A L S O +T O D A Y Kenneth Starr has lost his credibility By Joe Conason and Murray Waas Legal experts raise questions about the prosecutor's apparent conflicts of interest T A B L E+T A L K NATO expansion: Nutty or necessary? You decide in the Politics area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y The man behind the mask By Karen Rothmyer Shy, secretive and of regal bearing, Richard Mellon Scaife has worked hard and spent millions to dictate the nation's political agenda (04/07/98) Clinton's "Soviet connection" By Murray Waas GOP money man discussed digging up dirt on Clinton (04/07/98) A diminished view of manhood By Earl Ofari Hutchinson Reggie White's remarks that homosexuality is a sin reflects a widespread fear of gays in the black community (04/06/98) Republicans to Ken Starr: Ugh! By David Corn Now that Paula Jones has gone, all the Republicans have left against President Clinton is a 20-year-old land deal (04/03/98) Turning the tables on Starr By Murray Waas and Jonathan Broder Attorney General Janet Reno considers investigating key Whitewater witness David Hale (04/03/98) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Browse the Newsreal Archives - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
		SEE SOME EVIL, HEAR SOME EVIL ... | PAGE 2 OF 4 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - As the owner-proprietor of a federally sponsored Small Business Investment Corporation, Hale embezzled some $2.02 million from the government essentially by making phony loans to non-existent companies set up by him and his accountant, Robert Boyce. Those loans would then go into default, and the cash would go into Hale's pocket. Altogether, 13 of 57 companies lent money by Hale's Capital Management Services were dummy corporations with the same address as the lending company itself. Hale and several co-conspirators also ran a number of complex real estate scams in order to generate paper profits that the Small Business Administration matched on a 3-to-1 basis. It was an elaborate confidence game, pure but not so simple. After FBI agents, tipped off by SBA investigators, raided his office on July 21, 1993, Hale found himself in deep trouble. In an attempt to extricate himself, he hired the law partner of Clinton's longtime political enemy in Arkansas, Sheffield Nelson, and began to make the claim that Clinton and Jim Guy Tucker made him do it. Faced with a Clinton-appointed U.S. attorney who insisted that he plead guilty to at least one felony before she'd agree to hear his allegations against the president, Hale came up with a preposterous dog-ate-my-homework tale to the effect that he'd once had documentary evidence of Clinton's participation in the illegal $300,000 loan, but that FBI agents or career federal prosecutors stripped the file. Hale narrated this fiction to anybody who would listen back in November 1993. Republicans on the Senate Whitewater committee bought into this story sufficiently to summon two assistant U.S. attorneys to Washington to take their depositions. A career prosecutor named Fletcher Jackson categorically denied ever seeing any such documents as Hale described, and very much doubts they ever existed. Republicans decided against calling him and his colleague Brent Bumpers, son of U.S. Sen. Dale Bumpers, D-Ark., before the Whitewater committee. Starr managed somehow to prevent Hale from mentioning his absurd allegation in front of the Whitewater grand jury. Had Hale's allegations been aired, jurors at the Tucker-McDougal trial would have heard federal law enforcement officials taking the witness stand to call Hale a liar. And somehow Starr appears to have persuaded the official Whitewater media to ignore the story, although Hale recently repeated the purloined documents tale to Associated Press reporter Pete Yost. "The file on the $300,000 loan was three to four inches thick when the FBI took it," Hale told Yost. "But when my attorney and I asked to see it a month or so later, the U.S. attorney's office gave us maybe an inch of stuff." So why no New York Times or Washington Post headlines reading, "Key Witness Claims FBI, Clinton-appointed Federal Prosecutors Hid Evidence in Whitewater Probe"? Good question. Courtesy of Salon's Murray Waas and Jonathan Broder, we now learn that, accompanied by FBI agents under Starr's control, Hale made regular visits during 1995 and 1996 to a Hot Springs, Ark., fishing camp owned by one Parker Dozhier. There he met with, and was debriefed by, operatives of right-wing billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife's so-called Arkansas Project, affiliated with the American Spectator magazine. Dozhier's former girlfriend Caryn Mann, her 17-year old son and two sources at the magazine charge that he made surreptitious cash payments to Hale, Starr's ace witness. Meanwhile, Starr has stubbornly clung to Hale, portraying him as a born-again, repentant truth teller. Starr not only arranged for a reduction in Hale's prison term but also recommended that he be relieved of the burden of repaying the millions he stole. Last week, Starr's office did not respond to this reporter's inquiry as to whether Starr had initiated a witness tampering investigation concerning Salon's revelations about the Hale payments. If an investigation ever is conducted, not by Starr but by the Justice Department, two immediate questions come to mind: What did Kenneth Starr know, and when did he know it? - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - N E X T+P A G E+| Starr's Joan of Arc