Ex-Clinton Aide Faces S&L; Case Subpoena : Whitewater: FBI focuses on what chief of staff to then-Arkansas governor knows of thrift owner’s role in the paying off of a $50,000 loan.

The FBI has notified Betsey Wright, a senior aide to President Clinton when he was governor of Arkansas, that she will receive a grand jury subpoena in the expanding investigation of Clinton’s business dealings with the owner of a failed savings and loan, Wright acknowledged Friday.

The FBI also subpoenaed documents this week from a small Arkansas bank that loaned Clinton and his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, $50,000 to help finance his 1984 campaign for governor.

The subpoenas are part of a wide-ranging federal investigation into ties between the Clintons and their former business partner, James B. McDougal, the owner of the now-defunct Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan here.

Numerous questions have been raised about whether the Clintons and McDougal improperly benefited financially from the relationship and Atty. Gen. Janet Reno is preparing to appoint a special counsel to investigate the matter.

The primary focus of the investigation is the Whitewater Development Corp., a partnership formed by the Clintons and McDougal in 1978 to develop 200 acres of resort land in the Ozark Mountains. The Clintons have said that they lost $68,900 in the venture but key records apparently are missing and FBI agents have been trying to reconstruct the finances of the project.

Among some of the questions investigators hope to answer is whether McDougal received political favors in exchange for helping the Clintons pay off the $50,000 loan. McDougal has told reporters that he staged a fund-raiser in 1985 to help retire the debt.

Investigators apparently believe that Wright may be able to shed light on the loan issue. She attended the 1985 fund-raiser as then-Gov. Clinton’s chief of staff and helped collect $35,000 toward the loan repayment.

Although campaign laws require such contributions to be reported to the state, the list of contributors to the Madison Guaranty fund-raiser has disappeared and Wright has said that she does not know what happened to it.

Wright acknowledged Friday that the FBI had informed her this week that she would be subpoenaed. She also said, however, that she was told the subpoena had been withdrawn temporarily pending the naming of the special counsel.

In anticipation of the subpoena, Wright said that she moved several boxes of documents from her office at the Wexler Group, a Washington lobbying firm and part of the Hill & Knowlton communications firm, to her Washington home. She said that she plans to sort through the material over the weekend.

“I will be happy to help anyone to get the history sorted out,” Wright said.

She declined to disclose the nature of the material sought by the FBI or the types of documents she said she is examining.

However, during the 1992 presidential campaign, Wright collected numerous documents to rebut questions raised then about the Clintons’ involvement with McDougal.

The Whitewater case is not the first White House controversy in which Wright has become involved.

Last month, she took time off from her lobbying job to help senior presidential aide Bruce Lindsey coordinate the White House response to allegations made against the President by two Arkansas state troopers. They claimed that the President offered them federal jobs to discourage them from speaking publicly about his alleged extramarital affairs while he was governor.

FBI agents also served a new subpoena this week on the small Arkansas bank that actually made the $50,000 loan to the Clintons in 1984, in an apparent attempt to uncover the loan’s paper trail.

The institution--the Bank of Cherry Valley--was owned in part by W. Maurice Smith, a former member of Clinton’s staff. There was no collateral for the loan, which was used by Clinton to bolster his gubernatorial campaign in its final days.

Smith, later named by Clinton to head the Arkansas highway department, is a longtime friend and political confidant of the President. According to Wright, he was Clinton’s mentor and “like a father” to the young Arkansas politician.

Federal investigators examining the failure of Madison Guaranty suspect that some of the money raised by McDougal may actually have come from the savings and loan’s funds, sources said. The White House has said that Clinton and his campaign would have had no way of knowing the origin of the contributions.

Leon Foust, the president of the First Bank of Arkansas, which bought the Bank of Cherry Valley, confirmed Friday that the institution has received three subpoenas in recent weeks from FBI agents, the most recent coming Wednesday.

Foust declined to discuss the nature of the material sought by the subpoenas. But a knowledgeable source said that the FBI is seeking bank records related to the Clintons’ loan and checks used to pay it off in 1985.

Sources said that investigators also are interested in checks sent to the Bank of Cherry Valley from the Whitewater Development Corp. account at Madison Guaranty.

Some records have been located and turned over to the FBI, Foust said, and bank staff members are trying to find additional material.

“We’ve complied with the subpoenas to the best of our ability and we are still searching for records,” Foust said.

The possibility that Madison Guaranty funds were contributed to Clinton’s campaign is one of several questions expected to be examined by the special counsel.

Special correspondent Michael J. Goodman contributed to this story.

* FEW FOLLOW PROBE: Survey finds that few people are paying much attention to Whitewater investigation. A17