Bank Regulator Says Clinton Sought Aid : Inquiry: Comptroller of currency tells Whitewater counsel that the President approached him at New Year’s weekend retreat. He says he rebuffed request.

President Clinton personally asked the top banking regulator at the Treasury Department last New Year’s weekend to give him advice on how to handle the Whitewater controversy, Administration officials said Monday.

Comptroller of the Currency Eugene A. Ludwig has told Whitewater special counsel Robert B. Fiske Jr. that he refused Clinton’s request, made during the Renaissance Weekend conference at Hilton Head, S.C.

Ludwig said that Clinton asked him to meet and provide him with personal counsel on the growing Whitewater controversy. Ludwig, who is in charge of the government’s regulation of nationally chartered commercial banks, believed it would be inappropriate for him to get involved in a case that involved allegations of misdeeds at a federally regulated financial institution. As comptroller of the currency, Ludwig is also a member of the board of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which has been directly involved in key aspects of the Whitewater investigation.

Fiske is looking into allegations that then-Gov. Clinton may have benefited improperly from his association with James B. McDougal, owner of the failed Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan and partner with Clinton and his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, in Whitewater Development Corp., an Ozark real estate development.

Clinton’s request for help from Ludwig occurred before disclosure of other contacts between Treasury and White House officials over Whitewater sparked a controversy in Congress in February.

Those meetings, between key Treasury and White House staff members, became an early focus of Fiske’s probe. Contacts between political appointees at the White House and Treasury raised questions about Administration handling of Whitewater, because the Treasury officials supervised the Resolution Trust Corp., the agency in charge of the federal investigation of Madison Guaranty.

In his first public report on his investigation, Fiske said that he could find no evidence of criminal wrongdoing related to any of the contacts between the White House and Treasury. Although he did not detail all of those contacts, Fiske knew about Clinton’s meeting with Ludwig when he cleared the Administration of wrongdoing. White House officials said Monday that Fiske questioned Clinton about the conversation when he interviewed the President and First Lady in June.

The meeting between the President and Ludwig, an old friend and fellow Rhodes scholar and Yale Law School graduate, has not been publicly disclosed before and now seems likely to be an issue at congressional hearings next week. A spokeswoman for Ludwig said that on Wednesday he will brief staff members from the House Banking Finance and Urban Affairs Committee and the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, which will conduct the hearings.

Ludwig wrote a memo to Fiske on March 11 detailing his conversations with Clinton in response to a Fiske subpoena of the Treasury Department asking for information about all contacts between the Treasury and the White House.

Ludwig said that during a seminar at the annual Renaissance Weekend, an elite networking conference, the President asked him for his advice on Whitewater issues. Ludwig said that Clinton stressed that he did not believe he had done anything wrong but that he wanted Ludwig’s help because of his expertise in banking laws, according to Lee Cross, a spokeswoman for Ludwig.

Clinton asked Ludwig to meet with him further, Cross said. But while still attending the conference, Ludwig began to have qualms about getting involved as a personal adviser to the President on the issue. He called Treasury general counsel Jean Hanson, Deputy White House Counsel Joel Klein and Associate White House Counsel William Kennedy to ask their opinion.

Ludwig was advised not to get involved and agreed not to work with the President on Whitewater. “Within 24 hours of their original conversation,” Ludwig talked to Clinton in a corridor at the Renaissance Weekend and told him that he did not believe it would be appropriate to advise him, Cross said. Clinton told him that he understood.

White House Counsel Lloyd N. Cutler on Monday offered reporters a slightly different account of Clinton’s conversation with Ludwig, however. He said that the President was not asking Ludwig to give advice on Whitewater but to “recommend people who understand real estate transactions and could write about them for the public in a way the public could understand.”