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Whitewater Committee Poses New Questions for First Lady

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<i> From Associated Press</i>

The Senate Whitewater Committee has obtained last-minute accusations of greater involvement by First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton in a controversial real estate transaction a decade ago and will ask her to submit to written questions.

Don Denton, who was an executive at the savings and loan at the heart of the Whitewater investigation, told federal regulators that he cautioned Hillary Clinton in the spring of 1986 about a questionable loan deal in the Castle Grande real estate venture but that the first lady dismissed his advice.

Regulators have called the real estate venture a “sham.”

Castle Grande was prominently mentioned during the recently concluded Arkansas trial in which the Clintons’ Whitewater business partners and Gov. Jim Guy Tucker were convicted of fraud.

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Before Hillary Clinton’s law firm billing records resurfaced in January this year, two years after they were first subpoenaed, investigators did not know of the extent of the first lady’s legal work on the venture. She has said she remembers almost nothing about the work on Castle Grande.

Sen. Alfonse M. D’Amato (R-N.Y.), the Whitewater Committee chairman, said Thursday that Denton’s sworn interview with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. amounted to “important new evidence” that “sheds new light on the nature and extent of Mrs. Clinton’s work.”

D’Amato’s committee sent a request to the first lady’s private lawyer Thursday, asking her to answer in writing what she recalls about the transactions involving Castle Grande and specifically about the conversation with Denton.

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