Hakki
http://argument.independent.co.uk/leading_articles/story.jsp?dir=141&story=2 77071&host=6&printable=1 The great Whitewater scandal that never was 22 March 2002
The most expensive exoneration in history (cost $73m) clears Bill and Hillary Clinton
President tripped up by 'conspiracy from right wing'
Eight years, $70m and thousands of pages on, the Whitewater scandal is finally over. Bill and Hillary Clinton have been found not guilty, and it is hard to disagree with their lawyer, who described the independent prosecutor's final report on the land venture in Arkansas as "the most expensive exoneration in history".
The scandal, it is now apparent, was not the Whitewater land deal – beset with petty local financiers and shady politicians though it was – but the fact that such flimsy evidence was able to blight a presidency. On the admission of David Brock, the formerly right-wing journalist who has admitted insinuating some of the most damaging stories into the media, Hillary Clinton's charges of a "vast right-wing conspiracy" were not so far off the mark.
The Clintons did not help themselves. They were new to the White House when Whitewater surfaced, and they tried to deal with it like the provincial amateurs they then were. Mrs Clinton's failure to produce her law office records until two years after the investigation began aroused suspicions that have now been judged unfounded.
Lesson One, well learned by the Bush White House, is to deploy expert damage-limiters at the first hint of trouble and give no quarter. Lesson Two is that an early scandal creates an aura that can only be dispelled by irreproachable conduct. Mr Clinton's womanising and the exposure of the Lewinsky affair seemed to make Whitewater more credible. Each scandal fed on the other.
Lessons Three and Four are for the US political system. Independent prosecutors, introduced after Watergate, were an attempt to prevent any recurrence of such heinous misconduct. But neither Whitewater nor the Lewinsky affair fitted that bill, and the independence of at least one of the three Whitewater prosecutors (Kenneth Starr) can be questioned. For better or worse, the institution has now been allowed to lapse.
The efforts of right-wing agitators to besmirch the Clintons might have come to nothing, had the US Supreme Court not ruled early on that a sitting president could be investigated for misconduct that predated his time in office. That cleared the way for the investigation that took in both Whitewater and the sexual harassment allegations that precipitated impeachment. The justices argued that the investigation would not be such a distraction as to damage the functioning of the presidency. How wrong they were.