THIS FAR AND NO FURTHER
A Timeline of Events Surrounding the Radical Right's Attempt to Subvert American Democracy
Written and Compiled by Black Max
1998
March
- March: The Kosovan Liberation Army begins low-level guerrilla warfare against Kosovo's Serbian masters, prompting a harsh response from Yugoslavian and Serbian troops. In the months that follow, hundreds, mostly Kosovan Albanians, will die, and 200,000 will flee their homes. Reprisals against Serbian villages follow. (Wikipedia)
- March 6: Susan McDougal's 18-month maximum for a contempt sentence expires. Her appeal for her Whitewater conviction was refused, so she begins serving her 2-year sentence for that conviction. At the same time, the Whitewater grand jury was closing its procedures without finding a single indictable offense. The OIC decides to indict her again, filing criminal charges against her for her refusal to testify. She is pleased at the filing, and tells her lawyer, "This is going to be our chance. They are not going to put me on trial...we are going to put them on trial!" (Susan McDougal)
- March 8: Jim McDougal dies in prison. Hickman Ewing, the deputy for Kenneth Starr's OIC, delivers the eulogy. Ewing had denied repeated requests from McDougal, who was becoming more and more ill, to be sent to a prison hospital in the last few weeks of his life. Ex-wife Susan McDougal, who is in jail during the same time period, later writes, "...Ewing never responded to Jim's pleas, though he was more than happy to later stand over Jim's dead body and talk about him like they were close friends." (Washington Post, Susan McDougal)
- March 8: Design store owner Susan Pfeifer discusses the Ken Starr-ordered subpoena of her Little Rock home-decorating store, "Design Center," with the press. Recently, Starr demanded a list of all of Webster Hubbell's purchases in order to know more about Hubbell's buying habits. The subpoena wasted a full week of Pfeifer's time: "[W]e were taking boxes of credit-card receipts home at night," she said. "We came up with about $1000 [in sales receipts] over five years. I was really outraged." (New York Times/James Carville)
- March 10-18: Kathleen Willey testifies in the Paula Jones case. She now claims that Clinton sexually assaulted her in the White House. Clinton denies the charges, and releases letters from Willey that contradict her testimony. Willey's friend Julie Hiatt Steele testifies that Willey asked her to lie to Starr's investigators about the incident. Note: Because of her testimony, Steele's life is all but ruined. Starr's investigators engineer her firing from her job, the bank repossession of her house, and mount attempts to have her adopted son taken from her. (Clinton Impeachment Timeline)
- March 13: ABC's 20/20 airs the first of two damning reports filmed in the US protectorate of Saipan, where garment workers endure appalling conditions to produce clothing for a number of US manufacturers, including Wal-Mart, Liz Claiborne, Abercrombie and Fitch, and the Gap. Americans learn that these workers not only live in what amounts to indentured servitude, but many are forced to serve as sex slaves and even endure forced abortions.
- Six years of attempts by Clinton officials and some Democratic congressmen to curb the atrocities in Saipan have achieved little, even after the sensational 20/20 report, largely because in the House, Majority Leader Tom DeLay has blocked all attempts to probe the Saipan sweatshops. Shortly before the broadcast, DeLay puts together a junket for Congressional members to "investigate" Saipan, giving the lawmakers the opportunity to be wined and dined at the Hyatt Regency Saipan, at the expense of the Saipan Garment Manufacturers Association (SGMA) and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI). On a Christmas 1997 junket of his own to Saipan, where he is accompanied by family and aides, DeLay tells SGMA representatives, "You are a shining light for what is happening in the Republican Party, and you represent everything that is good about what we're trying to do in America and in leading the workd in the free market system." Lobbyist Jack Abramoff rakes in $7 million for "representing" Saipan, mostly through the auspices of DeLay. More information about Abramoff follows in later pages of this site.
- DeLay later charges that the stories of Saipan's horrendous working conditions are "incredible lies" by "the left," without explaining that the efforts to investigate Saipan are being headed by conservative Republican senator Frank Murkowski, nor does he explain why he personally blocked fellow House Republican Peter Hoekstra from conducting his own investigation of Saipan, in the process threatening to remove Hoekstra from his subcommittee chairmanship. "Hoekstra was told to lay off the Marianas," recalls a former aide, who describes Hoekstra as "beside himself" with anger. (Hoekstra later downplays the incident with DeLay.) (ABC News/National Journal/Al Franken)
- March 20: Clinton invokes executive privilege to stop some testimony before the Starr grand jury. (Clinton Impeachment Timeline)
- March 25: Kenneth Starr subpoenas the records of two Washington bookstores, Barnes & Noble and Kramerbooks, asking for Monica Lewinsky's book purchase receipts. Lawyers, librarians, civil libertarians, and public interest groups decry Starr's investigation into Lewinsky's reading habits as a gross invasion of privacy. Starr's subpoena "smacked of some of the worst abuses under a totalitarian regime," says the national director of Americans for Democratic Action. And former representative Pat Schroeder, now the head of the Association of American Publishers, says, "This is a scenario that belongs in Baghdad or tehran. I don't think the American people could find anything more alien to our way of life or more repugnant to the Bill of Rights than government intrusion into what we think or what we read." (Clinton Impeachment Timeline, Washington Post/James Carville)
