Aide Who Found Missing Records Testifies in Whitewater Inquiry

The presidential aide who found Hillary Rodham Clinton’s missing legal billing records in the White House residence last year testified Tuesday before a federal grand jury investigating the Whitewater affair.

The appearance was the second time Carolyn Huber, an aide to the first lady, had been summoned by Whitewater independent prosecutor Kenneth W. Starr to answer questions under oath. In January, after the disclosure that she had found the records that had been sought by investigators for two years, Whitewater prosecutors brought her before a federal grand jury in Little Rock, Ark., to testify.

Huber spent more than an hour before the grand jury Tuesday. Afterward, her attorney told reporters: “We’re not interested in talking to you.”

Huber has testified before a Senate Whitewater committee that she first saw the documents in August 1995 sitting on a table in the White House residence. She said she put them in a box with some “knickknacks” and did not find them again until Jan. 4. She then called the Clintons’ lawyer, who gave them to investigators.

Mrs. Clinton, in a precedent-setting appearance before the grand jury, testified in January that she had no idea how the missing documents suddenly turned up. The records involved work she did as a private lawyer in Little Rock in the mid-1980s for a failed savings and loan, Madison Guaranty, which is at the center of the Whitewater affair.

The failure of the savings and loan cost taxpayers an estimated $65 million. The Clintons were partners in a money-losing 1978 real estate venture called Whitewater that prosecutors believe may have illegally siphoned money from the savings and loan.