GOP Whitewater Report to Claim Abuses of Power

As both parties jockeyed for political advantage, sources on the Senate Whitewater Committee said Saturday the Republican majority’s final report this week will accuse the Clinton White House of “abuses of power”--a charge that Democratic members of the panel say is totally unjustified.

Summing up a 14-month inquiry, the majority report is expected to allege that eight current or former White House aides or administration figures committed perjury or at least tried to mislead senators investigating President and Hillary Rodham Clinton’s money-losing investment in the late 1970s in the highly speculative Arkansas land venture known as Whitewater.

The majority report will conclude: “Administration officials improperly used the power of their offices in a wrongful attempt to ensure that ongoing federal investigations resulted in the least amount of legal and political damage to the President and Mrs. Clinton.”

It was also reported that the panel’s GOP members have concluded that Hillary Clinton likely played a part in limiting the probe into Deputy White House Counsel Vincent Foster’s death in order to keep potentially embarrassing documents from coming to light.

Committee sources said the report will assert that presidential aides and advisors, such as Deputy Chief of Staff Harold M. Ickes and former White House Counsel Bernard Nussbaum, sought to thwart or limit official inquiries involving Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan, the failed Little Rock, Ark., thrift at the heart of the Whitewater probe, and then misled Congress about their actions.

The Whitewater land development was jointly owned by the Clintons, Susan McDougal and James B. McDougal, who also owned Madison Guaranty, which was seized by federal regulators in 1989. Officials have been investigating, among other issues, whether Whitewater caused losses at Madison Guaranty, or whether federally insured deposits from the S&L; went through Whitewater to aid Clinton’s 1984 gubernatorial campaign or to benefit the Clintons in any other way.

The majority report will single out Nussbaum for special criticism for allegedly keeping Justice Department investigators at bay who were seeking to search the office of the Foster after he was found dead in July 1993. His death was ruled a suicide.

There was ample testimony before the committee that Nussbaum kept Justice Department investigators from searching Foster’s office for a suicide note, telling them he would search for it himself, much to their displeasure.

Nussbaum said he wanted to protect any national security documents or lists of potential Supreme Court nominees from prying eyes. Republicans, however, suspect that he was hiding incriminating documents, such as Whitewater strategy memos or papers relating to the White House travel office firings.

Discounting the testimony of a number of current and former White House officials, a draft of the GOP report also says that evidence “strongly suggests” that Hillary Clinton, after hearing of Foster’s death, “dispatched her trusted lieutenants to contain any potential embarrassment or political damage” stemming from an investigation of Foster’s papers. Foster had worked on Whitewater questions and the controversy over the travel office.

The report doesn’t link the president to what it calls the “pattern of highly improper conduct” after Foster died, but it focuses on Hillary Clinton; her chief of staff, Margaret Williams; and her close friend Susan Thomases.

The draft report labels Thomases and Williams as the first lady’s “key agents” in the matter of access to Foster’s papers. The Republicans conclude that Williams searched Foster’s office at Hillary Clinton’s request the night of his death. They find credible a Secret Service agent’s testimony that Williams removed documents that night, and they reach the “inescapable conclusion” that two days later, the first lady discussed limiting authorities’ access to Foster’s office. The first lady has denied she tried to limit access to the papers.

Hillary Clinton is also expected to be blamed by the Republican majority as the only suspect in the disappearance of billing records from her former law firm, which were missing for two years after the panel subpoenaed them. The records, which had been sought to determine what work she had done in the 1980s for Madison Guaranty, were found in the White House in January and turned over to the committee.

Democratic members of the panel, who will file a minority report challenging the committee’s conclusions, declare there is “no credible evidence” that the Clintons or their aides abused their offices.

In a rare statement Saturday in advance of its report, the committee minority, headed by Sen. Paul S. Sarbanes (D-Md.), attacked “well-coordinated leaks” by Republicans, including the Friday edition of ABC-TV’s “Nightline” that included quotations from the majority draft report.

“The public deserves an objective report that separates the Whitewater facts from the Whitewater froth,” the Democrats said.

“Unfortunately, the extension of these hearings directly into the presidential campaign season has provoked a high degree of partisanship that has undermined the objectivity of this investigation,” they added.

One Democratic source said: “We hope the public will keep in mind that the majority report is not a grand jury indictment. It is a document clearly intended for political impact.”

Ickes, who is expected to be singled out for some of the heaviest criticism in the majority report, is a former New York lawyer and longtime political foe of Sen. Alfonse M. D’Amato (R-N.Y.), chairman of the Whitewater panel. Ickes headed a Whitewater response team within the White House in early 1994. He was questioned extensively about notes from his strategy meetings that the White House furnished in response to Senate subpoenas.

The committee is expected to ask Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr to launch a perjury investigation of Ickes, who has denied any wrongdoing. Ickes’ testimony contradicted that of former Deputy Treasury Secretary Roger Altman about information allegedly divulged to the White House by the Resolution Trust Corp., a division of the Treasury Department that was investigating Madison Guaranty. Altman resigned in August 1994.

Ickes also claimed a faulty memory about many White House strategy sessions on Whitewater.

According to committee sources, two others for whom perjury investigations may be recommended are Williams and Thomases. Both testified repeatedly that they could not recall details of 17 phone calls they had with each other and with the first lady in the hours after Foster was found dead.

The majority also may single out allegedly misleading testimony by Nussbaum on his search of Foster’s office and by presidential aide Bruce Lindsey, former aides Mark D. Gearan and David Watkins, and former Justice Department official Webster L. Hubbell.

These men were mostly questioned about White House reactions to official investigations of Madison Guaranty and about the first lady’s long-missing billing records.

Democrats, in their statement, said any criticism of these witnesses was “unsupportable” in view of the fact that many questions dealt with events in Arkansas dating back 10 or more years.