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Ned Ray was worth so many votes that I didn’t care what he called Al, or me for that matter. In August, Kenneth Starr lost his first big case, one that reflected just how desperate he and his staff were to pin something on me. Starr had indicted the two owners of the Perry County Bank, lawyer Herby Branscum Jr. and accountant Rob Hill, on charges arising out of my 1990 gubernatorial campaign. The indictment stated that Branscum and Hill had taken about $13,000 from their own bank for legal and accounting services they did not perform in order to reimburse themselves for political contributions they had made, and that they had instructed the man who ran the bank for them not to report two cash withdrawals of more than $10,000 each from my campaign account to the Internal Revenue Service as required by federal law.

The indictment also named Bruce Lindsey, who had served as my campaign treasurer, as an “unindicted co-conspirator,” alleging that when Bruce withdrew the money to pay for our election day “get out the vote” activities, he had urged the bankers not to file the required report. Starr’s people had threatened Bruce with an indictment, but he called their bluff; there was nothing wrong with our contributions or the way they had been spent, and Bruce had no motive for asking the bank not to make the required filing on it: we would be making all the information public in three weeks as required by Arkansas state election law. Since the contributions and their expenditure were legal and our public report was accurate, Starr’s people knew Bruce hadn’t committed a crime, so they settled for smearing him as an unindicted co-conspirator.

The charges against Branscum and Hill were absurd. First, they wholly owned the bank; if they did not impair the bank’s liquidity, they could take money out of it as long as they paid income taxes on it, and there was no suggestion that they had not done so in this case. As to the second charge, the law that requires a bank to report cash deposits or withdrawals of $10,000 or more is a good one; it permits the government to follow large amounts of “dirty money” from criminal enterprises like money laundering or drug dealing. The reports filed with the government are checked every three to six months but are not open to the public. As of 1996, there had been two hundred prosecutions for failure to file the reports required by the act, but only twenty of them were for failures to report withdrawals. All of those involved money that was tainted by an illegal enterprise. Until Starr came along, no one had ever been indicted for a negligent failure to report deposits or withdrawals of legitimate funds. Our campaign money was undisputably clean money that had been withdrawn at the end of the campaign to pay for our efforts to call voters and offer rides to the polls on election day. We had filed the required public report within three weeks after the election, detailing how much money we had spent and how we had spent it. Branscum, Hill, and Lindsey simply had no motive to hide from the government a legal cash withdrawal that would be a matter of public record in less than a month. That didn’t stop Hickman Ewing, Starr’s deputy in Arkansas, who was just as obsessed as Starr with going after us and not nearly as good at disguising it. He threatened to send Neal Ainley, who ran the bank for Branscum and Hill and who had been responsible for filing the reports, to prison unless he testified that Branscum, Hill, and Lindsey had ordered him not to file it, even though Ainley had earlier denied any wrongdoing by them. The poor man was a little fish caught in a powerful net; he changed his story. Initially charged with five felonies, Ainley was now allowed to plead to two misdemeanors. As in the earlier trial of the McDougals and Tucker, I testified on videotape at the request of the defendants. Though I had not been involved in the withdrawals, I was able to say I had not appointed Branscum and Hill to the two state boards on which they served in return for their contributions to my campaign.

After a vigorous defense, Branscum and Hill were acquitted on the reporting charges, and the jury deadlocked on the question of whether they had falsely reported the purposes for which they had withdrawn funds from their own bank. I was relieved that Herby, Rob, and Bruce Lindsey were cleared, but sickened by the abuse of prosecutorial power, the enormous legal costs my friends had been forced to bear, and the staggering costs to the taxpayers of a prosecution over the $13,000 of reimbursements the defendants got from their own bank and the failure to file federal reports on two legal and publicly reported withdrawals of campaign funds.

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