Whitewater Panel Was Lied to, GOP Alleges

In a stinging review of the ongoing Whitewater controversy, the new Republican leadership of a key Senate panel charged Tuesday that congressional hearings last year examining the highly political matter “demonstrated serious misconduct and malfeasance by high Administration officials.”

The report--summing up six days of hearings, testimony from 38 government witnesses and a review of more than 10,000 pages of documents--likely will become a GOP blueprint for future hearings on the complex Whitewater case with Republicans in control of both houses of Congress.

A second report issued Tuesday by the old Democratic-controlled Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee found no ethical or criminal violations in congressional testimony by White House and Treasury Department aides. But the Democrats faulted some government officials for participating in “troubling” internal contacts about criminal investigations of Whitewater.

However, the dissenting Republican version urged independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr to study “possible criminal violations” in the testimony of key witnesses in the Senate.

And incoming committee Chairman Sen. Alfonse M. D’Amato (R-N.Y.) asked Starr “to determine whether any orchestration of this testimony took place, by whom, who knew about it and for what reason.”

Specifically, the GOP report charged that some Administration witnesses gave false testimony to Congress and traded confidential information about ongoing criminal matters that reached into the White House and potentially touched President Clinton.

Despite the differences between the two reports, D’Amato said that he strongly agreed with the Democratic majority’s conclusion that there was troubling testimony by some officials.

“These (Democratic) senators should be commended for sharing our outrage and the outrage of the American people that such blatant disregard for the truth could occur on an important matter of public trust,” D’Amato said.

He added: “These contradictions go way beyond normal differences in memory.”

But Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.), a committee member, challenged D’Amato’s conclusions. He stressed that the report released by the old Democratic-controlled committee found no evidence of ethical breaches or criminal violations by Administration aides.

Instead, Dodd suggested, the Republicans are trying to spin Whitewater to win political points against Clinton and “drag these issues around endlessly.”

“The last thing we need now,” Dodd said, “is to see these serious proceedings degenerate into a political witch hunt while the investigation continues.”

D’Amato, however, said that the committee, under his new leadership, will continue to press its investigation.

Whitewater Development Corp. was a failed Arkansas real estate project jointly owned by then-Gov. Bill Clinton and his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and James B. McDougal--who also owned Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan, an Arkansas thrift that was seized by federal regulators in 1989. Starr is investigating whether Whitewater caused losses at Madison and whether federally insured deposits from the savings and loan were siphoned off through Whitewater to benefit Clinton’s 1984 gubernatorial campaign.

The inquiry also is examining whether White House officials mishandled the Whitewater-related papers in the office of Deputy White House Counsel Vincent Foster after his suicide in the summer of 1993 and whether Treasury Department and White House political appointees acted improperly in dealing with investigators’ referrals of Madison-Whitewater matters.

D’Amato said that, while he had hoped to conduct more hearings into the matter next month, he now wants to defer to Starr’s timetable before moving forward. He said that he also wants to wait to obtain copies of depositions taken by the independent counsel’s office of President and Mrs. Clinton.

Starr, through a spokeswoman Tuesday in Little Rock, Ark., would say only: “We have received copies of the reports, and we will review and evaluate them in connection with our ongoing investigation.”

Reacting to the two reports, the White House on Tuesday noted that Administration officials “violated no law and breached no existing ethical standard in its contacts with the Treasury Department on Whitewater matters.”

But White House Counsel Abner J. Mikva said that he has acted on one of the report’s recommendations and issued new guidelines to White House staff members governing contacts between the White House and federal agencies.

He also said that he is restricting to his office any future contacts relating to particular law enforcement investigations.

The GOP report’s most blistering allegation contends that Roger Altman, formerly the No. 2 official at the Treasury Department, “intentionally lied to Congress” and that he committed “malfeasance” by attempting to seal from the committee his discussions about Whitewater with the White House.

“This is an aggravated case of lying before Congress,” the GOP committee members said.

The report said that Altman “falsely claimed” not to know about Treasury-White House contacts over Whitewater in the fall of 1993. It said that he “misled Congress about the true nature” of a meeting with White House officials about Whitewater and that he transmitted “false and misleading” letters to the committee in an attempt to “correct” his oral testimony.

The report also maintains that there was a series of “improprieties” by Altman and other Administration officials in discussing confidential information with the White House about ongoing criminal investigations into Whitewater.

And it suggested that the discussions were done in an attempt to improperly brief White House officials, including the Clintons, on the status of Justice Department criminal inquiries into Whitewater.

Some of the contacts, the GOP report said, included “the existence and details of criminal referrals that mention the President and Mrs. Clinton.”

The report alleged that Administration officials “breached the confidentiality of law enforcement information by giving it to the White House.”

“The significance of Mr. Altman’s malfeasance in this regard cannot be overemphasized,” the GOP report said.

Altman could not be reached for comment Tuesday. But Dodd, rising to his defense, said that “there’s nothing that we determined, after going through these hearings, that draw (the) conclusion” that Altman committed perjury.

Dodd and the other Democrats on the panel, in their majority report, stated that they “found no law or ethics standard that clearly prohibited” the contacts regarding criminal investigations.

But their report noted that both the Office of Government Ethics and former White House Counsel Lloyd N. Cutler found some of the contacts “troubling.”

Cutler told the committee that “it would have been better if some of these contacts had never occurred and if fewer White House staff members had participated. . . . There were too many people having too many discussions about too many sensitive matters, matters which were properly the province” of the White House counsel.