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Free at Last!
SCOTUS Rules 8-1 to Dismiss Charges against Webb Hubbell
by Tamara Baker

Monday, June 5, 2000 -- ST. PAUL, MINNESOTA (AmpolNS) -- Live by the immunity agreement, die by the immunity agreement.

The wondrous immunity agreement, which Linda Tripp used to save her own bacon (and that of her fellow elves) last month, has now come back to bite the OIC in the butt.

Remember the much-touted convictions Starr got on Webb Hubbell, using evidence Hubbell provided under an immunity agreement with Starr's OIC?

At least one of them isn't sticking:

The Supreme Court handed presidential friend Webster Hubbell a victory Monday that wipes out his guilty plea to a misdemeanor tax charge.
The justices' 8-1 ruling said prosecutors could not use financial documents against Hubbell that he was forced to produce under a limited grant of immunity. Using the documents would violate his protection against self-incrimination under the Constitution's Fifth Amendment, the justices said.
Hubbell pleaded guilty to the tax charge last year on condition his plea would be dismissed if the Supreme Court ruled in his favor on whether the documents could be used. Monday, the nation's highest court ordered the charge against him dismissed.
"The documents did not magically appear in the prosecutor's office like 'manna from heaven,'" Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the court. "They arrived there only after (Hubbell) asserted his constitutional privilege, received a grant of immunity" and provided the documents.
"We have no doubt that the constitutional privilege against self-incrimination protects the target of a grand jury investigation from being compelled to answer questions designed to elicit information about the existence of sources of potentially incriminating evidence," Stevens wrote.
Hubbell had reached the plea agreement with former independent counsel Kenneth Starr, who was replaced by Robert W. Ray last October.

Webb Hubbell has been in Kenny Starr's gunsights ever since Webb, when he was the #3 man at DOJ back in Clinton's first term, cost Ken Starr personally between one and two million dollars in outside legal work, reducing Starr to his $116,000-a-year DOJ salary. Hubbell did this by extending for a year a moratorium on DOJ employees doing outside legal work.

Kenny used his position as Whitewater OIC head to vengefully Hoover through every single detail of Webb Hubbell's life, both to nail Webb to the wall and to go after Webb's friends, Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Kenny Starr has a funny way of looking at the grants of immunity that he made while he was OIC head. When they are granted to people whose mouths he wants shut forever, such as Linda Tripp, they are all-potent and cover a wide variety of situations. When they are granted to folks he wants to destroy, like Webb Hubbell, they wouldn't cover a baseball.

But the Supreme Court, with one exception, does not share that view. Grants are grants, and what goes for Linda Tripp in the Maryland courts goes for Webb Hubbell before the Supreme Court.

Poor Kenny. He's been so used to breaking the law and getting away with it that it really stings when the law is actually enforced as it was meant to be.

To be sure, Webb still has other Starr-caused convictions on his record: convictions sane legal observers say would never have been brought by an honest and ethcial prosecutor. But he has just about served his time on them.

And this last outstanding blot against his reputation has now been erased, courtesy of the US Supreme Court.

Free at last, free at last -- Webb Hubbell is free at last!