WhiteWaterWeb FBI home page

WITH a new poll indicating that Americans are still not too bothered about the Whitewater scandal, President Clinton was handed another useful piece of news yesterday about his chief tormentor in the Senate.

It seems that Senator Alfonse D'Amato, the Republican chairman of the special Whitewater investigation committee, is as adept as Hillary Clinton in making money on the stock market.

The senator, noted for his ferocious questioning of White House officials in the Whitewater hearings, has suggested that Mrs Clinton's profit from an Arkansas cattle futures deal, in which a $1,000 (£650) investment was turned into $99,537 in less than a year, was achieved through political favouritism.

Now lawyers for the Wall Street Journal have forced the unsealing of a secret Securities and Exchange Commission report that says a brokerage firm bent its rules to help Mr D'Amato make $37,125 in a day of share trading in a computer firm. At the time, Mr D'Amato was a senior member of the influential Senate Banking Committee. He is now its chairman.

The newspaper reported that before the deal the senator asked one of the brokers: "Can you make me some money?" The senator has insisted that he was never given special treatment. He said in 1994: "I am no Hillary Clinton."

While the thick-skinned Mr D'Amato is likely to shrug off the details, they are welcome ammunition for the beleaguered White House, especially as they were unearthed by a newspaper that has led American media in trying to get to the bottom of Whitewater.

Hale is refusing to tell what he knows about the president unless he is given immunity from prosecution

Mr D'Amato is already having trouble with his committee's campaign to question in public David Hale, the former Arkansas judge who claims Mr Clinton forced him to grant an illegal federal loan to his Whitewater partner, Susan McDougal. Democrats have so far blocked the idea. Hale is refusing to tell what he knows about the president unless he is given immunity from prosecution.

However, the White House remains on the defensive in another affair being investigated by the Whitewater independent counsel, Kenneth Starr. He is looking into whether administration officials tried to mislead investigators of the 1993 sacking of seven White House travel office officials, including the chief, Billy Dale. Mrs Clinton is suspected to have played a major role in the dismissals.

It now emerges that seven months after Mr Dale was dismissed, the FBI was asked by the White House for its confidential file on him. The FBI handed over documents dating back 31 years. Republicans allege that officials were on a witch-hunt to smear Mr Dale, who was charged with embezzlement but acquitted by a jury.

The explanation given by the White House is that the FBI request was a bureaucratic error while staff files were being updated. Officials insisted that the records were untouched in a vault. Mr Dale said: "For them to tell me this was [a] clerical mistake, I can't accept that. I think they were digging for dirt on me."

Louis Free, the FBI director, said he was ordering a "thorough inquiry" into the handing over of the file.

Reply to Electronic Telegraph

Electronic Telegraph is a Registered Service Mark of The Telegraph plc