A FEDERAL appeals court ruling points up once again the ethical sloppiness of the Clintons and their allies during his Arkansas gubernatorial years.
A three-judge panel of the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Federal District Judge Henry Woods of Little Rock should not have dismissed an indictment brought by the Whitewater special counsel against Arkansas Gov. Jim Guy Tucker, Clinton's successor and political ally. Tucker and two others are currently on trial on other charges.Woods last year decided that earlier fraud charges brought by special prosecutor Kenneth Starr were beyond the scope of Starr's authority. The charges dealt with loans obtained from the Small Business Administration.
It didn't seem to matter to Woods at the time that he had been appointed to his position by Bill Clinton and that he had close ties to Hillary Rodham Clinton and had spent a night at the White House, and that he once even asked Vincent Foster, the late White House counsel, whether he should grant a press interview about the first lady.
Starr's protestations to Woods went unheeded.
But it did matter to the appeals court, which not only reinstated the charges against Tucker but also granted Starr's request that the case be reassigned to another judge. Apparently the appeals court could see things a bit clearer in St. Louis than Woods could in Little Rock.
Wood's refusal to recognize all these apparent conflicts of interest is typical of the arrogance that has marked White-water and related cases since the beginning. Arrogance is the only term that fits when one considers that most of the parties are highly educated and experienced and unlikely to be ignorant of ethical pitfalls that would be evident to a first-year law student.
Hillary Clinton regularly ignored ethical considerations, practicing law and sitting on the boards of private companies as though her husband were just an ordinary citizen rather than the governor of the state. Her legal career is studded with appearances of ethical impropriety.
The president seems to have seen nothing wrong with using his White House counsel as his personal attorney or in involving much of his White House staff in the Whitewater matter, a personal affair.
It isn't unusual for prosecutors to request removal of a judge from a case, but it is rare for an appeals court to grant such a change. The ruling made clear the three judges felt that Woods' conflicts were sufficiently evident to cause reassignment of the case.
How ironic that the Clintons entered the White House talking about paying attention to ethics. As the late Gov. Earl Long of Louisiana once said, "Yeah, we use ethics in politics, we use anything we can get our hands on."