Whitewater Counsel to Plow Ahead

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — One day after a jury acquitted two Arkansas bankers in a Whitewater-related case, independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr said Friday that he will push ahead with his investigations, despite criticism from jurors who said the banking case should not have been filed.

In an interview, Starr said he will continue vigorously pursuing his broad investigation, even though a jury returned four “not guilty” verdicts Thursday to charges that the bankers had misapplied bank funds to make campaign contributions to then-Gov. Bill Clinton.

“Our overall investigation has continued to move forward on a variety of fronts as this trial of the bankers unfolded,” Starr said.

He added that “although it was an integral part of our work, it was not at the core” of the independent counsel’s task, which is to determine whether Clinton or other leading government officials committed a crime.

Starr’s statement came as some jurors from the trial of bankers Herby Branscum Jr. and Robert M. Hill argued that the men should not have been prosecuted.

Juror Mary Zinamon of Little Rock said it was “a waste of money” to prosecute the two men. “I would hate to see the government waste more money on Whitewater,” she said.

Juror Wesley Camp of Conway, Ark., said he believes that the power of the independent counsel’s office is virtually unlimited and that prosecutors are quick to “turn people’s lives upside down.”

Another juror, Leland Sullivan of Cabot, Ark., said Starr’s office presented “flimsy” evidence during the trial. “If they’re going to spend my tax dollars, they need to get stronger evidence,” he said.

Sullivan added that, if anything, he had been predisposed to believe that the two bankers were guilty, even though prosecutors could not prove it. “I’m an anti-Clinton person myself,” he said. “I would have loved for them to have a little more evidence, but they didn’t.”

In responding to the criticism, Starr said: “Congress determines what provisions are in the U.S. Criminal Code. Prosecutors are duty-bound to go about their work when they find evidence of serious offenses, and they have the duty to present such matters to a grand jury. That happened in this case, and a grand jury returned an indictment leading to their trial. We have no apologies for that.”

In a six-week trial, Branscum and Hill were acquitted of four felony charges and a mistrial was declared on seven other counts on which jurors could not agree. The bankers had been accused of illegally funneling donations to Clinton’s 1990 reelection campaign as governor.

Richard Ben-Veniste, a former Watergate associate prosecutor who served as Democratic counsel on the Senate Whitewater Committee, said in an interview that the case had no connection to the Clintons’ investment in the Whitewater land venture that was supposed to make up the heart of Starr’s inquiry.

In addition, other lawyers said some of the charges brought against Branscum and Hill were unusual. In addition to the misapplying-funds counts, they were charged with failing to file required reports with the Internal Revenue Service covering $52,500 in cash withdrawals made by the Clinton campaign from its account at the Perry County bank owned by the two defendants.

Defense attorney Dan Guthrie said the Justice Department never prosecutes such cases of non-reporting unless the amounts are far greater and involve either money laundering or major drug trafficking, the two offenses that the law was designed to curtail.

Starr, who worked out of his Little Rock office this week, flew back to Washington on Friday to review grand jury matters there. He indicated that he and W. Hickman Ewing Jr., a deputy who prosecuted the bankers, would take several days to determine whether Branscum and Hill should be retried on the counts that deadlocked jurors.

Starr, a well-known Republican, is a former federal judge and onetime Justice Department official. He said he is sensitive to concerns that some investigative matters may be coming to a head in a presidential election year.

He gave assurances that he would not deliberately seek to influence voters by returning charges on the threshold of the Nov. 5 election, but he refused to pledge that he would avoid any indictments after Oct. 1.

“We are duty-bound to follow Department of Justice policies and practices on this,” Starr said. The manual for U.S. attorneys suggests that elections “should be taken into account as prosecutors go about their work,” he said.

“But there is no bright line here,” Starr said. “It is something we must evaluate carefully as we attempt to move our investigations forward as rapidly as possible.”

The continuing investigations in Washington include possible perjury before Congress by White House aides involved in the 1993 firing of presidential travel office employees and possible obstruction of justice if anyone deliberately concealed Whitewater-related billing records belonging to First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. The subpoenaed records mysteriously appeared in the White House living quarters last year.

In addition, Starr’s office recently started investigating possible wrongdoing by presidential aides who obtained hundreds of FBI files on past employees of Republican administrations. The White House has said the FBI files were obtained mistakenly as security clearances were being checked. It has also denied wrongdoing in the travel office and billing records inquiries.