First Lady’s Top Aide Said to Remove Foster Office Files : Senate: Secret Service agent’s account before Whitewater panel is denied. His testimony runs counter to nearly all who witnessed the White House events.

Challenging the recollections of top White House officials, a low-level Secret Service agent told a Senate panel Wednesday that he saw Margaret A. Williams, chief of staff to First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, remove files from Vincent Foster’s office on the night the President’s deputy counsel committed suicide.

Williams promptly denied the allegations and bolstered her account by producing the results of a polygraph test indicating that she was telling the truth. “I took nothing from Vince’s office,” she told the Senate Whitewater investigating committee.

Nevertheless, the testimony of Henry P. O’Neill, a veteran uniformed Secret Service agent, was greeted by many Republicans as proof that White House officials conspired to obstruct a police investigation of Foster’s death.

His is the strongest testimony offered to date to support GOP suspicions that there was a White House effort to cover up whatever may have motivated Foster to take his own life on July 20, 1993. Republicans have theorized that the documents O’Neill saw in Williams’ arms were related to the First Family’s highly controversial investment in the Whitewater land deal in Arkansas.

Yet O’Neill’s account runs counter to the testimony of virtually every other person who witnessed the events inside the White House that night, including Williams. Democrats challenged him repeatedly by pointing to contradictions in what he has said over the last two years and by characterizing him as one of the lowest persons in the White House pecking order.

It was O’Neill’s job on that night to guard the offices of top White House aides while the night cleaning crew was making its rounds. A burly 18-year veteran of the Secret Service, he was responsible for locking and unlocking office doors and disposing of any trash deemed confidential.

In her testimony, Williams was choked by tears as she recalled how she decided to go to the White House after receiving a call from Mrs. Clinton telling her about the death of Foster, a close friend. At first she avoided Foster’s office, she said, but later entered when she saw a light on inside, where she found White House aide Patsy Thomasson looking--in vain--for a suicide note.

“I sat on Vince’s couch and I cried the whole time,” she said.

While she was crying, she said, then-White House Counsel Bernard Nussbaum came into the office too. “He seemed at a loss as to what he should do,” she added, and they soon left the office together without removing any documents.

“That evening was not about documents,” she insisted.

It was at that point that Williams encountered O’Neill in the hallway outside on the second floor of the West Wing of the White House. As O’Neill recalled it, he saw Williams walk out of the office into the hallway carrying a stack of folders about three to five inches high. He said she dropped the documents in her office at the other end of the hall, and then went down to the first floor.

In an effort to undermine O’Neill’s testimony, Democrats emphasized that he had described the documents that Williams was carrying in a variety of ways during several interviews with committee investigators and law enforcement officials. At one point, they noted, he even suggested there was a box on top of the files she was carrying.

Asked Wednesday about the box, O’Neill, who was clearly nervous and uncomfortable under the spotlights of a Senate inquiry, emphasized he was not entirely certain he saw a box. He first described it as “a lightweight-type hat box,” later suggested it was rectangular, and then added: “Let’s just strike the hat box.”

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), who claims to have identified eight major contradictions in O’Neill’s testimony, noted that when he was interviewed by committee investigators before his appearance at the hearing, he said: “I don’t want to dream up a box. It’s getting confusing. I can’t remember.”

Still, O’Neill clung to his basic contention that he saw files in Williams’ arms. “I’m not in any doubt about it,” he declared in response to friendly questioning from Republicans.

Among the other weaknesses that Democrats found in O’Neill’s testimony were these: He remembered Williams’ assistant identifying her as a “secretary” to Mrs. Clinton, when she is actually the First Lady’s chief of staff; and he gave several different versions of what Williams’ assistant, Evelyn Lieberman, was wearing.

While O’Neill often seemed confused, Williams was remarkably self-assured during her testimony, sometimes even directly challenging the Republicans who questioned her. When Lieberman testified that Williams “does not make close friends easily,” Williams interrupted. “I do make friends easily.”

And Williams’ confidence only grew after her attorney, Edward S. G. Dennis Jr., told the committee how she had passed a polygraph examination in which she was asked directly if she removed any documents from Foster’s office that night. In fact, Dennis said she actually passed two polygraphs--one arranged by him and another administered by Kenneth W. Starr, the independent counsel investigating the Whitewater controversy.

But despite her poise, even the Democrats seemed skeptical of the other key element of Williams’ story: her account of how she handled documents that she admits she removed from Foster’s office two days later.

At the time of his death, Foster, a former childhood friend of the President and former law partner of the First Lady, was working on a number of issues related to the Clintons’ family finances. Among other things, he had been setting up a blind trust for the family, reviewing tax matters and preparing financial disclosure reports.

On July 22, 1993, Williams said, she was summoned by Nussbaum to retrieve a box of files related to these matters that were to be sent to the Clintons’ personal lawyer, Robert Barnett. But instead of sending the files immediately to Barnett’s office, Williams said she stored them for several days in a locked closet in the White House family quarters.

It is believed these files included key documents related to Whitewater, a failed Ozark real estate venture that is being investigated by Starr to determine if the Clintons benefited improperly from it or from their relationship with their co-investor, James B. McDougal.

Williams said she did not send them immediately to Barnett because she was exhausted by the emotion of Foster’s death and wanted to go home. She chose to put them in a closet in the White House after consulting by telephone with Mrs. Clinton.

Even Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), who has been a Clinton loyalist throughout the hearings, said Williams’ explanation seemed to defy common sense. Republicans have suggested that Mrs. Clinton wanted the files moved into the residence because she wanted to review them.

But Williams insisted that Mrs. Clinton never had expressed any personal interest in Foster’s files in the wake of his suicide.