High court reviews Starr's appeal in Hubbell tax case

From staff and wire reports

October 12, 1999
Web posted at: 3:10 p.m. EDT (1910 GMT)

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The Supreme Court Tuesday agreed to review Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr's appeal to hold former Justice Department official and Whitewater figure Webster Hubbell to a guilty plea on a misdemeanor tax charge.


Hubbell

Hubbell had admitted to evading taxes on hundreds of thousands of dollars of income he received from friends of President Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton in 1994, while under criminal investigation by Starr's office.

The justices will consider whether personal documents that Hubbell was required to produce for the Starr grand jury under a grant of limited immunity may still be used against him.

A federal appeals court set a standard that Starr has acknowledged would have made the case against Hubbell extremely difficult to prove. When Hubbell entered his guilty plea last June, Starr promised to seek to have the guilty plea dismissed and to drop the tax case if the Supreme Court failed to overturn the lower court ruling.

Hubbell's guilty plea will remain in place only if the high court rules for Starr after hearing oral arguments sometime this winter. A decision is expected by late June.

The Tuesday action does not affect Hubbell's guilty plea to a felony charge involving legal work for a savings and loan at the center of the Whitewater investigation.

Hubbell, the former No 3. Justice Department official, was sentenced on June 30 to a year's probation after entering pleas that wrapped up the Whitewater phase of Starr's work.

Hubbell says using papers violates Fifth Amendment

The April 1998 indictment was based partly on Hubbell's financial papers, which he was forced to provide to prosecutors in 1996 under a limited grant of immunity from prosecutors.

Hubbell argued that using the papers to prosecute him would violate his privilege against self-incrimination, guaranteed by the Constitution's Fifth Amendment.

A federal judge agreed and dismissed the charges. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit revived them last January but said Starr's office could use information from the documents only if prosecutors could show they previously had "reasonably particular knowledge" of their existence.

"That is a daunting standard that no prosecutor is ever likely to meet," Starr said in the appeal acted on Tuesday. "We readily concede that the government could not make a case against ... (Hubbell) without use of the contents of the documents he delivered to us."

Starr contended his office could use the documents' contents so long as prosecutors did not seek to show they came from Hubbell.

Starr said Hubbell's plea showed that if the independent counsel were allowed to use the documents, his guilt would be "readily established."

Hubbell's lawyers said the legal standard urged by Starr would let prosecutors obtain documents through a grant of immunity "and still use the documents to prosecute the witness, so long as the jury is not told where the documents came from."

"Without the immunity order, and Mr. Hubbell's truthful response ... the independent counsel and the grand jury would not have had access to the documents," his lawyers said.

Correspondent Charles Bierbauer and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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