That dull thud you heard out of Washington was the Ray Report.
Ten years after theNew York Times" incompetent reporting instigated it, the great Whitewater snipe hunt
came to a merciful end. $73 million in the making, theOIC's 2200 page effort at self-justification ended up
costing, as Joe Conason pointed out, roughly $33,000 a page.

           Pardon me for saying so, but you read it all here first. Indeed, as the Ray Report sheepishly concedes
in a section somehow overlooked by the dogged sleuths in the Washington press, its findings are virtually
indistinguishable from a 1992 report written for the Clintons by Denver attorney James Lyons (no kin),
or theTreasury Department's widely-ignored 1995 report by the law firm of Pillsbury, Madison & Sutro.
 
      Here's the summary conclusion of the "Arkansas phase:" The Clintons' investment in Whitewater was financially unsuccessful. They invested a substantial amount ofpersonal funds and realized no profit from the venture. In the main, theypermitted Jim McDougal to manage the investment, and McDougal failed in making the venture profitable.
 
        Indeed, the Whitewater investment was so unsuccessful that McDougal was obliged to engage in a series
of fraudulent transactions to keep the venture afloat. The evidence is unequivocal that, concerning almost all of the
fraudulent transactions, the Clintons were unaware of McDougal's criminal conduct. [T]here is, save in two instances,
no substantial evidence that they participated in or knew of McDougal's acts.
 
       Back to those two instances later. A thousand indignant editorials to thecontrary, the Clintons told the truth all along. Somebody else the report vindicates is former Little Rock Republican U.S. Attorney Chuck Banks, who told his superiors
in 1992 that there was no chance the Clintons knew of McDougal'stomfoolery. Having prosecuted McDougal for fraud,
he'd seen the evidence and knew the poor man's creative ways with other people's money.

      What did Banks get for his principled refusal to open a last minute probe involving  the Democratic presidential nominee? He got investigated by Kenneth Starr. Only Joshua Micah Marshall, writing in Salon, noticed the Ray Report's one real shocker: a detailed account, using sworn testimony, of the Bush White House's improper pressure campaign to use
Whitewater as a 1992 October Surprise. Other Washington reporters kept discreet silence. (The tale's told in less
detail in Conason's and my book The Hunting of the President.)

      Of course Starr's also the same guy who also interviewed 381 witnesses trying to turn Hillary Clinton's lost-and-found
billing records into a crime. Records which, the report shows elsewhere, confirmed her previous testimony down to the semi-colon. Writing on the Washington Post website, reporter Susan Schmidt highlighted the report's solemn
pronouncement that a witness saw Hillary carrying a box containing what could have been a rolled-up sheaf of
billing records. Or a dozen Krispy Kreme donuts, a kilo of cocaine smuggled into Mena airport, or the Ark
of the Covenant. You just never know.

      Somewhere in the night, however, editorial gremlins added quotes from Clinton  attorney David Kendall mocking
the most expensive exoneration in history, and subtracted Schmidt's byline. By the time the newspaper hit the streets,
Starr and Ray's favorite reporter was no longer on the story.

      So here's a suggestion for the mighty New York Times, which ran a churlish editorial conceding that despite less
than wholehearted acquittal, the only fair response is to declare [the Clintons] cleared, but added darkly that unanswered queries still float around the history of the former president and first lady. These Whitewater fundamentalists are still
awaiting big revelations. So why not put ace Jeff Gerth on the Schmidt angle? Did Sen.Hillary Clinton hack the Post
website and remove Schmidt's byline? Or has editor Len Downie, after flogging Schmidt's absurdly one-sided dispatches
for years, been compromised? His recent book The News About the News, never mentions Whitewater at all.

      Any patriot who didn't want to see another president hogtied by mendacious reporters and demented prosecutors
should scrutinize the two instances. Starr used to keep the OIC going for years between the conviction of sadsack
Jim McDougal and the advent of Monica Lewinsky. The first involves the famous $300,000 loan con man David Hale
claimed Bill Clinton pressured him to make. Documents available since 1995 show that McDougal used some of it
to incur a huge debt contrary to the Clintons' interest and repeatedly deceived them about it.

      Instance two concerns a $27,600 cashier's check ostensibly written to Clinton which he never endorsed and clearly
never saw. A clever child could see through the charade. Falsifying documents as usual,McDougal obviously used
Clinton's name to award himself a government-backed loan. FBI testimony at Susan McDougal's contempt trial
admitted that Jim's first story blaming Clinton was proven false. So the Ray Report omits it and offers the backup
version, flimsy nonsense it gravely deems insufficiently corroborated "beyond a reasonable doubt.