U.S. SENATE : Controversy Over Hiring of Immigrant : Huffington claims he has independently verified that Feinstein used an illegal immigrant as a housekeeper in the early 1980s. INS officials say they have no proof of such actions.

A new controversy over illegal immigration engulfed the U.S. Senate race Thursday as GOP candidate Mike Huffington seized on a disputed and unverified news report claiming that Sen. Dianne Feinstein hired an illegal immigrant as a housekeeper in the early 1980s.

By late Thursday, the striking San Francisco newspaper reporters responsible for the initial story said they were revising it because they had received incomplete information from the Immigration and Naturalization Service. INS officials also said they had no proof that Feinstein had employed an illegal immigrant and were rechecking their records.

But Huffington’s campaign, which has been battered by his admission that he employed an illegal immigrant as a nanny until last year, said it had independently verified the report. The campaign immediately began airing a 30-second television commercial accusing Feinstein of lying. At least two of the contentions in the ad were apparently untrue.

In a crowded news conference in San Francisco, Feinstein told reporters that she had employed a Guatemalan woman, but the woman had provided documentation showing that she was in the country legally. Feinstein pointed out that in any case, the woman worked for her years before a 1986 federal law made the employment of illegal immigrants a crime.

Asked if she believes the woman was in the country illegally, Feinstein told reporters: “No, and I don’t believe she was . . . based on documentation that I saw when she came in. . . . I was a new mayor. I was not going to hire someone who was here illegally. She presented work documentation to me and I hired her.”

Throughout the day there was continuing uncertainty about the housekeeper’s legal status, with Feinstein saying she was legally in the country and Republican challenger Huffington insisting otherwise. The first report about the housekeeper was prepared Thursday morning by striking San Francisco newspaper reporters and sent out over the Internet computer network.

But by the end of the day, Pamela Burdman, one of the two striking San Francisco Chronicle reporters who wrote the story, said the paper was revising the story for a strike edition “based on the fact that we now know the information from the INS is incomplete.”

In a Century City news conference earlier, Huffington accused Feinstein of deception and an attempted cover-up.

“She is a liar. And she is a hypocrite. And she has purposefully and blatantly attempted to mislead you and the people of California. She is unworthy to serve in the United States Senate,” Huffington told reporters.

The day’s furor erupted one week after the Santa Barbara congressman acknowledged that he and his wife had hired an illegal immigrant as a nanny for more than four years, beginning in 1989--well after federal immigration law made such hiring a crime.

At his conference Thursday, Huffington refused to concede that he broke the law and Feinstein did not. “There may have been different laws. You will have to have lawyers look at that. . . . She may well have (broken the law) but you’ll have to ask your lawyers.”

Asked in another way, he suggested that reporters are working on Feinstein’s behalf. “I already had my discussion. I am talking about Mrs. Feinstein . . . I have talked about my case. I want to talk about her lying and I think it’s about time you print it, unless you are part of her campaign also.”

Late Thursday, Huffington campaign officials insisted that their account was accurate. They said the woman who worked with Feinstein provided them with her immigration case number and that a source in the INS matched it to the record of an amnesty applicant who was in the country illegally in 1981 and 1982.

The Huffington television ad said the INS had confirmed that the woman was an illegal immigrant; it also said that the Associated Press had proven Feinstein lied. INS officials late Thursday said they could make no such confirmation and AP challenged the accuracy of the ad. “No AP story has said Feinstein lied about this, let alone proved that she lied,” said AP’s San Francisco bureau chief Dan Day.

“I have sent the Huffington campaign a fax pointing out that we take issue with their description of our reporting.”

Huffington’s campaign spokeswoman Jennifer Grossman said: “We are standing by the ad. Mrs. Feinstein lied. Everyone knows she lied.”

But Feinstein’s campaign manager said the ad should be withdrawn. “I think the Huffington campaign should pull their ad and wait until this is all sorted out,” he said.

