Whitewater Indictment Haunts Hillary All the Way to Benghazi

 

IBDEditorials.com

First lady Hillary Clinton talks to reporters outside the U.S. District Court after testifying before a grand jury investigating Whitewater on Jan. 26, 1996. AP

Corruption: Hillary Clinton hopes to get her email scandal behind her by going before the Benghazi committee Thursday. Fat chance. Not only will her missing emails still dog her, but so too will an old scandal: Whitewater.

Washington watchdog group Judicial Watch is suing the Obama regime to obtain a copy of a draft indictment against Hillary for her role in the Whitewater scandal, which involved the former lawyer's work on a fraudulent real estate project for a Little Rock savings and loan that cut the Clintons in on a sweetheart deal.

Judicial Watch announced in a Tuesday press release that the National Archives and Records Administration has admitted locating records responsive to a Freedom of Information Act request, confirming that it found 38 pages of records in a folder entitled, "Draft Indictment," and some 200 pages of responsive documents in a folder called "Hillary Rodham Clinton/Webster L. Hubbell Draft Indictment."

However, the agency refused to turn over the files to Judicial Watch because it would "constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy."

Translation: Disclosing the indictment could further hamstring Hillary's already scandal-plagued campaign to succeed Obama as president.

Written between 1996 and 1998, the draft indictments reportedly arose from an independent counsel's investigation into Clinton's involvement in the Castle Grande real estate deal involving the assets of Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan. Clinton was alleged to have drafted an option agreement that concealed from federal bank examiners a fraudulent $300,000 cross-loan to the Castle Grande project.

Her "grand jury testimony — and her alleged concealment of her role in this fraudulent transaction, including the hiding of her Rose Law Firm billing records concerning her legal work for Madison — reportedly became the subject of an obstruction of justice and perjury investigation," Judicial Watch says.

Hillary's law partners, Webb Hubbell and Vince Foster, printed the billing records and apparently showed them to Hillary when she was in the White House. But then they mysteriously disappeared under subpoena.

Both former independent counsel Robert Fiske and deputy counsel Hickman Ewing are confirming that the indictment exists. The FBI agents who interviewed Hillary reportedly didn't believe her statements to be truthful, so prosecutors drafted an indictment.

Ewing himself has said he "had problems" with some of her statements to investigators in April 1995. So his office drafted an indictment in September 1996. Without the Rose Law Firm billing records, however, the case against Hillary was hard to prove.

Still, the fact that the Whitewater investigation resulted in indictments being drafted against the then-first lady means all those Clinton apologists in media who pooh-poohed Whitewater as "no there there" were, of course, dead wrong.
It also means the Benghazi and email scandals aren't the only signs of corruption that the Obama regime is protecting Clinton over.

President Obama himself went on CBS' "60 Minutes" and covered for the Democratic presidential frontrunner by claiming that her unsecured private email server, which she kept in her basement and which contained top secret information, didn't pose "a national security problem."

Of course, Obama doesn't know that. That's what FBI agents are trying to get to the bottom of by doing the forensics on Hillary's servers they've confiscated.
Yet the president deliberately prejudiced their investigation.

Judicial Watch says it is filing a lawsuit in U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia to force the release of the indictment. Let's hope it gets a friendly judge. As first lady, Hillary was a public official, and this federal information should be made public.

One way or another, the dam of Hillary scandals will break.