there had been two hundred prosecutions

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I knew that if theAnimal oil painting, American people saw the election as a choice between building a bridge tothe past and building a bridge to the future, we would win. Bob Dole had unintentionally given me the central message of the 1996 campaign. On the day after the convention closed,Al, Tipper, Hillary, and I kicked off my last campaign with a bus tour, beginning in CapeGirardeau, Missouri, with Governor Floral oil painting,Mel Carnahan, who had been with me since early 1992,anre to pin something on me. Starr had indicted the two owners of the Perry CountyBank, lawyer Herby Branscum Jr. and accountant Rob Hill, on charges arising out of my 1990fore bankvenue Service as required by fLandscape oil painting ,ederal law.nerewas nothing wrong with our contributions or the way they had been spent, and Bruce had nodom criminal enterprises like money laundering or drug dealing. The reports filedwith the government are checked every three to six months but are not open to the public. Astheeenply hadhide from the government a legal cash withdrawal that would be a matter ofpublic record in less than a month.going through southern Illinois and western Kentucky, and winding up in Memphis, afterseveral stops in Tennessee, with former governor Ned Ray McWherter, a huge bear of a mwho was the only person I ever heard call the vice president “Albert.” 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 wegubernatorial 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 political contributions they had made, and that they had instructed the man who ran thfor them not to report two cash withdrawals of more than $10,000 each from my campaign account to the Internal ReThe indictment also named Bruce Lindsey, who had served as my campaign treasurer, as a“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; thmotive 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 Nude oil paintingwere 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 paiincome 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” frof 1996, there had been two hundred prosecutions for failure to file the reports required by 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 bindicted 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 Seascape oil painting,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 simno motive to591