ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, February 7, 1997 TAG: 9702070046
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-8 EDITION: METRO
RICHARD Nixon's downfall resulted less from Watergate misdeeds than from the attempt to cover them up. This point has been often noted. The question is: Do Bill and Hillary Clinton understand it?
This editorial page has been at times a bit dubious about the extent and intent of some of the investigative attention paid to long-ago land transactions in Arkansas while Clinton was governor. But it's hard not to wonder, along with New York Times columnist William Safire, about a transaction that occurred while Clinton was president.
We refer to the payments, in reportedly large amounts, made in 1994 to former Associate Attorney General Webster Hubbell by - who else? - the Lippo Group.
That's right: the same Indonesian conglomerate under scrutiny for making humongous contributions to the Democratic National Committee. The same outfit with which John Huang, Democratic fundraiser extraordinaire, was often on the phone while he held a sensitive trade job at the Commerce Department.
Safire, who has reported these developments in his column, detects a stink. So do we.
Hubbell was Hillary Clinton's law partner at the Rose law firm. Just after he'd been forced out of the Justice Department and was about to go to jail for defrauding his firm and clients, he received from Lippo a sum he won't reveal, for services he won't reveal.
Hubbell had done legal work for Lippo's owners, the Riady family, when he was with the law firm in Little Rock. So he did have a connection with them. We still find it hard to believe that, at the time they paid him in 1994, he was in a position to offer much by way of legal services.
It was, however, a time when Hubbell had little or no income, and faced crushing legal bills. It also was a time when he was considering a plea bargain with the Whitewater independent counsel, Kenneth Starr. Starr offered Hubbell leniency in exchange for telling what he knew about the Clintons' affairs. Hubbell declined.
In December, a spokesman said neither the president nor anyone else in the White House knew about Lippo's pre-jail payment to Hubbell until they read about it in the press. That assertion became inoperative after Bruce Lindsey, a longtime Clinton aide, acknowledged he may have known about the payments when they occurred.
Yet, at a recent press conference, Clinton insisted this knowledge had been kept from him: "I didn't know about it. And I can't imagine who could have ever arranged to do something improper like that and no one around here know about it. It's just not - we - we did not know anything about it."
Just like they didn't know anything about Hillary Clinton's old billing records from the Rose law firm? These were the records, you'll recall, that disappeared during the 1992 presidential campaign and mysteriously reappeared a year ago in the White House living quarters.
Starr's staff reportedly is finishing up a memo outlining pros and cons of bringing charges against "senior government officials," including the president and first lady. The independent counsel is said to be focusing less on old dealings in Arkansas than on whether perjury and obstruction of justice were committed in efforts to conceal the true nature of those dealings.
Certainly, fishy real-estate loans aren't comparable to the Nixon White House's attempts to subvert the Constitution. And no evidence of criminal behavior by President Clinton has surfaced. Even so, regarding administration efforts to suppress scandal, it isn't unreasonable to ask: Who knew what, and when did they know it?
LENGTH: Medium: 65 linesby CNB