A stocky 30-year-old who lives in a fire station in Burtonsville, Md., where he volunteers as a fireman, Bossie hardly seems threatening. But he is the key player in a well-organized network determined to bring down the Clintons. Among friends, Hillary Clinton angrily blames her Whitewater problems on the relentlessness of this network, which includes publications like The Washington Times and figures like Rush Limbaugh and Sen. Lauch Faircloth.
Bossie is a ready resource for journalists covering Whitewater. He provides documents and points them toward leads. The subpoena that hit Clinton last week resulted in part from an early Bossie press tip. He helped steer reporters to former Arkansas judge David Hale, who alleges that Clinton pressured him to make an illegal loan to the Clintons’ Whitewater partners. Hale is now the chief witness in the trial of Jim and Susan McDougal.
Bossie is an instant authority on the scandal: he has assembled thick briefing books that include tax returns, copies of deeds and canceled checks. In 1994 Bossie and an NBC crew went to Fayetteville, Ark., and chased after Beverly Bassett Schaffer, the former state official who regulated Madison. She later accused Bossie of ““stalking’’ her. Usually, he prefers working in the shadows. When told he would be the subject of a NEWSWEEK story, he threatened to stop providing information to the magazine’s reporters.
For the past seven months, Bossie has had an official role in the affair as an aide to Faircloth. Bossie’s anti-Clinton motivation is ideological: a gofer in Reagan’s ‘84 campaign, he trained in the aggressive wing of the conservative movement in the ’80s. His mentor was Floyd Brown, a master at right-wing agitprop who produced the infamous Willie Horton commercial in 1988 and, four years later, set up a phone line to play tapes of Gennifer Flowers’s salacious conversations with Clinton. Bossie had gone to work for Brown in early 1992 and was soon dogging the family of a woman who committed suicide while she was rumored to be pregnant with Bill Clinton’s child. The family bitterly denied the allegation and even Bossie now admits it was baseless.
But he defends his zeal in confronting the dead woman’s family. ““It was something I couldn’t ignore,’’ he told NEWSWEEK. Besides, he found Clinton campaign operatives on the trail of the same story, and ““they knew where the bodies are buried.’’ Bossie tries to be modest. ““I’m just a little cog in a big wheel,’’ he insists. A wheel that’s splattering mud all over the White House.
