Thread by @nimkef

21 June 1994

Somewhere safe, Laura Jean Lewis keeps her most valuable, and perhaps most volatile, possession. It is an audio cassette tape, a recording so important, so politically charged, that she is known to have played it for only one person.

articles.latimes.com/1994-06-21/new…

The tape is supposedly a recording of a private conversation between Lewis & April Breslaw, a senior govt attorney who denies the convo ever took place, is like everything else about Jean Lewis and her critical role in the Whitewater scandal: It remains shrouded in intrigue.

L. Jean Lewis is emerging as Whitewater's mystery woman. Lewis will tell her story on Capitol Hill, allegations of check kiting and other questionable dealings between Clinton's and their Arkansas business partner, and a possible cover-up within the Clinton Administration.

All that figures to make her the star witness in what still seems likely to become the biggest Washington scandal since Iran-Contra.

"I think Jean Lewis could prove to be more troublesome for Bill Clinton than Paula Jones," argues Rep. Jim Leach, (R-Iowa), the Republican Party's point man on Whitewater, and Lewis' main protector in Congress.

Today, Jean Lewis is struggling to cope with her new-found status as presidential whistle-blower.

"I'm just trying to maintain... some days are better than others," says Lewis. "I find myself in a very difficult situation. I don't want any publicity out of this, I really don't.

"Any quotes you may have seen from me in the press have all been surprise interviews, where reporters got me outside my house. I hope there comes a time where I can talk more freely, but right now...."

40yo Houston native & daughter of a retired U.S. Army major general, Lewis is a bureaucrat in the field office of an obscure federal regulatory agency here and has never met Bill Clinton or Hillary. She earns $54k/yr at the Resolution Trust Corp., the federal govt's S&L-cleanup.

She combs through paperwork left behind by failed savings and loans after they are seized by regulators. As a senior criminal investigator at the RTC regional office here, she looks for signs of criminal wrongdoing by S&L; executives and their friends and business partners.

If she finds something suspicious, she is supposed to send a recommendation for criminal action to the DoJ.

"Jean loves digging out facts and details," observes Van Glover, a former S&L; executive who worked with Lewis at a Dallas thrift before she joined the RTC.

Lewis' job at that ailing S&L; was to act as liaison with the FBI and regulatory agency officials in their criminal investigation of the thrift's management, and she handled most of the document searches for the investigators.

"She was great at the nitty gritty detail work. Investigating makes some people very nervous, especially where you are investigating powerful people. But it never made Jean nervous. She loved it."

Lewis joined the RTC in 1991 after a government investigator she had worked with at the Dallas S&L; recommended her for an opening in the Tulsa, Okla., office.

Soon, she was assigned to investigate the wreckage of Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan, a Little Rock S&L; owned by James McDougal--the Clintons' partner in Whitewater, a failed land development project in the Ozark Mountains of northern Arkansas.

Lewis, a lowly federal bureaucrat who has stumbled into the Whitewater scandal, guards the tape so fiercely because she believes it is her best defense against the mounting attacks on her reputation from Washington.

At first, the case hardly looked promising. By the time Lewis came on the scene, Madison had long since gone belly-up and McDougal had already been tried and acquitted of criminal fraud charges stemming from the S&L;'s failure.

But before it closed the books on Madison, the RTC wanted to take one last look.

After an initial probe in 1991 that turned up little out of Madison's disastrously disorganized records, she and her colleagues set the case aside again.

But then, a bombshell struck; in March, 1992, in the midst of the presidential campaign, the NYT first reported the existence of Whitewater and McDougal's business ties to the Clintons. That prompted Lewis and the RTC to reopen the case.

She & other RTC staffers pieced together enough to submit a referral in Sept 1992 to the US Attorney in Little Rock that, didn't accuse the Clintons of any crimes, but named Whitewater & the Clintons as possible beneficiaries of criminal acts at Madison.

https://twitter.com/nimkef/status/1437161142577680389?s=20

Then something happened that Lewis couldn't quite fathom; the criminal referral naming the next President of the United States was swallowed up by the federal bureaucracy.

Her E-mail and internal memos at the RTC, released to the press by Rep. Leach, show that Lewis tried unsuccessfully for months to find out what had happened to the Madison referral within the DoJ.

Spring & Summer 1993
She repeatedly called the USA's office in Little Rock and the DoJ searching for answers. Lewis didn't receive final word until the fall that the new USA in Little Rock, Paula Casey, a former law student of Bill Clinton, had turned down her referral.

Lewis & others in KC had begun work on a new criminal referrals in the Madison case.

