Clinton Raised $500,000 in Calls to Donors, Aide’s Note Indicates

Investigators trying to determine whether President Clinton made telephone solicitations to Democratic donors from the White House have obtained an aide’s notes that say the president raised $500,000 by telephone, government officials say.

“BC made 15 to 20 calls, raised 500K,” White House aide David Strauss wrote in 1994.

In addition, the White House has turned over to Congress a handwritten notation from Clinton on a February 1996 memo from presidential aide Harold Ickes that forwarded the names of 10 major corporate donors the president could call, the officials said--on condition of anonymity.

Since the revelations last spring that Vice President Al Gore made fund-raising calls from the White House, the president has said he could not recall making any telephone solicitations but could not rule out the possibility.

On Thursday, Lanny J. Davis, a White House special counsel, said: “The president has made hundreds of phone calls to supporters over the years” and “has stated that he cannot say that, ‘Out of the hundreds and hundreds and maybe thousands of calls’ he made to supporters that he never asked for financial support. He said that he can not recall specifically asking for contributions during these calls, though he may well have.”

Federal law bars government officials from soliciting political donations on government property.

But when Gore acknowledged making fund-raising calls, he said he believed they were legal because he used a political credit card to pay for them and was told there was “no controlling legal authority” prohibiting doing it that way.

Asked if the White House believes that fund-raising calls by Clinton would be legal, a senior White House official responded, “If the president did make fund-raising calls, is there anything inappropriate or illegal? The answer is no.”