White House Reprimands 4 in Travel Staff Flap

The White House on Friday reprimanded four officials for their roles in the dismissal of seven longtime employees of the White House travel office.

Acknowledging that “mistakes were made” in handling the firings and in improper contacts with the FBI, White House Chief of Staff Thomas (Mack) McLarty vowed that numerous “ill-advised” actions of Administration officials in the affair would not be repeated.

Five of the seven fired workers will be given new jobs in other offices, and a cousin of President Clinton who was put in charge of the travel office after the dismissals will be reassigned.

The White House will not rehire the former director of the office, Billy R. Dale, and his deputy, Gary Wright, because they were responsible for financial oversight in the office, McLarty said.

McLarty and Office of Management and Budget Director Leon E. Panetta insisted that the travel office was badly managed and said that an FBI investigation of the seven employees would continue to determine if funds were inappropriately used.

“We did the right thing, but we clearly did it in the wrong way,” McLarty said at a White House briefing. He apologized to the fired workers.

The four officials who received reprimands--David Watkins, director of administration and management; William Kennedy, an assistant White House counsel; Jeff Eller, director of media affairs; and Catherine Cornelius, the current head of the travel office--all have longtime personal or professional ties to the President or First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Watkins is a Little Rock, Ark., public relations man who has handled Clinton campaign advertising since the late 1970s. Kennedy is a former law partner of Hillary Clinton’s at the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock. Eller is a veteran Democratic operative who joined the Clinton presidential campaign in its earliest days. Cornelius is a distant cousin of the President who helped handle travel arrangements during the campaign.

The White House’s 80-page report reveals a surprising level of interest in the matter by Hillary Clinton. The White House previously has denied that she played any role in the affair.

The First Lady asked associate White House counsel Vincent Foster about the travel office in May before officials called in an accounting firm to conduct an audit.

She also had a brief conversation about it with McLarty, who said Kennedy was looking into it.

Watkins sent the First Lady a copy of a May 17 memorandum he wrote for McLarty outlining the case against the travel office workers and saying that he planned to fire the employees the next day.

A spokesman for Hillary Clinton said she did not read the memo until a week after the firings and contended that she had little interest in the case.

The report also said Cornelius and another Clinton associate, TV producer Harry Thomason, initiated the scrutiny of the travel office and monitored its operations in the first few months of the Administration.

Thomason possibly stood to profit from the ousting of the travel office staff because he owns an interest in an air charter firm that was seeking the White House air charter account.

When one of his business partners, Darnell Martens, sought information on how to bid on the account, Dale rebuffed him, according to a Martens memo included with the report.

Thomason then complained about the travel operation to his friends at the White House.

The report said Cornelius infiltrated the travel office and carried out an amateurish effort at espionage, copying travel office documents and smuggling files out at night in an effort to build a case against the officials whose job she coveted.

Her cover was blown when a canceled check she was surreptitiously copying got jammed in a copying machine and travel office employees discovered it.

The report continues: “The assistant director in the office reacted by placing the financial files in a locked cabinet. This made it impossible for Cornelius to return a file of documents she had previously taken home.”

Cornelius also eavesdropped on office conversations and concluded that her co-workers “were living beyond the means of government employees,” the report said.

She reported this to Eller, Thomason and others, who leaked to the press suggestions that the horses and boats Cornelius heard about could only have been procured with ill-gotten gain.

Cornelius is being transferred out of the travel office, and Thomason may lose his unlimited-access White House pass, McLarty said.

The report also said White House officials improperly communicated with the FBI and threatened to call in the Internal Revenue Service if FBI personnel did not initiate an investigation promptly.

The report does not fault Kennedy for initially contacting the FBI for guidance on how to investigate officials’ suspicions about the travel office’s practices.

But Kennedy and others did make “mistakes,” it found, in continuing to contact agency officials and in publicly disclosing the FBI’s involvement.

Mark Shaffer, an attorney for one of the five lower-level travel office employees, praised the White House effort but said the report should have cleared away the false charges leveled against his client, 15-year employee John McSweeney.

“My client has been accused of everything from criminal conduct to mismanagement,” Shaffer said. “I didn’t hear anyone say now he wasn’t guilty of those things.”

The travel office handles air charter and ground arrangements for the journalists who cover the White House, as well as providing commercial travel assistance for White House staff.

Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) renewed his call for a Senate investigation of the affair despite the White House confession of error.

Staff writer William J. Eaton contributed to this story.