Angry Clinton Rebukes His Whitewater Critics : Politics: Probes have found ‘not a shred of evidence’ of wrongdoing, he says in interview with The Times.

President Clinton on Wednesday heatedly rejected critics’ efforts to equate the Whitewater controversy with the Watergate scandal that destroyed Richard Nixon’s presidency, and he declared that $25 million worth of investigations of the Clintons’ Arkansas real estate venture have found “not a shred of evidence that we had done anything whatever wrong.”

Getting their side of the story out to the public has sometimes been so difficult, Clinton said, that he and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton sometimes relieve their frustration by laughing about it.

So determined has he been not to let the controversy distract him from larger issues, Clinton said, that until the current argument erupted over surrendering notes from a 1993 White House meeting on the subject, he would permit “no discussion of this in my household, no discussion of this in this office.”

“It’s not funny when somebody says something about you that’s not true,” he said, “but sometimes you just have to learn to laugh about it and go on.”

It was clear, however, during an hourlong interview at the White House with members of The Times Washington Bureau, that the continuing controversy has gotten deep under the president’s skin. Coming at a time when he has gained ground in his struggle with the Republican Congress and seen his own political prospects brighten for the first time in many months, the intensifying Whitewater controversy appears to be a darkening cloud.

In the wide-ranging session, Clinton handled with ease questions on subjects ranging from Bosnia and the federal budget to affirmative action and welfare reform.

But when the questioning turned to Whitewater and its increasing focus on the first lady, Clinton’s face reddened visibly and he scaled the heights of rhetorical indignation.

“What was Watergate about? It was about abuse of the CIA, illegal wiretaps, criminal conduct in the White House. There has not been a single, solitary soul accuse me or my wife of doing anything illegal not only in the White House, in the presidential campaign, or in the governor’s office,” Clinton said.

“This is the first time we have ever had in the history of the Republic a special inquiry dealing in some ephemeral way with something the president may or may not have done that may or may not have happened, that didn’t even include not only the administration but the campaign.”

“What I think about this is that a lot of this is politics,” he said.

As for the confrontation with Senate and House investigating committees over notes from the 1993 meeting at which White House staff lawyers and Clinton’s personal attorney discussed Whitewater, Clinton said: “These people won’t take yes for an answer.”

“I’m dying to give these notes up,” he said, and have offered to do so, provided the overall principle of attorney-client privilege is preserved. “I never wanted to keep these notes. I have given 35,000 pages of documents up.”

What apparently was uppermost in Clinton’s mind when he entered the Roosevelt Room for the interview Wednesday afternoon was the budget. He had just ended a telephone conversation with Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) about the latest collapse in the effort to restart both the federal government and budget talks with congressional Republicans.

The president blamed Republican “extremists” in the House for the renewed impasse and implied that House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) had been unable to control them.

He said Dole and Gingrich had agreed Tuesday to support a continuing resolution to keep the government operating while the two sides conducted face-to-face negotiations. But the agreement fell through, he charged, when it was rejected by GOP hard-liners whose real goal is “to destroy the ability of the federal government to address the problems facing America--to move the country forward, to move the country together.”

Clinton said Dole was “frustrated” by the development, and that he believes that Gingrich “intended to keep his word” but that “the tail is wagging the dog in Congress.”

In the interview with 36 Times reporters and editors, which covered both domestic and foreign issues, the president also said that:

* A big part of his reelection campaign would be spent trying to elect a Democrat Congress by helping with fund-raising, supporting the party’s Senate and House campaign committees and pointing out the differences between the records of Democratic and Republican Congresses.

* He will consider going along with the congressional desire to buy more of the Northrop Grumman B-2 stealth bombers, if the cost is not too disruptive to the overall Pentagon budget. He noted that he had signed a defense spending bill that contains $493 million for production of the bombers beyond the current 20 on order.

* He is “hopeful” that he can sign sweeping telecommunications legislation now apparently nearing congressional approval, although just two months ago he indicated that he might veto it.

* Rising inequality among working people and festering social problems, especially increasing drug use and crime among young people, are “two great problems” that should be a major focus of the 1996 election campaign.

* Despite the growing support for communists in Russia’s parliamentary elections, there is no need to change U.S. policy. “Most of these people are not in any way, shape or form saying that they want to go back to a communist political or economic system,” Clinton said.

* China made “a big mistake” in sentencing and imprisoning dissident Wei Jingsheng, but his administration’s decision to divorce Beijing’s human rights abuses from trade issues remains correct. Relations between the two countries are more honest and forthright than they once were and China realizes how strongly the United States disagrees with its imprisonment of Jingsheng, Clinton said.

* The next big challenge for U.S. foreign policy is getting a comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty and then pressing on with American efforts to reduce the proliferation of biological, chemical and smaller-scale nuclear weapons.

Midway through the session, a reporter asked Clinton for his reaction to a prediction by Dole that Whitewater would be an issue in the 1996 campaign. The president’s face grew red and he jabbed his finger repeatedly as he answered.

He said he has cooperated extensively and fully with investigators but has felt compelled to resist the subpoena for notes of the November 1993 meeting because his lawyers advised him that he would be waiving all his lawyer-client confidentiality rights.

“I’m dying to give these notes up . . . “ he declared, waving both arms. “I mean I have asked my lawyers: ‘Can’t I just go out here in the Rose Garden and call the press corps and . . . just throw them out there?’ ”

None of the notes, he said, “would do anything but exonerate me.” But even during Watergate, “nobody even thought of asking President Nixon to waive his lawyer-client privilege.”

Clinton, especially outraged that the Whitewater investigations increasingly are focusing on the first lady, said it apparently is “part of the price of being president. I hope to goodness nobody else has to go through it ever,” he said.

“But the country is well served by--I wish everybody in this country had character as strong as hers and a sense of honesty and integrity as deep as hers. We’d be in better shape.”

He found it “amazing,” he said, that many media outlets did not find it newsworthy that the Resolution Trust Corp. this week had absolved him and his wife of any civil or criminal liability in the finances of a failed savings and loan that has become part of the Whitewater issue. Although The Times and many other newspapers did publish accounts of the RTC’s action, Clinton said, “it seems to be a secret around here.”

When a reporter suggested that this is the first time in history a first lady has been the subject of such an investigation and asked if it had taken a toll on her, Clinton cracked that “she was laughing about it this morning.”

He explained that she was “laughing about the fact that there had been almost no publicity about the fact that we had a $4-million investigation that said we told the truth about all the underlying basic things that gave rise to . . . all these charges and cross-charges.”

Clinton said his wife “doesn’t think it’s funny when people accuse her of doing something she didn’t do. That’s not funny. But sometimes you have to just laugh and go on.”

Until the issue of the attorney notes issue came up, Clinton said, he had banned discussion of Whitewater because “it is the only way I can be president.”

“Because otherwise I’d have to deal with . . . how I feel about this. So I just don’t deal with it. I just let the lawyers handle it and I do what I’m supposed to do. . . . You can’t let it consume your life.”

* CLINTON CHALLENGED: The Senate voted to fight for Clinton papers in court. A16