Whitewater Prosecution Scouring White House Videotapes

WASHINGTON — Prosecutors exploring why supporters of President Clinton hired former Associate Atty. Gen. Webster L. Hubbell for several lucrative private deals have obtained White House videotapes showing Clinton conferring with one of Hubbell’s biggest benefactors.

Administration officials confirmed that independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr requested the tapes, which show, among other things, Clinton visiting in the Oval Office with Indonesian billionaire James T. Riady.

The videotaped meeting occurred on June 24, 1994--about the same time Riady hired Hubbell through a Hong Kong company for unspecified services--and paid him $100,000.

Starr, who is overseeing an investigation of the president’s and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton’s roles in the Whitewater controversy, is examining whether Clinton supporters arranged well-paying deals for Hubbell to discourage his cooperation with that probe.

According to people familiar with the Whitewater investigation, Starr’s office is reviewing the videotapes to assess conversations between Riady and Clinton that are audible and to identify prospective witnesses.

Clinton has said he did not know Riady had hired Hubbell until news reports appeared in 1996.

White House Special Counsel Lanny J. Davis said Tuesday that the Riady tapes do not show Clinton involved in an effort to help Hubbell.

“Nothing on the videotapes alters one iota our previous statements regarding the timing of the president’s knowledge” of Hubbell’s deals, Davis said.

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Starr’s action reflects continuing interest in the president’s contacts with those helping Hubbell and in Hubbell’s private employment after he resigned from the Justice Department over fraudulent billings in his earlier law practice.

Starr’s office has called witnesses before a grand jury in Little Rock, Ark., in preparation for a possible criminal prosecution of Hubbell related to the private income he earned after his resignation in April 1994.

Depending on their evaluation of the deals, prosecutors will consider conspiracy or tax charges. Hubbell served an earlier sentence for the fraudulent billings.

The videotapes, recorded by the White House Communications Agency, show an assortment of scenes of the president at fund-raisers and private events with supporters, donors and others. White House officials turned them over to investigators only last month, blaming earlier staff miscommunications about subpoenaed materials. But administration critics have questioned how the tapes could have been overlooked for months, since they were recorded in plain sight of Clinton and numerous senior aides.

“It’s hard to walk away when they’re thumbing their nose at you,” said one investigator, citing the videotapes.

Hubbell, during the 14 months between leaving the Clinton administration and entering federal prison in August 1995, received about $500,000 from a dozen or more private deals, many obtained with the help of top aides to the president.

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The Riady deal has attracted particular attention because of its size. It also involves people who figure prominently in allegedly improper fund-raising for the Democrats during the 1996 campaign.

Hubbell’s employment was facilitated, according to people familiar with the matter, by John Huang, the former star Democratic fund-raiser whom Clinton appointed in July 1994 to a trade position at the Commerce Department. Huang’s lawyer, Ty Cobb, declined to comment.

Huang was present in the Oval Office on June 24, 1994, when Clinton met with Riady. The videotapes made public recently also verify that Clinton, Riady and Huang again visited in the Oval Office on Sept. 10, 1994. Huang was Riady’s top executive in the United States until the time Huang joined the Clinton administration.

White House officials have said the visits were primarily social. Riady saw Clinton at the White House three times in 1994 and made a total of 20 visits there from 1993 to 1996, according to records and interviews. Riady and Clinton were acquainted from Riady’s stint as a banker in Arkansas.

But investigators in the campaign fund-raising affair are probing whether Riady and Huang helped the Clintons and the Democratic Party so they could gain a voice on U.S. policy with China and other Asian nations, where the Riadys have extensive investments.

Interviews and records reviewed by The Times show that in addition to arranging employment for Hubbell, Riady approved a $12,000 contribution, made in August 1995, for private-school tuition for one of Hubbell’s children.

The $12,000 contribution was made in the name of the Arkansas International Development Corp., a for-profit joint venture between Riady’s conglomerate and C. Joseph Giroir, a lawyer in Little Rock.

Giroir, reached Tuesday in Australia, where he is traveling on business, said he specifically discussed the 1995 payment with Riady because “it was not a business-type expenditure and our venture was a business venture. And I thought it was the type of thing that I should discuss with him.”

Giroir recalled that “We agreed to do it, mutually.”

Giroir also said he had earlier, around mid-1994, alerted Riady that Hubbell faced possible criminal charges. “The rumor was that Webb was going to be indicted,” Giroir said, recalling that Riady, upon being told this, “seemed surprised and saddened.”

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Clinton supporters who steered employment to Hubbell have said they did so out of compassion for his family, not to buy his silence.

Hubbell and Hillary Clinton, until they came to Washington in 1993, had been senior law partners at the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock. They worked on certain real-estate transactions that are at the heart of the Whitewater controversy.

Hubbell pledged to cooperate with the Whitewater investigation when he pleaded guilty in December 1994 to fraud and tax-evasion charges from his Rose billings. However, after serving 18 months either in prison or under federal supervision, Hubbell did not provide the information that prosecutors were seeking.

In the ongoing Whitewater probe, prosecutors in Little Rock also are continuing to evaluate documents found last spring in the trunk of an abandoned car there, which raise questions about whether Clinton in the 1980s received an undisclosed loan from a savings and loan.

A check, made out to Clinton for $27,600, was among the documents. However, the check was not endorsed by Clinton.

The president’s lawyer, David E. Kendall, said this month that if the check is authentic, it “appears to represent” the repayment of a loan obtained in 1981 by James B. McDougal, the Clintons’ partner in the Whitewater Development Co. Neither of the Clintons signed for the loan, according to Kendall.

Starr on Oct. 31 obtained a six-month extension, until May 8, 1998, for the Whitewater grand jury that has been hearing evidence in Little Rock.

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Times staff writer Glenn F. Bunting contributed to this story.