Hillary Clinton’s Scandal Mistake
Clinton’s first experience with a criminal investigation came with Whitewater, the name given to various activities centered around a money-losing land deal that she and her husband invested in during the nineteen-eighties. Republican (and journalistic) claims of illegality in connection with the investment led to the appointment of a special prosecutor, Robert Fiske, in 1994. Fiske quickly cleared the Clintons of allegations of wrongdoing that had arisen in connection with an earlier investigation of Whitewater, as well as in the suicide of their friend and colleague Vincent Foster. Shortly after Fiske’s report, however, the court in charge of the case, under the independent-counsel law, replaced Fiske with Kenneth Starr, and Clinton’s true ordeal began.
Starr and his successors spent eight years, and more than seventy million dollars, on an investigation that began with the remains of the Whitewater probe and metastasized into an open-ended search-and-destroy mission into the personal and political lives of Bill and Hillary Clinton.
.. The lesson she took was that Republicans used criminal investigations as a political weapon against her.
.. That Clinton would even install such a rattletrap system suggests the influence of the Starr legacy.
.. Clinton’s visceral distaste for being the target of partisan smears led her to overreact, overdeny, and make a bad situation worse. As a victim of partisan vendettas, she couldn’t recognize a good-faith F.B.I. investigation when she saw one.