Senate Panel Will Re-Examine Foster’s Death : Congress: Despite official findings that White House aide killed himself, conspiracy theorists still see a cover-up. D’Amato hearing opens Tuesday.

There is every reason to believe that the death of Deputy White House Counsel Vincent Foster nearly two years ago was a suicide.

Every official investigation of the case has found it to be the tragic result of the despair Foster endured as he struggled with the stress of his high-powered, highly visible job.

Yet nothing since the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 has fired the imagination of conspiracy theorists the way Foster’s death has.

Despite the overwhelming evidence pointing to suicide, polls show that many Americans still believe Foster was murdered as part of a cover-up of misdeeds by President Clinton.

That belief has become the foundation of a lively cottage industry of low-budget newsletters, videotapes and lecture tours produced by those who insist Foster “knew far too much and had to go because he was about to crack.”

It is that rich vein of public suspicion that Sen. Alfonse M. D’Amato (R-N.Y.) intends to plumb beginning Tuesday, when he opens special committee hearings into unproven allegations that Foster’s death somehow resulted from his knowledge of the Clintons’ investment in the controversial Ozark real estate development known as Whitewater.

According to congressional sources, the hearings are expected to yield many new details--sure to intrigue conspiracy theorists--about what happened at the White House immediately after Foster’s body was found in Ft. Marcy Park in Fairfax, Va., on July 20, 1993. Among other things, D’Amato and other members of his panel are said to be prepared to point out inconsistencies in testimony by those who witnessed the actions of White House staffers who went into Foster’s office the night of his death.

In addition, there will be allegations raised by Republicans that then-White House Counsel Bernard Nussbaum may have intentionally overlooked scraps of paper in the bottom of Foster’s briefcase, which later proved to be the remnants of a suicide note.

And top Justice Department officials are expected to tell the committee in open testimony that Nussbaum highhandedly interfered with the work of law enforcement officials trying to investigate Foster’s death.

Yet for Clinton, the hearings are not likely to stir up any major, embarrassing revelations. Despite the Republicans’ bluster, even Clinton’s staunchest GOP critics admit privately that they no longer see Whitewater hearings as a means to bring down his presidency.

But the President’s defenders are not taking the hearings lightly. The prospect of hours of televised testimony focusing on allegations of a cover-up by Clinton aides has prompted White House officials to mount one of the most aggressive behind-the-scenes efforts to shape public sentiment on the subject since the Whitewater controversy began.

Just last Sunday, hoping to rob D’Amato of his most titillating new piece of evidence, White House officials disclosed that a Secret Service agent has told the Senate committee that he saw First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton’s chief of staff, Margaret A. Williams, remove documents from Foster’s office on the night of July 20.

His story runs counter to the expected testimony of Williams, who says she did not remove any documents until two days later.

In addition to Williams, D’Amato’s committee is said to be planning to call two others who ventured into Foster’s office that night: Nussbaum and White House aide Patsy Thomasson. All three will tell the same story, White House officials say.

Former Associate Atty. Gen. Webster L. Hubbell--a close friend of the President and a former law partner of the First Lady--is another likely witness.

Hubbell, who soon will begin a prison sentence for expense account fraud at the Little Rock, Ark., law firm where he once worked with Foster and Mrs. Clinton, will be questioned by the committee about allegations that he inhibited a routine National Park Service investigation of the suicide. One park ranger has accused him of interrupting the questioning of Foster’s widow.

This fascination with Foster’s death and its aftermath perhaps is to be expected. After all, it is extremely rare for a top government official to die under mysterious circumstances.

Even before he died, Foster was the subject of intense curiosity on the part of Clinton critics--most notably the Wall Street Journal editorial page. As a close friend and personal attorney to the Clintons, as well as Mrs. Clinton’s former law partner, Foster was seen by Republicans as a man who knew more than a few of the First Family’s secrets.

Clinton’s critics speculated that Foster’s death--whether suicide or murder--was somehow related to the probe of the President’s financial ties to James B. McDougal, the owner of a failed Arkansas savings and loan.

Typical of the conspiracy theorists spreading these ideas are the authors of a widely distributed booklet titled “Murder, Bank Fraud, Drugs and Sex: How Whitewater Will Change Your Life Forever,” published by a firm called the Wall Street Underground. It speculates that Foster was killed because he was about to spill information “that would have ended the Clinton presidency right there and then.”

The murder theories persist, even though comprehensive investigations by both special counsels Robert B. Fiske Jr. and Kenneth W. Starr, as well as separate probes by both the Democrats and Republicans on the Senate Banking Committee, have found no evidence to support any conclusion other than suicide.

D’Amato was among those who signed the report of Senate Republican members of the Banking Committee issued Jan. 3, which concluded: “Vincent Foster took his own life.”

Yet the murder-or-suicide question is expected to be raised again during the hearings by Sen. Lauch Faircloth (R-N.C.), a persistent advocate of the theory that Foster met with foul play.

Suspicions also likely will be fed by presenting evidence that on July 22, Williams, the First Lady’s close and trusted aide, took from Foster’s office a file with information about the Clintons’ Whitewater investment with McDougal.

The committee will challenge Williams’ account of when she removed the file, and well as ask why she took it and what she did with it before turning it over to Clinton’s attorney six days later.

D’Amato recently outlined his questions for her this way:

“What documents were in Mr. Foster’s office at the time of his death? Did any White House officials improperly remove any documents from Mr. Foster’s office? Were any documents destroyed? Why did White House officials want to keep law enforcement officials from looking at certain documents in Mr. Foster’s office?”

According to White House officials, Williams placed the Whitewater file in a cupboard in the White House residential quarters and removed nothing from it.

When she later sent it by messenger to the office of Clinton’s attorney, officials say, it contained only sketchy records of the Whitewater business and two copies of a report on Whitewater prepared during the 1992 election.