Word: mcdougall
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...White House lawyers working on Whitewater were relieved last week when the 21-count felony indictment of Tucker and former Clinton business partners Susan and James McDougal didn't mention the Clintons-or Whitewater-at all. Starr hammered the point home: "The indictment does not charge criminal wrongdoing by President William Jefferson Clinton or First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton." To White House officials, this was vindication: Starr, they believe, has accepted their contention that the Whitewater mess was only one small scam in a host of shady deals by Jim McDougal...
Indeed, Starr's latest charges focused on a series of allegedly fraudulent loans made to the McDougals and to Tucker, then a lawyer. The loans were issued by former Arkansas municipal judge David Hale, who ran a federally backed investment company for small businesses called Capital Management Services; the money helped finance various real estate developments in the mid-1980s. The indictment alleges that Hale gave McDougal four loans backed by the Small Business Administration in exchange for $825,000 in financing by McDougal for a fraudulent real estate deal. The financing was provided by McDougal's savings and loan...
...McDougal was tried and acquitted in 1990 on bank-fraud charges stemming from the failure of his S&L. Last week he said he would fight the new indictment. "It's going to be fun for everybody except for this Republican prosecutor who is bringing these bogus, fabricated charges," McDougal said. His ex-wife Susan will also fight the charges...
During the mid-1980s, as McDougal struggled to prop up his sinking S&L, Madison Guaranty, he increasingly turned to Clinton--friend, business partner and Governor of Arkansas--with requests. Once, McDougal complained to a Clinton aide about a state health inspector who was causing him problems with a land development--and who was later reassigned. In a March 1986 memo from the aide, McDougal is quoted as saying "he hadn't spent $60,000" on Bill Clinton over the years only to lose a battle with a state health inspector. In late 1984, when McDougal was seeking changes...
...others take heart in polls showing that the public has largely lost interest. Said a White House official: "The American people are beginning to ask, 'Is there any there there?'" Despite Leach's assertion that "the evidence is in" showing a quid pro quo between the Clintons and the McDougals, his House hearings fell short of proving that the Clintons did anything illegal. The President's former business partner, meanwhile, was not shy in admitting that he and Clinton exchanged favors over the years. "So what?" McDougal said over the phone from Little Rock, Arkansas, last week. "Jim Leach...