Senate Whitewater Panel Ends Meetings

The Senate Whitewater Committee ended 14 months of meetings Tuesday on a partisan note as Democrats voted against giving congressional immunity to President Clinton’s chief accuser, David Hale, thus blocking Republican hopes for his televised testimony.

With the panel scheduled to issue its final report early next week, Sen. Alfonse M. D’Amato (R-N.Y.), the committee chairman, said it will probably recommend the criminal prosecution of several administration figures.

Although D’Amato refused to elaborate, committee sources said Republicans may press for perjury investigations of Deputy White House Chief of Staff Harold M. Ickes and two longtime confidantes of First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton’s: her chief of staff, Margaret Williams, and New York lawyer Susan Thomases.

Democratic sources on the panel scoffed at the idea, with one calling it “a purely political move based solely on wishful thinking. There is no basis for such prosecutions.”

A vote to grant immunity from prosecution to Hale for his testimony fell short of the two-thirds majority needed for passage. All 10 GOP members voted in favor, and all eight Democrats voted against.

Hale, a former Arkansas municipal judge, testified in the federal trial that resulted in last month’s conspiracy and fraud convictions against Arkansas Gov. Jim Guy Tucker and the Clintons’ Whitewater investment partners, James B. and Susan McDougal. Hale has said that Clinton improperly pressured him to make a $300,000 loan to Susan McDougal and that some of the money was funneled into the troubled Whitewater real-estate project. Clinton has denied the allegation.

Democrats said they were not willing to protect Hale from further prosecutions, a condition his lawyers insisted on before allowing him to appear before the Senate. Republicans accused Democratic members of trying to shield the president from embarrassing testimony.

Although many congressional committees over the years have referred cases of alleged lying under oath to the Justice Department, actual prosecutions of perjury referrals have been rare because the questions and answers often are inexact. However, Republicans seem more optimistic this time because of the congressional perjury case being pursued by Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr over the travel office firings.

“We are studying what seems to be a very serious number of discrepancies,” D’Amato said.

Ickes, who appeared before senators on two occasions, repeatedly claimed a poor recollection of details when questioned about White House notes from early 1994 meetings of a Whitewater damage-control group that he headed.

At the time, D’Amato sought to point out contradictions in Ickes’ prior testimony before Congress and with the testimony of other witnesses--including Deputy Treasury Secretary Roger Altman, who later resigned. Ickes insisted he was testifying to the best of his recollection.

Williams and Thomases also raised the hackles of committee Republicans in repeated appearances beginning last year, turning aside questions about 17 phone calls they made to each other and to Mrs. Clinton in the hours after Deputy White House Counsel Vincent Foster was found dead of a gunshot wound in July 1993 in a suburban Virginia park. His death has been ruled a suicide.

Williams and Thomases insisted that none of the calls involved subsequent actions by Bernard Nussbaum, then-White House counsel, to keep Justice Department investigators away from Foster’s office files. But they could not remember specifics of the calls, saying they were overwrought by the death of Foster, a longtime friend and former law partner of the first lady’s.

D’Amato and Sen. Lauch Faircloth (R-N.C.) asserted that the two women engaged in “a pattern of deception” about their conversations. Williams and Thomases have denied trying to mislead the committee.