Feinstein on Thursday drove home the distinctions between Huffington’s action and her own. Most notably, she said, she hired the woman only after asking for documentation and employed the woman years before the federal law was enacted.

Unlike Huffington, Feinstein opposes Proposition 187, the ballot measure that would deny health and education services to illegal immigrants.

The political impact of Thursday’s events was unclear.

“I think, from what I understand, it is does not appear to be the smoking gun. On the other hand, to the extent that Huffington can obfuscate the issue--as he has done with some success in terms of wealth and campaign spending and residency--it is . . . helpful” to Huffington, said Arnold Steinberg, a GOP consultant not associated with the Senate campaign.

Huffington’s accusations consumed Feinstein’s day of campaigning. She had scheduled a series of news conferences with women’s groups and abortion rights advocates.

In a teleconference with reporters, senior campaign strategists Ed Rollins and Ken Khachigian not only called Feinstein a hypocrite, but suggested that federal agencies were attempting to protect her by withholding information.

“Worse than her lies, worse than her hypocrisy is the disturbing appearance that her campaign may have actively tried to mislead you and the voters by attempting to cover up this story,” said Khachigian.

But federal officials said there was no effort to keep information from the Huffington campaign.

Late Thursday, Ron Rogers, an INS spokesman at the regional office in Laguna Niguel, said there was confusion over whether the woman in question actually was here illegally.

“I can’t confirm the status of the person in question,” said Rogers. “What happened is that a similar name was given, and the INS ran a check on a person with a name similar in nature.”

Feinstein campaign manager Kam Kuwata said the Guatemalan woman worked for Feinstein from 1980 to 1982 as a housekeeper while Feinstein was mayor of San Francisco.

Although the law did not require it, Feinstein asked the woman to show her documentation of a work permit and the woman complied, Kuwata said.

Kuwata said Feinstein did not learn that her housekeeper had immigration problems until after the woman was no longer working for her.

By 1983, however, the mayor knew there was a problem because sometime between 1982 and 1983, the housekeeper had returned to Guatemala and was unable to re-enter the United States.

Feinstein and her husband arranged for the housekeeper’s son, Josue, who was a U.S. citizen, to come from Guatemala and live in their household so he could continue his schooling.

A 1984 profile of Feinstein in the San Francisco Examiner reported this:

“Without any publicity, the couple opened their home last year to 9-year-old Josue Paiz, the son of their former Guatemalan housekeeper, who was stuck in her native country with immigration problems. Feinstein said they sent for Josue so that he could continue in school. ‘She loves him like her own,’ says daughter Kathy.”

While the former housekeeper was stuck in Guatemala, Feinstein wrote a letter on her behalf to authorities, Kuwata said. He said he did not know what the letter said, or to whom the mayor sent it.

Kuwata said Feinstein paid all applicable taxes and Social Security for the housekeeper.

Earlier, John Nelson, who has been conducting research on Feinstein for the Huffington campaign, said without confirmation of the former housekeeper’s status from INS, he could not prove she was an illegal employee.

“That’s all speculation,” he said. “I don’t know for sure she was working illegally.”

Nelson said the Huffington campaign had received a number of tips in the past week from people who knew that at one point Feinstein had a Latina housekeeper and that later the mayor was taking care of her son.

But the Huffington campaign could not produce anyone who could say for sure that the woman did not have legal status at the time she worked for Feinstein.

One of the callers was Tony Hipchen, who painted houses for Feinstein in the early 1980s. He said that in 1983 or 1984 he noticed “she had this little boy who appeared to be Mexican being chauffeur driven by the mayor’s limo to school.”

At the time, he said, Feinstein explained to him that the boy was the son of her former housekeeper, that the housekeeper had gone back to Guatemala because of a death in the family and that she could not get back into the United States.

Hipchen said he assumed the housekeeper had been illegally employed before her return to Guatemala, but said he had no proof. He also said Feinstein’s subsequent housekeeper, Shirley, “pretty much” told him that the previous worker was illegal.