No Indictments in Travel Office Probe, Ray Says

Independent counsel Robert W. Ray won’t prosecute anyone in the White House travel office controversy, and is putting the finishing touches on a report likely to be made public before Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Senate campaign ends, officials say.

Some documents and testimony gathered by Ray’s office and already on the public record suggest the first lady played a central role in instigating the firing of seven longtime employees in the White House travel office shortly after President Clinton took office.

The May 1993 firings of the entire White House travel office staff, which arranges travel for reporters accompanying the president on official trips, touched off one of the earliest political controversies in her husband’s presidency. The first lady denies being involved.

The report could be sent to a three-member federal appeals court panel next week and publicly released three months from now after lawyers for Mrs. Clinton and others named in the document have had an opportunity to respond, say legal sources familiar with the investigation, who spoke only on condition of anonymity.

The decision marks the second since Ray took over for the oft-criticized Kenneth W. Starr that he has closed down an inquiry without any prosecutions in the long-running independent counsel investigation of the Clintons.

Previously, Ray announced there would be no prosecutions regarding the White House’s gathering of FBI background files on former Republican administration employees.

The White House had no comment on the travel office matter.

Among the questions that could be answered in Ray’s report is whether Deputy White House Counsel Vincent Foster and other presidential aides tried to protect the first lady from criticism by saying she had little to do with the purge.

Nine days before Foster committed suicide in July 1993, the former law partner of Mrs. Clinton hired prominent Washington attorney Jim Hamilton to defend him because of a looming congressional inquiry into the firings.

Starr issued a grand jury subpoena for Hamilton’s notes on a conversation with Foster, but Hamilton won a Supreme Court ruling keeping them private.

Republicans accused the White House of using the FBI to justify the firings.

The White House, saying the firings had been mishandled, apologized after an internal review. It also recommended that five of the seven former employees be given new government jobs while it reprimanded four presidential aides. The former head of the office was prosecuted and acquitted of financial wrongdoing.