Investigators for the Independent Counsel always considered the trial of Jim and Susan McDougal and Jim Guy Tucker to be a preliminary battle that would eventually lead to the White House. And now that the three have been convicted of multiple felony counts, Starr will be emboldened to more visibly take on the real target of his massive investigation - the Clintons.
Early in the Tucker/McDougal investigation, a source inside Starr's office told me the strategy - convict the three first and hope to leverage those convictions into testimony against the Clintons. In fact, Starr's team didn't really expect the Tucker/McDougal case to get this far. Starr believed the three to take one of the plea offers that were dangled in front of them in exchange for information on the Clintons.
Ultimately what Tucker and the McDougals know could result in politically embarrassing tax evasion charges against the First Couple.
Specifically, Starr believes the McDougals will be able to confirm the assertion of David Hale, the government's chief witness in the case, that it was Bill Clinton who forced Hale to make a $300,000 loan to Susan McDougal in 1986. The government can also provide a motive as to why Bill Clinton would have done such a thing.
From evidence I've seen, it appears that the loan was needed to cover a fraudulent loan taken out by Whitewater Development, a company owned by the McDougals and Clinton, the previous year. It is less clear what Tucker can provide, although the government is looking into whether he threw the primary election in 1990 to Bill Clinton in exchange for a payoff.
More intriguing and mysterious, is a note produced recently by Sen D'Amato's Whitewater hearings that show Bill Clinton asked aide Susan Thomases to call Tucker in 1992 and make an inquiry about Whitewater.
Investigators still don't know why that call was made. But when they find out, it could draw Clinton into the conspiracy in which the McDougals and Tucker were convicted.
Clearly the Little Rock jurors who voted to convict - the vast majority of whom were Democrats - believed Hale's testimony over Clinton's. And Hale is a confessed liar and a convicted felon. "This takes the investigation directly to Bill and Hillary Clinton," says a source close to Starr's investigation.
There is one source of comfort for the President. As long as Clinton's rating remain high, the McDougals and Tucker can always be kept in line with the hope of a Presidential pardon after November. Clinton has done it before for friends, namely convicted drug dealer Dan Lasater.
A source who dined with Jim McDougal the other night says McDougal didn't seem to have hard feelings against the President. He felt the President did his best to get the defendants off. But the promise of a pardon becomes iffy, Starr's strategy could start paying off soon. Tucker and the McDougals might decide it is in their best interest to talk.
(John Crudele is a financial columnist with the New York Post. His mailing address is P.O. Box 610, Lincroft, N.J. 07738. Click here to send him e-mail).