The Electronic Telegraph   Monday 17 July 1995   World News

He's in for a rough ride
By Stephen Robinson

As the Whitewater hearings reopen tomorrow, STEPHEN ROBINSON in Washington previews the roasting that the Clinton administration can expect at the hands of the Republicans

IT HAS become fashionable for Washington savants to begin any comments they offer about the widening Whitewater affair with a qualifying "As you know, I'm the last person to subscribe to conspiracy theories, but . . ."

Everyone seems to be doing it, for there is a natural reluctance to believe the more extravagant claims of shenanigans in the Clinton White House and in Arkansas in the 1980s, despite the mounting evidence of serious wrongdoing.

If the most serious allegations are true, it means that the president of the US and his circle are implicated in a giant interlocking scandal involving fraud, drug smuggling, and the mysterious death of an old friend, Vincent Foster. Of course, it all sounds perfectly preposterous, but then . . .

We may be in a better position to judge the evidence by the end of summer, for congressional committee rooms are once again being transformed into televised courtrooms for tomorrow's opening of the next phase of the Whitewater hearings. Members of the president's inner circle - though not the Clintons themselves - will troop sheepishly along the corridors of the Capitol and in front of the television cameras to testify.

There were hearings last summer, but then the relevant Senate and House committees were under Democratic control, so the witnesses were given an easy ride. Still, even though witnesses were facing relatively friendly fire, those hearings triggered the resignations of the deputy Treasury Secretary, and two other senior officials. Since then, another close Clinton friend and the former number three at the Justice Department, Webster Hubbell, has been jailed for fraud and Mr Clinton's successor as governor of Arkansas has been indicted on serious charges.

This week, the Clinton loyalists can expect a roasting as the new Republican leadership opens fire on a Democratic administration. Mr Clinton's allies are prepared for the hearings to turn very ugly indeed. The next election is only 16 months away, and nothing that happens in Washington - least of all highly charged congressional hearings - can be separated from presidential politics.

The "Whitewater affair" takes its name from the Clintons' failed property investment of the 1980s, but the term is now used to cover all of the administration's alleged crimes and misdemeanours.

Tomorrow's hearings begin two days before the second anniversary of the death of Vincent Foster, Mr Clinton's boyhood friend and Mrs Clinton's former legal partner in Little Rock. After a brief and unhappy tenure as deputy White House legal counsel, Foster was found dead in Fort Marcy Park outside Washington, killed by a single gunshot to the head.

Initially it looked like an obvious suicide but there were inconsistencies. For a start, his arms were laid out neatly at the side of his body, with the revolver still in his hand, just like in the movies. In real-life suicides by handgun, the weapon is usually thrown clear by the recoil. Then there's the point that no one in the nearby houses heard a shot that warm summer evening, and no bullet was recovered.

Not all of the people who are suspicious about the circumstances of his death assume Foster was murdered. But as Wesley Pruden, editor of the Washington Times, has put it, "it's easier to find someone who believes Elvis did it than to find someone who believes Mr Foster did the deed at Fort Marcy Park".

IF FOSTER'S body was moved, who did it, and why? How high does the cover-up go? The hearings this week will not address that precise issue of whether Foster's body was moved, an investigation which remains under the remit of the Whitewater special prosecutor Kenneth Starr, who will release his own official report later.

But the Senate banking committee, led by an irascible Brooklyn Republican named Alfonse D'Amato, is very interested indeed in the Clinton circle's peculiar behaviour in the hours after Foster's death.

News that the body had been found threw the staff there into an extraordinary panic. Foster's White House office should have been immediately sealed off as part of a potential crime scene, but instead the Clintons' aides began rifling through his filing cabinets. Foster had been acting as the Clintons' personal lawyer and was trying to extricate them from their failed Whitewater investments. Files relating to this were snatched, and placed by Hillary Clinton in a safe in the White House living quarters.

As a lawyer, she should have known that was improper, and Senator D'Amato is suspicious. "We want to see if any documents were mishandled, misplaced, or destroyed in the securing of the office." He believes White House officials have lied about those documents. If he is right, very senior members of the staff, conceivably even Mrs Clinton, would be guilty of obstruction of justice, which is a felony and could result in long stretches in jail.

The other part of the Whitewater conundrum is what was going on in Arkansas in the 1980s, when Mr Clinton was governor. The Clintons' partner in the Whitewater investment ran a bank which crashed spectacularly, leaving debts to the taxpayer of $60 million. In Arkansas there has long been a suspicion that money was siphoned off from the bank deposits to offset the Clintons' losses, and also possibly to finance his political campaigns.

The third leg to the Whitewater stool is the bizarre goings-on in the 1980s at a small airport at Mena, in western Arkansas. Former CIA operatives allege the agency was flying weapons to Central America from that airport and that vast quantities of cocaine were coming back on the empty return flights. Mr Clinton has said that any illegal activities at Mena were carried out as part of a CIA or federal operation, and had nothing to do with him as governor. That is technically true, but then Mr Clinton's associates in the murky world of Arkansas business have been linked to the drug running.

Much of the best original Whitewater reporting has been done by Ambrose Evans Pritchard of The Sunday Telegraph, who is currently involved in a public quarrel with the Washington Post. They have branded him a conspiracy theory freak; he accused them of complicity in the cover-up by failing to throw their considerable investigative resources into the story.

It somehow seems hard to believe that a paper which broke the Watergate story would shy away from the biggest scandal in American presidential history. But then those expert commentators who complacently advised everyone that there was nothing to Whitewater - that it would simply blow away - have consistently been proved wrong.

AMERICAN congressional hearings tend to focus tightly on the narrow issue of correct procedure in government. In the next few weeks, one fears that relatively junior members of the administration will be disgraced because of their efforts to protect people higher up.

There has always been a whiff about Whitewater that a larger scandal lies behind the relatively trivial lapses of government ethics for which people have already been forced to resign. And you do not have to be a conspiracy theory buff to worry about that.

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