Leach Urges Keeping Focus in Whitewater : Critic: Angry reaction to naming of investigator dismissed as ‘pretty natural.’ Reports on investments in cattle futures bring denials.

The leading Republican critic of President Clinton’s involvement in the Whitewater controversy Sunday said the angry White House reaction to the appointment of a partisan Republican to investigate civil cases for the Resolution Trust Corp. was “pretty natural” and too much should not be made of it.

The White House, meanwhile, spent much of the day denying allegations from Whitewater-related news reports.

Officials flatly denied a report that Hillary Rodham Clinton put none of the Clinton’s own money into a cattle-futures investment that earned the family about $100,000 in 1978 and 1979.

Later in the day, a White House spokesman approached reporters aboard Air Force One to deny broadcast reports that White House support for senior adviser George Stephanopoulos was weakening.

On the “Meet the Press” program, Rep. Jim Leach (R-Iowa) said it would be “premature to draw any extraordinary conclusions” about a phone call Stephanopoulos made in February to Joshua Steiner, chief of staff at the Treasury Department.

Sources have described Stephanopoulos as angrily asking Steiner how the RTC came to name former federal prosecutor Jay B. Stephens to investigate possible civil cases against Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan and whether that hiring could be reversed.

Stephens, a former Republican U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, was sharply critical of Clinton when the President fired him as part of the removal of all the U.S. attorneys appointed by the George Bush Administration.

Among the cases the RTC is examining for a possible civil action is the Rose Law Firm’s representation of Madison Guaranty before Arkansas regulators.

Hillary Rodham Clinton, then a partner at the firm and a partner in the Whitewater Land Development Corp. with her then-governor husband and James B. McDougal, who owned Madison Guaranty, asserted to the state regulators that the thrift was on the road to financial health. It later collapsed, requiring a taxpayer bailout of at least $47 million.

Leach has maintained that Whitewater Development and Madison Guaranty were so intertwined that the Clintons ended up with financial benefits from the S&L; even as it was collapsing and their Whitewater project was failing.

The President maintains that he lost about $46,000 on the Whitewater endeavor.

During an interview on NBC-TV’s “Meet the Press,” Leach adhered to his previous assessment that the Whitewater case is not about impeachment and should not be about criminal charges against the Clintons.

The futures investment came up in Newsweek story that quoted professor Marvin A. Chirelstein of Columbia University Law School as saying that Mrs. Clinton invested no money of her own. Chirelstein issued a statement calling the article “false and irresponsible.”