I remember some of his questioning and he was like a pit bull. If anybody but Damato had been chairman of that committee, he might have found out something. Damato was a usful idiot for the dems. Instead the entire hearing became a farce and set the stage for all the coverups that followed and lent victim status to the Clintons and their henchmen. IMHO
I remember this as clearly as I'm sitting here right now. The following doesn't really convey it, but the Senate hearing went into complete meltdown. Sarbanes and D'Amato were both yelling at Chertoff.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/003/967rwskg.asp?pg=2
On February 7, 1996, majority counsel Michael Chertoff posed a series of eerily prescient questions to Webster Hubbell in a televised hearing before the Senate Whitewater committee. Chertoff asked Hubbell, who had been brought up from prison in Maryland to testify, about his employment prospects following his release from prison.
"Are you familiar with a group called the Lippo Group?" Chertoff asked. This was the first public inquiry into a matter that would, seven months later, break out into the Clinton campaign-finance scandal. In February 1996, no one outside the financial community knew much about the Indonesian conglomerate run by Mochtar Riady and his son James. And no one outside the
Clinton Arkansas circle knew much about the many, many connections between Lippo and the Clinton crowd--connections apparently based on the flow of Lippo-linked cash into Democratic political operations and rewards for it from the Clinton team in the form of access and influence.
Hubbell responded that an affiliate of the Lippo Group had been a client of his between his resignation from Justice and his guilty plea.
"Did you have other clients?" Chertoff asked.
"Yes," Hubbell replied.
When Democratic senator Paul Sarbanes asked Chertoff what the relevance of all this might be, Chertoff said he was interested in knowing whether the money Hubbell received "may have had an impact on your degree of cooperation with the independent counsel or with us." (At Hubbell's sentencing after his plea agreement, Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth Starr had asked for no leniency--a clear signal that Starr didn't believe Hubbell was cooperating fully with his investigation.)
Hubbell protested vigorously, and committee chairman Alfonse D'Amato ruled that any further questions along these lines would be addressed in private depositions.
Do you remember he was smirking when he asked Hubbell the questions?
As the above-referenced Weekly Standard says, he didn't know what exectly it was, but Chertoff knew he was on to something.