Oct 1993
Lewis issued 9 referrals, inc. 1 naming Bill's 1984 campaign for Gov, which received campaign contributions from a McDougal fund-raiser, as a beneficiary of criminal acts at Madison.

Lewis was prepared to show that Whitewater had become a funnel for siphoning money out of Madison; she claimed that as much as $70k in Madison funds had gone through Whitewater in one six-month period alone.

This time, the referrals didn't get buried. In fact, they led quickly to a furious round of high-level meetings in Washington between Treasury and White House officials.

Lewis was pulled off the Madison case almost immediately. Mike Forshey, a Dallas attorney who represents Lewis, says that her supervisor in Kansas City, Richard Iorio, was ordered to remove her from the Madison case by RTC attorneys soon after the Madison referrals were issued.

Forshey says Iorio never told Lewis the reason she was being reassigned, "because Iorio was never given a reason."

Lewis was taken off the case despite the fact she had received a $1k internal cash award in 1993 from RTC mgmt for her part in the Madison criminal investigation.

She has been recommended for a second award, in the form of extra paid time off, for work on the Madison civil investigation. That second award has been delayed because RTC attorneys have opposed citing Lewis and the others for their work, Forshey says.

"The powers that be have decided that I'm better off out of the line of fire (and I ain't arguing)," a seemingly relieved Lewis wrote in an electronic message to her co-workers on Nov. 10.

The case was turned over to Michael Caron, a colleague in KC. While others saw nothing more than typical bureaucratic incompetence behind the long delays and mishandling of the initial referral, Lewis seemed increasingly convinced that a cover-up was in the works.

"It's beginning to sound like somebody, or multiple somebodies, are trying to carefully control the outcome of any investigation surrounding the RTC referrals, and the beginnings of a cover-up may have already started months ago," she wrote in an email to her supervisors Jan 6

So Lewis could not keep her suspicions in check when April Breslaw, a senior attorney at the RTC's HQ in DC, came to Kansas City in early February to check on the Madison case. And when Breslaw came to her office to talk, sources say Lewis secretly taped their conversation.

In notes she wrote after the meeting, Lewis claimed that Breslaw told her that "people at the top" in Washington wanted to be able to say that Whitewater did not cause a loss at Madison; if that were true, that would help extricate the Clintons from the scandal.

"April stated very clearly that the 'head people' wanted to be able to say that Whitewater did not cause a loss to Madison, but the problem is that so far no one has been able to say that to them," Lewis wrote in a memo to herself.

"She felt like they wanted to be able to provide an honest answer, but that there were certain answers that they would be happier about because it would get them off the hook." Breslaw she has previously denied that she ever made the comments that Lewis has attributed to her.

After her meeting with Breslaw, Lewis says she had heard and seen enough. By mid-February, she had made contact with Leach, who she knew was already leading a campaign in the House to begin a congressional investigation into Whitewater.

Still wary, she refused to talk to Leach's staffers, and would only deal with the Iowa congressman directly. Within days, Leach, the ranking Republican on the House Banking Committee, flew secretly to Kansas City to meet with her.

Lewis played the tape of her conversation with Breslaw for Leach, and gave him sheafs of internal RTC documents and memos, including copies of her E-mail. Leach said in an interview that the tape confirms Lewis' versions of events.

Leach went public with Lewis' records and allegations in a dramatic presentation on the House floor on March 24; since then, Lewis and her colleagues in Kansas City have been cooperating with Whitewater special counsel Robert Fiske.

Forshey says Lewis has not yet been subpoenaed by Fiske and she has not testified before the Whitewater grand jury in Little Rock, however, so it is unclear whether she has provided Fiske's staff with her tapes, memos and other evidence.

Her celebrity status now seems to give her job security; the RTC just renewed her annual employment contract, even though the agency is rapidly downsizing and is scheduled to go out of existence at the end of 1995.

As Whitewater is set to burst back into the headlines with the start of this summer's hearings, it is Lewis' zealous eagerness to provide evidence that has raised many of the most troubling questions about her.

Justice Department officials and other critics, who have gone largely unnamed in the press, have suggested that Lewis styles herself as an amateur sleuth obsessed with making a name for herself by making more out of Whitewater and the Clintons' involvement than is really there.

Even Leach notes that she is a registered Republican.

Her friends & allies argue that what some see as obsessive behavior is really just a stubborn persistence, a trait that has made her a top investigator willing to run down leads in the face of unrelenting pressure to back off

"While Jean was the lead criminal investigator, the entire criminal investigative team is with her, and supportive of her," Leach says. "What you have in Jean Lewis and her colleagues is a group of individuals in an obscure agency intent on upholding the law."