D’Amato to Press Reopening of Whitewater Investigation : Politics: The likely chairman of the Senate banking committee says a special panel will probe issues concerning Clinton’s failed real estate venture.

Signaling his intention to move aggressively in reopening the Senate’s Whitewater investigation, the prospective chairman of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee said Saturday he plans to hold hearings on the issue as soon as late January or early February.

Sen. Alfonse M. D’Amato (R-N.Y.), who as chairman of the banking panel would be the Senate’s chief Whitewater investigator, said he is inclined to create a special subcommittee--which he would chair--to handle the Whitewater probe. By doing so, he said, senators who are not members of the banking panel also could participate.

The Whitewater affair has been a nagging embarrassment for President Clinton since early in his term and is likely to become even more so now that Republicans have assumed control of Congress.

In an early indication of the high priority D’Amato places on Whitewater, he and six other Republicans on the banking panel wrote to Whitewater prosecutor Kenneth W. Starr last week asking him to investigate whether senior White House aides George Stephanopoulos and Harold M. Ickes lied during Whitewater-related testimony before Congress last summer.

While he has yet to receive a response from Starr, D’Amato said testimony given during depositions and at Senate hearings raise questions about the “truthfulness” of the two men. D’Amato, speaking on CNN’s “Evans & Novak” program, said his first priority will be to hold hearings on the handling of Whitewater-related documents that were removed from White House Deputy Counsel Vincent Foster’s office after he committed suicide in July, 1993.

“There were allegations that some may have been destroyed or shredded or sent to various places and were under control of the White House personnel and maybe even (First Lady Hillary Rodham) Clinton,” D’Amato said. “We have not finished and completed that task, and that is what we’re going to start with.”

Acknowledging that he would need Starr’s approval before undertaking such a probe, D’Amato said he intends to meet with the prosecutor on the subject soon. Starr’s predecessor in the Whitewater case, special counsel Robert B. Fiske Jr., had asked Congress to refrain from holding hearings on that issue and other Whitewater matters under investigation.

While the House is seen as the likely body to take the lead on many conservative priorities in the new Congress--such as welfare reform, tax cuts and a presidential line-item veto--D’Amato is expected to move more swiftly than his counterpart, moderate Rep. Jim Leach (R-Iowa), who is expected to head the House Banking, Finance and Urban Affairs Committee.

The Whitewater Development Corp. was a failed Ozarks real estate project jointly owned by James B. McDougal and then-Arkansas Gov. Clinton and his wife. The central focus of the Whitewater inquiry is whether either Clinton or his campaign were improperly enriched by money from the now-defunct Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan, which McDougal also owned. The inquiry spread to questions of propriety in the Clinton Administration’s subsequent handling of the affair.

Meanwhile, Starr’s office is expected to make two Whitewater-related announcements early this week in Little Rock, Ark.

One is likely to be the official confirmation of a plea bargain with former Associate Atty. General Webster L. Hubbell, a close friend and golfing partner of the President and a former law partner of Hillary Clinton. Late last week, sources said Hubbell had agreed to plead guilty to two felony charges of tax evasion and mail fraud arising from the investigation, making him the first major political figure to be snared in the probe.

D’Amato said Saturday that he suspected that Hubbell had been involved in obstructing the inquiry while he was at the Justice Department.

The senator said if Hubbell has agreed to cooperate with the investigation in the plea agreement, it “doesn’t bode well for the White House.”

While expressing his determination to be thorough, D’Amato stressed that his committee would not be a renegade outfit. “We’re going to look to cooperate with the special counsel,” he said.

He declared that he would not pursue a re-examination of the circumstances surrounding Foster’s death, as some Republicans had requested. D’Amato said he does plan, however, to bring Paula Casey, a former campaign worker whom Clinton hired as a U.S. attorney in Little Rock, before his Senate panel.

Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) recently charged that Casey was appointed specifically to derail the Whitewater investigation.

“I think her conduct was bizarre at the least,” D’Amato said of Casey, who has resigned her post.

In other matters, D’Amato said he also would push for early passage of a cut in the capital gains tax and would support Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan’s policy of increasing interest rates to control the growth of the economy and inflation--a policy that has come under attack by Democrats on the committee.