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June 17, 1996

CLINTON CAN'T GET IT RIGHT - WHOSE WRONG?

by Staff Journalists , The Daily Republican Newspaper


WASHINGTON DESK - Today the Senate Whitewater Committee publicly released the findings of its Final Report. It makes out a clear-cut case for obstruction of justice by either or both first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton and president William Jefferson Clinton.

The Final Report lays out a trail of obstruction leading from the first lady and back to her. The Committee has referred the Final Report to the special prosecutor's office who will make the final decision as to whether there is to be criminal prosecutions.

Meanwhile, the Little Rock criminal trial begins, and the nation is stunned over revelations of the abuse of power by the Clinton's in the Whitewater-related controversy over the improper gathering of FBI files during Clinton's first year in office. The Clinton White House maintained yesterday that the use of the FBI files was not intentional. On Saturday, the president apologized for an "innocent SNAFU" by a lower echelon Army employee and added that no one had looked into the FBI files.

On Sunday, it was disclosed by former White House aides, that the White House Chief of Security, a Mr. Linvingston, was a close personal friend of the first lady, That his previous occupation was tat of a bouncer in a Pennsylvania bar. That he had no security clearance. That he had bragged to White House aides that he had seen their FBI files and knew confidential information about them.

By Sunday evening, the word had leaked out that president Clinton had relieved Mr. Livingstone of his high-level post in the White House and had placed him on 'paid leave' for an indeterminate time.

Just today, it was disclosed that president Clinton has reorganized White House 'security' in order to replace Mr. Livingstone with a 'career level' security employee.

Political analysts contend that character questions continue to damage the Clinton administration badly. One recent poll, by Time Magazine and CNN, has shown a sharp tightening of the presidential race that CNN pollsters attributed in large part to concerns over the Clintons' character.There is no doubt that many Americans have questions about the president and first lady's character, particularly personal morality.

In a sworn affidavit requested by the Senate Whitewater Committee, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton on Monday denied knowing how her missing law firm billing records turned up in the White House living quarters, while her attorney, David E. Kendall, accused the Republican-controlled panel of carrying out a "last-minute hit-and-run smear."

Mrs. Clinton's brief affidavit was filed in response to an eleventh-hour request from the committee's chairman, Sen. Alfonse M. D'Amato (R-N.Y.), as the panel prepared to wrap up its 13-month inquiry. It represented her first sworn testimony to the committee, although senators have had access to other statements that she has made to federal investigators.

Instead of a direct answer to the Senate Committee question the first lady only said: "I do not know how the billing records came to be identified" by a White House aide or wound up in a book room on the third floor of the executive mansion, Mrs. Clinton said in her statement which also included the attachment of a sharply worded letter from Kendall attacking the Senate White Water Committee. Kendall wrote that it was:

" ... plain to the public that the majority [Republican] report is simply the politically preordained verdict of a partisan kangaroo court. It simply makes no difference what information we furnish you. The special committee majority has adopted the procedural style of the Queen of Hearts in 'Alice in Wonderland': 'Sentence first, evidence afterwards.' "

Key parts of the Senate Final Report accuse White House aides of misusing and abusing their power by seeking to thwart federal investigations into Whitewater-related events and using confidential law enforcement data to try to shield the Clintons from legal trouble.

The report also views Mrs. Clinton as the only suspect in the sudden appearance in the White House last January of long-sought billing records for her past work as a lawyer for Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan Assn. in Little Rock, Ark., the failed thrift that is at the heart of the Whitewater investigation.

In addition, the Final Report accuses her of having directed aides to limit the search of White House lawyer Vincent Foster's office after his suicide in July 1993, in an effort to prevent incriminating documents from being found. In her affidavit, the first lady said that she saw her billing records in 1985 and 1986 when her former Little Rock law firm was seeking payment from Madison Guaranty and that she recalls discussing her legal work during the 1992 presidential campaign, when some reporters began asking about the issue.

These discussions were with Foster and Webster L. Hubbell, her law partners at the time, she said, but she had no further contact with the documents. Hubbell, who later became a high-ranking Justice Department official, pleaded guilty last year to overbilling clients and cheating his law partners. He is now serving a federal prison term.

An FBI analysis showed that Foster's fingerprints and those of Mrs. Clinton were found on the records but the analysis could not determine when they were placed there and thus it shed no light on who may have handled the records after they were subpoenaed in January 1994.

The first lady's affidavit failed to respond to a Senate request for her recollection of a 1986 conversation with Don Denton, who recently told U.S. bank examiners he had warned Mrs. Clinton that a Madison loan transaction she was handling might be improper.

Denton, who headed Madison Guaranty's loan department, said that Mrs. Clinton abruptly dismissed his concerns about some aspects of the so-called Castle Grande real estate deal that was a phony loan scam the bank regulators called a"sham" transaction.

Kendall's letter to the Senate Committee tried to limit the damage to the Clintons of "the Denton evidence" as "a last-minute hit-and-run smear. Kendall said, "Mr. Denton's sudden recollection of a 12-minute phone call with Mrs. Clinton over 10 years ago is wholly unreliable."

The Senate Committee's legal counsel, Michael Chertoff, expressed said that the first lady had been unclear as to what she knew about the mysterious appearance of her billing records in the White House residence years after the records had been subpoenaed by the Committee. He also suggested that she had not fully addressed the question about other files, such as those of Madison Guaranty.

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