Inside Starr and His Operation

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Yet for all that, Starr's biggest catch remains former Arkansas Governor Jim Guy Tucker, who was charged with conspiring, while a lawyer in private practice, in a plan to have Madison Guaranty lend another man $825,000 as part of a questionable real estate scheme. Starr has also won convictions of Webb Hubbell, the former associate attorney general, for bilking his own law firm and clients, and of the Clintons' former Whitewater partners Jim and Susan McDougal. His last indictments, brought 18 months ago, were against Herby Branscum Jr. and Robert Hill, two officers of the Perry County Bank in Perryville, Ark. Starr charged them with misappropriating $13,000 that he thought might be linked to an attempt by White House adviser Bruce Lindsey, who was then campaign treasurer of Clinton's 1990 gubernatorial race, to conceal some illegal campaign borrowing. In September 1996 both men were acquitted, though the jury deadlocked on other charges.

It was a major setback to Starr. Branscum's attorney, Dan Guthrie, a former federal prosecutor himself, complains that Starr applied the full firepower of his office to a case that might ordinarily have been relegated to banking regulators. "No prosecutor's office anywhere would even take that case," says Guthrie, who charges that Starr's office also continually leaked negative stories to the press. "His tenure is a classic example of how not to prosecute these cases."

In another case, Starr's office is accused of engaging in a questionable practice that resembles the "talking points" that Monica Lewinsky, acting at the behest of persons unknown, is alleged to have offered Linda Tripp to guide Tripp's deposition testimony to lawyers for Paula Jones. Steve Smith, a longtime Clinton friend and adviser, is the former president of Madison Savings & Loan, the institution at the center of Whitewater. After being targeted by Starr, Smith entered a guilty plea to a misdemeanor charge of conspiring to divert government-backed loan proceeds. But he insists that lawyers on Starr's staff wrote out a prepared script for him to read before the grand jury. "It contained things I had told them time and time again were not true," he says. "Any allegation that we prepared a script for Smith to read is false," says Jackie Bennett, a Starr deputy.

Since the acquittal of Hill and Branscum, the momentum of Starr's investigation has slowed. Before Monica Lewinsky came along, his best hope at snagging the Clintons was still the claim by David Hale, a former Arkansas municipal judge, that Clinton had put improper pressure on him to okay a loan to Madison Guaranty, a charge Clinton denies. Jim McDougal also denied it before his May 1996 conviction on fraud and conspiracy charges. After that, as part of a deal for a lighter sentence, he changed his story. But that change makes McDougal an admitted perjurer--not the most effective witness against the President in any future trial. McDougal's ex-wife Susan has spent the last 17 months in a federal prison for refusing to cooperate with Starr.