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Condit Offers to Let Police Search Home, Phone Bills

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

A lawyer for Rep. Gary A. Condit (D-Ceres) said Monday that the congressman has offered to allow police investigating the disappearance of Modesto intern Chandra Levy to search his Washington condominium and give them access to his telephone and cell phone records. Condit would even consider undergoing a lie detector test, the lawyer said, “if we think it would be helpful.”

The offer came after Condit reportedly acknowledged to detectives over the weekend that he had an affair with the missing woman. Police continue to say that Condit is not a suspect in Levy’s disappearance.

“The congressman will provide whatever additional information and material he can to police,” said attorney Abbe Lowell, who said he was also writing a plea to major media organizations to stop “prying into the private lives of the Condits.”

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Despite Lowell’s insistence that Condit “will work with police,” questions about the congressman’s truthfulness during his three interviews with D.C. detectives and at other points in the two-month-old investigation remain at issue both with Levy’s parents and with law enforcement authorities.

On Monday, Levy’s parents openly pressed Condit to undergo a polygraph test to rectify what they described as discrepancies in his statements. The Levys contend that Condit told them his last contact with Chandra Levy came on April 25--a conflict, the parents insist, with more recent comments indicating Condit was in contact with their daughter as late as April 29. She vanished May 1.

“Mr. Condit has not been very truthful to me up to now,” Susan Levy, the missing woman’s mother, said in a brief appearance outside her home in Modesto.

Lowell disputed any inconsistency in Condit’s statements.

But the congressman’s veracity will likely be the focus Wednesday of a meeting between investigators and Anne Marie Smith, a 39-year-old United Airlines stewardess who asserted she had a 10-month affair with Condit.

Sources familiar with the case say that federal officials are interviewing Smith to determine whether to launch an inquiry into the possibility that the Levy investigation was obstructed or that perjury was encouraged. Condit has not commented publicly on Smith’s allegations.

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