House Whitewater Panels Reject Deal

Independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr agreed Tuesday to accept the notes of a controversial Whitewater meeting under strict legal conditions set down by the White House, but the proposed deal was rejected by the House committees investigating the scandal.

The surprise refusal of House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) to accept the proposed agreement means that the Senate will be called upon to vote today to enforce a subpoena for the notes of a Nov. 5, 1993, meeting of seven lawyers who were working on the case for President Clinton.

Although the legal machinations surrounding the subpoena were extremely complex, Mark Fabiani, special White House counsel for Whitewater, insisted that the entire dispute was just a simple matter of partisan politics.

“The situation is now clear: The White House wants to release the notes,” he said. “The independent counsel has reached an agreement with the White House. . . . Only Republican partisanship prevents the public from seeing these notes.”

The letter from Gingrich to the White House was not made public, and his reasoning for rejecting the agreement was not immediately known. One source said House members wanted to demonstrate they do not march in lock-step with their colleagues in the Senate.

Sources said Gingrich’s decision to reject the proposal was based on advice from House Banking Committee Chairman Jim Leach (R-Iowa) and William F. Clinger Jr. (R-Pa.), chairman of the House Government Operations Committee. Both committees have been investigating the Whitewater scandal.

The dispute began recently when the Senate Whitewater investigating committee headed by Sen. Alfonse M. D’Amato (R-N.Y.) requested the notes of the meeting, and the White House insisted that they were protected by attorney-client privilege.

D’Amato said the notes will shed light on what he suspects was an effort by the president to obstruct government investigations related to Whitewater.

Eventually, White House officials said they would be willing to release the notes, but only if everyone involved in the investigation agreed that it did not represent a waiver by the president of attorney-client privilege over all other confidential documents. Usually, if a person waives attorney-client privilege in one instance, it cannot be reasserted in a related matter.

Although the Senate committee last week agreed to the conditions laid down by the White House, it took until Tuesday for the White House to seek the approval of Starr. According to Fabiani, Starr readily agreed.

Almost everyone involved in the negotiations had assumed that the House would go along with anything agreed to by the Senate. Thus White House officials were taken aback by Gingrich’s decision.

Fabiani said the House’s refusal demonstrates what the president’s aides have often suspected: “The House Republicans intend to argue that disclosure of the . . . notes entitles them to pry into every confidential conversation the president has ever had with his lawyers.”

The Senate committee voted last week to seek approval of the full Senate to enforce the subpoena. If the White House continues to refuse to release the notes after the full Senate vote, the matter would likely wind up being litigated in the courts.