McDougal request to unseal files is rejected
Posted on Saturday, June 21, 2008
A federal judge Friday rejected Susan McDougal’s request to unseal certain grand jury proceedings from the 1990 s Whitewater investigation involving Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton, among others.
The investigation, named for a failed real estate transaction, led to McDougal’s 1996 conviction on four felony fraud and conspiracy charges related to illegal loans obtained through the U. S. Small Business Administration.
It also led to McDougal being jailed in September 1996 on civil contempt-of-court charges, at the order of U. S. District Judge Susan Webber Wright, after Mc-Dougal refused to answer questions before a Whitewater grand jury.
McDougal remained jailed until March 1998, then served three months of her two-year sentence for the felony convictions.
Upon her June 1998 release for health reasons, McDougal was charged with obstruction of justice and two counts of criminal contempt of court. A jury acquitted her of the obstruction charge and deadlocked on both contempt counts in 1999, and the government dismissed the charges.
President Clinton pardoned McDougal in 2001.
In late January, McDougal of Camden filed a motion asking the court to unseal the record, including normally secret grand jury testimony.
Her attorney, Bobby McDaniel of Jonesboro, said McDougal wanted the material for a movie being made about her role in the Whitewater investigation. He also said, “Susan and I think the public ought to have a right to know about it.” McDaniel predicted that the information, if unsealed, would be “embarrassing to our government” and that he hoped it would “prevent this kind of abuse in the future.” In a five-page order issued Friday, Senior U. S. Circuit Judge Pasco Bowman of Kansas City, Mo., who was assigned to the case after all the district judges in the Eastern District of Arkansas recused from it, turned down the request. He said McDougal hasn’t shown any “particularized need” for the grand jury materials, “much less the ‘strong showing’ that the Supreme Court has said is required.” Bowman noted that McDougal’s pleading was filed under the case number for the criminal obstruction and contempt case, but its text referred to the proceedings resulting in the civil contempt finding.
“It appears that McDougal has confused her civil contempt proceeding with her criminal contempt and obstruction trial, although parts of the record in both cases were sealed,” Bowman noted. In any event, he said, it doesn’t matter because “she has not made a case for the disclosure of anything that was sealed because of the need for grand jury secrecy.” McDaniel couldn’t be reached Friday afternoon for comment.
In April, an attorney for the Public Integrity Section of the U. S. Department of Justice filed a response to McDougal’s request, arguing that McDougal had provided “no legal basis” for the records being unsealed.
The attorney, Justin Shur, argued that McDougal must show that her request falls within a recognized exception to the long-standing rule of grand jury secrecy and that a “particularized need” exists for the disclosure.
Shur’s office handled the filing because the office of independent counsel that pursued the Whitewater case has expired.
He attached a copy of an undated Arkansas Democrat-Gazette news clipping in which McDaniel was quoted as saying that McDougal wanted the information for purposes of the film. The order indicated that was the judge’s only indication that the material was being requested for purposes of a film.
Bowman discounted McDougal’s argument that the record should be unsealed because the Whitewater investigation is “old news” and that the reasons for sealing the record have “grown stale and disappeared.” “As the Supreme Court has noted, some of the reasons for grand jury secrecy — such as fear or concern of future witnesses that their testimony may someday be revealed — outlive individual cases,” Bowman wrote.
He added, “That is particularly true here, considering the high-profile nature of the investigations undertaken by the Whitewater grand jury and the involvement of the then-sitting President of the United States and First Lady — neither of whom was indicted and both of whom remain public figures today.”
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