the Clintons' property operations that first went missing and finally came to light in HRC's private quarters.

HRC's riposte to onslaughts by Giuliani on such matters will no doubt be that she and Bill have emerged unscathed from the most ferocious scrutiny in American investigative history, by Ken Starr and his team. But Starr never did issue a report on Whitewater, and HRC narrowly escaped indictment for perjury committed in the course of her grand jury deposition testimony. Hickman Ewing was handling this aspect of Whitewater for the Starr probe. He found that HRC was safe under the statute of limitations for what she did back in the Whitewater era but was open to a perjury rap.

In the end, Starr didn't have the nerve, but HRC may not be quite out of these particular woods yet. HRC's erstwhile partner at the Rose Law Firm, Webb Hubbell, has now had Starr's charges restored against him by a federal appeals court and faces trial on the matter of whether he was bribed to silence when he got highly lucrative consultancy fees after he'd left the Justice Department and, in some cases, after he'd been indicted.

This Hubbell trial is set to start in August of this year, and HRC will obviously be a prime focus of the prosecutor and the press. Hubbell is looking at some serious prison time if he goes down and might have some incentive to sing.

As a corporate lawyer, HRC has plenty of unwholesome skeletons rattling in the closet, quite aside from Whitewater. The Rose Law Firm was not a charitable institution. Her work in the sale of the Beverly nursing home chain is perhaps something that Giuliani's researchers will take a passing interest in, since the sale, handled by HRC, did leave a number of old folks facing higher fees and all the discomforts attendant on being kicked out in the snow.

Then, there was the LaFarge cement and incineration business on whose board HRC sat. Any third-party Green candidate might take an interest in the conduct of this enterprise. And as HRC tries to muster the support of New York's labor unions, Giuliani will perhaps evoke her years on the board of Wal Mart, a company not noted for its admiration for the proud tradition of Gompers and Debs.

There's the matter of HRC's inexplicable enrichment, in which, under the kindly guidance of Jim Blair, chief corporate counsel for Tyson Foods, and also of the futures magician "Red" Bone, Hillary's modest investment of $1,000 in cattle futures bloated up to the $100,000 level.

More unsettled business comes in the form of Travelgate, another chapter in the Starr investigation. Starr did say nothing impeachable had come out of his Travelgate probe, so far as Bill Clinton was concerned. But Bill was a peripheral figure in that affair. HRC was at the heart of Travelgate.

Suppose HRC accuses Giuliani of violating civil rights and of having about his person the aroma of the police state. Now imagine the righteous prosecutorial finger of Rudy Giuliani pointing straight back at HRC, reminding her and the voters of New York of Filegate. Once again, HRC seems to have been the person who brought on board Craig Livingstone, former barroom bouncer, to head up White House security and amass several hundred files on enemies of the Clintons, possibly including Rudy Giuliani himself.

HRC will defend herself from all charges of scandal by deploring these souvenirs of Ken Starr's long and costly effort to beat down Bill Clinton. She will insist that Giuliani concentrate on substance. But her own record on substance isn't so hot. Her supervision of health reform back in 1994 ended in debacle. And although she will doubtless be offering herself as a friend of the poor and downtrodden, evoking her work as board member of Marian Wright Edelman's Children's Defense Fund, the dismantling of the welfare system occurring on the Clintons' watch is perhaps not a substantial achievement she will want to boast about. After all, Peter Edelman, Marian's husband, did resign from Health and Human Services in protest.

HRC has taken a principled stand ... on Palestinian rights, and Giuliani has already lost no time in reminding voters of this.