Whitewater Panel Probes First Lady’s Mystery Phone Call : Inquiry: Senators submit written questions asking her to help identify number she apparently dialed after the death of Vincent Foster.

First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton was asked Thursday by the Senate Whitewater investigating committee to help solve the mystery surrounding a telephone number that she apparently called on the night of July 20, 1993, shortly after police found the body of Deputy White House Counsel Vincent Foster in a suburban park.

Members of the panel voted to submit four written questions to the First Lady, asking her to help them identify the Washington, D.C., phone number that the telephone company says is no longer in service and cannot be identified.

By submitting written questions, the panel stopped short of complying with Republican demands for personal testimony by the First Lady.

One committee member, Sen. Lauch Faircloth (R-N.C.), has repeatedly been denied his request that she be subpoenaed.

Even so, Sen. Paul S. Sarbanes (D-Md.) described the circumstances surrounding the decision as “unusual and unprecedented.”

It is not known whether the 10-minute call, placed from Arkansas beginning at 10:41 p.m. CDT on July 20, 1993, bears any significance to the panel’s investigation of the Foster suicide or its inquiry into the Clintons’ controversial investment in an Ozark resort development known as Whitewater.

Hillary Clinton placed the call shortly after she learned that police had found the body of Foster, whose death has been ruled a suicide.

But the telephone company, acting on a subpoena from the committee, has been unable to identify to whom the number was assigned at the time of the call.

Before coming to Washington, Hillary Clinton and Foster had been law partners and friends.

The mystery phone number has become the latest focus of an effort by the committee to determine whether White House officials sought to obstruct either the police investigation of Foster’s death or the government inquiry into the Clintons’ Whitewater investment.

In response to the request, the White House issued a statement saying that it would “continue to do everything possible to answer the committee’s legitimate questions, including written questions presented in the appropriate way to the First Lady.”

The statement did not say whether the First Lady remembers to whom she spoke at the telephone number in question.

Meanwhile, it was disclosed by the White House that Hillary Clinton’s top aide, Margaret Williams, was present in the White House residence on July 27, 1993, when the Clintons’ private attorney, Robert Barnett, reviewed documents that had been removed from Foster’s office after his death.

Williams has previously denied spending time with Barnett that day. She had no comment on the matter Thursday.

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The White House statement also acknowledged that Hillary Clinton and two of her friends, New York lawyer Susan Thomases and Diane Blair of Arkansas, were in the White House family residence at the same time Barnett was examining Foster’s files.

White House officials said Barnett does not recall seeing Hillary Clinton or Thomases during his 87-minute visit to the family residence that day, although he does not rule it out. Williams has told the committee that Barnett came there that day to see the First Lady.

Sen. Alfonse M. D’Amato (R-N.Y.), chairman of the special investigating panel, said he will call Barnett to testify in the near future.

In addition, he said, Williams would be called to testify for a third time to explain the discrepancies in her earlier testimony.

Senate Republicans suspect that Hillary Clinton conspired with Thomases and Williams to prevent law enforcement authorities from reviewing potentially embarrassing documents that Foster may have left in his office pertaining to the First Family.

Then-White House Counsel Bernard Nussbaum and Williams removed 24 files from Foster’s office two days after he died, and Williams took the materials to the White House family residence at that time. The materials included a file on the Clintons’ Whitewater deal.

After Barnett came to the White House to review the material, according to Williams, he summoned one of his legal associates to the family residence to haul the materials back to his office at the law firm of Williams & Connolly.

According to a White House security report tracking the movements of these people inside the presidential residence that afternoon, Thomases, Williams and Blair all departed from the family quarters on the second floor a few minutes after Barnett.

Also on Thursday, April Breslaw, a counsel to the Resolution Trust Corp., testified before the panel and denied charges leveled the previous day by RTC investigator Jean Lewis that Breslaw sought to interfere with the RTC’s investigation of an Arkansas savings and loan closely linked to Whitewater.