White House Shields Whitewater Data, Leach Says : Inquiry: Clinton critic contends the action will limit the scope of the congressional hearings. The Administration sees his complaint as politics.

A leading Republican critic of President Clinton’s handling of the Whitewater controversy complained Tuesday that the White House is restricting congressional access to documents and other evidence in an effort to limit the scope of next week’s hearings in the House and Senate.

In a memo to House Minority Leader Robert H. Michel (R-Ill.), Rep. Jim Leach (R-Iowa) said the restrictions mean that the hearings will cover just 2% to 3% of the issues involved in the affair.

The hearings--which will be conducted by the House Banking, Finance and Urban Affairs Committee and its Senate counterpart, the Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee--will focus on the Washington aspects of Whitewater. Those issues include some of the questions raised by last July’s suicide of White House Deputy Counsel Vincent Foster, and the controversial series of meetings between staff members of the White House and Treasury Department over the federal investigation into a failed Arkansas savings and loan.

The Democratic leadership in Congress has agreed to a request from Whitewater special counsel Robert B. Fiske Jr. to limit the hearings to issues on which Fiske has already concluded his investigation. Fiske has said he has not completed his review of actions of White House officials immediately after Foster’s death, when they conducted their own search of his office.

Leach complained in his memo that, if the hearings cannot deal with that aspect of the Washington side of Whitewater, then the “most important part of the investigation, which the majority has allowed us to consider, appears to be eliminated from these hearings.”

In addition, Leach argued that evidence related to the White House and Treasury contacts was being overly censured by the White House.

“Both the White House and Treasury have produced heavily redacted (blacked out) documents to the committee based on their own internal determinations,” Leach wrote in his memo, which was sent to Michel and to Leach’s Republican colleagues on the House banking panel.

Leach said that, at the request of White House Counsel Lloyd N. Cutler, the banking panel chairman, Rep. Henry B. Gonzalez (D-Tex.), has “implemented unprecedented document control procedures that are intended to shield the vast majority of documents from public disclosure” at the hearings. “It should be noted that the documents involved do not impact on an ongoing prosecution and do not relate in any manner to personal financial privacy interests.”

A White House spokesman dismissed Leach’s complaints Tuesday. “It has, of course, been acknowledged by special counsel and others that the White House’s cooperation with the Whitewater investigation has been both broad and thorough. And when congressman Leach complains about our document production, that’s politics,” the spokesman said.

Julie Black, a spokeswoman for Gonzalez, refused to comment on Leach’s complaints.

Whitewater Development Corp. was a failed Ozarks real estate project jointly owned by James B. McDougal and then-Arkansas Gov. Clinton and his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton. McDougal also owned Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan, an Arkansas thrift that was seized by federal regulators in 1989.