Poor Hillary. Just leave those Clintons alone, Christ! In a new book set for release on February 16th, author Ken Gormley says prosecutors were prepared to indict both former President Clinton and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. The planned indictments were related to both the Lewinsky scandal and the Clinon’s Whitewater dealings. Excerpts from the book were first released on the Politico website last Thursday.

In the book, entitled ”The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr”, Monica Lewinsky says she has no doubt that Bill Clinton lied to a grand jury about their relationship.

“There was no leeway on the veracity of his statements because they asked him detailed and specific questions to which he answered untruthfully,” Lewinsky said about Clinton’s grand jury testimony, according to the book.

Gormley also claims in the book that former Secret Service Director Lewis Merletti believed that the FBI was suspicious that he had conspired with Clinton in order to get the top spot at the agency. Merletti claimed that an FBI agent accused him of concealing Clinton’s affair with Lewinsky. Merletti denies that accusation.

Independent counsel Kenneth Starr’s office spent years and millions of dollars in the 1990′s on the investigation into Clinton’s affair with Lewinsky and the efforts to conceal it. The scandal eventually led to Clinton’s impeachment by the House of Representitives. The five-year probe by Starr also looked into the Clintons’ Whitewater business dealings, as well as the suicide of deputy White House counsel Vincent Foster. Starr also investigated the firing of White travel office workers and accusations that White House officials misused FBI files.

According to the book Starr’s successor, Robert Ray, informed Bill Clinton that he was prepared to prosecute the ex-president . In the book Gormley says Ray “took steps to instill the fear of God in the White House.”

“I wanted them to know I was coming,” Ray said. “I was fully of the view that if I was not prepared to carry out the threat, it wasn’t worth making.”

Clinton made a deal with prosecutors to avoid indictment on Jan. 19th 2001, his last full day as president. Clinton admitted he gave false testimony in the Lewinsky matter, in return for a promise to drop the threat of indictment. As part of the deal, the president admitted he gave false answers in a January 1998 deposition, but insisted he didn’t do so knowingly, which is crucial in obtaing a conviction for the crime of perjury.

That in itself would appear to be a lie, as the grand jury questions about Clinton’s involvement with Lewinsky were reportedly very specific. Unless Clinton was unconscious during his sexual encounters with Lewinsky it seems it would have been impossible for him to have “unknowingly” lied.

The book also says that prosecutors under Starr wanted to formally indict Hillary Rodham Clinton in 1998 on charges that she and a  former law partner lied about her business dealings with Madison Guaranty, a failed savings and loan connected to friends James and Susan McDougal.

An indictment was drafted against Clinton and Webster Lee Hubbell to be filed in Arkansas federal court, the book says.

In December 1994, Hubbell pleaded guilty to federal mail fraud and tax evasion charges in connection with his handling of billing at the Rose Law Firm, a firm with partners that once included Hillary Clinton and Vince Foster. Judge George Howard sentenced Hubbell to 21 months in prison.

In 1998  Hubbell and his wife were indicted on 10 counts of conspiracy, tax evasion and mail fraud. District Judge James Robertson later threw out the charges, ruling that Independent Counsel Ken Starr had overstepped his authority in bringing forth the Hubbell indictment.

Hubbell was indicted for a third time later in 1998, this time for fraud and lying to the House Banking Committee and federal banking regulators. Hubbell resolved those charges in a plea agreement with Starr and was sentenced to a year of probabtion.

Susan McDougal eventually spent 18 months in prison for refusing to testify before the Whitewater grand jury.

“Yet the consensus was that any effort to prosecute Mrs. Clinton would be extremely risky,” Gormley writes in the book. Prosecutors believed that “getting an Arkansas or a Washington grand jury to indict the First Lady seemed like a long shot.”

Thanks Examiner.