Don’t Appoint a Prosecutor, Letter Warned

Six months after White House lawyer Vincent Foster died, his family’s attorney wrote to President Clinton cautioning against naming a special prosecutor in the Whitewater affair.

Attorney James Hamilton wrote that he feared such a prosecutor “might pursue his or her self-aggrandizement rather than the truth” and could be “a recipe for trouble.”

“If politically possible, Janet Reno,” the attorney general, “should stick to her guns in not appointing an independent counsel for Whitewater,” Hamilton told the president in the Jan. 5, 1994, letter.

Reno didn’t heed the advice. Just three weeks later she appointed a special prosecutor. Later, a federal court named independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr, a Republican, to take over.

Hamilton’s letter, which the White House released Thursday under pressure from the Senate Whitewater Committee, offered politically sensitive advice.

“The White House should say as little and produce as few documents as possible to the press,” Hamilton wrote.

“Erroneous or conflicting statements could be disastrous; the Nixon White House brought huge trouble upon itself by issuing inaccurate, inconsistent statements about Watergate.”

Later, he cautioned the Clinton White House to avoid any interference with the investigations of the Clintons’ Whitewater land venture and its ties to a failed Arkansas savings and loan.

“Any hint of attempts at interdiction or manipulation would raise the specter of Watergate,” he said.

“Despite the falsity of the allegations, these remain treacherous matters,” he wrote.

Hamilton represented Foster’s family after the deputy White House counsel was found dead in a suburban park July 20, 1993, after what authorities have twice ruled a suicide.