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A House probe of transcripts

At a hearing last summer on the problems at the Environmental Protection Agency, Congressman John Hiler, an Indiana Republican, angrily accused the panel's Democrats of conducting a political witch hunt. "We are unfortunately doomed to have to undergo what has been an extraordinarily partisan hearing," he said. On reviewing the transcript of the hearing last month, Hiler discovered that his remark had been altered to read: "We are unfortunately doomed?" And there, astonishingly, the sentence ended. This and other surprising examples of phantom fiddling with the official record of House committee hearings had the effect of making Republicans look worse and Democrats better.

So far, three doctored transcripts have been discovered, all of them involving hearings of the House Government Operations Committee. In addition to the EPA hearing, the panel's 1980 deliberations on an attempt by the Hunt family of Texas to manipulate the silver market and its 1982 discussions on synthetic fuel production were surreptitiously revised. "Some staff person was overzealous," says House Speaker Tip O'Neill. "He didn't do it with instructions from any member." The Massachusetts Democrat said that the culprit, if caught, should be fired.

The records of committee meetings are generally transcribed by a stenographer and sent to the committee for editing. Usually the task of cleaning up the copy falls to committee staffers, who are supposed to do no more than make minor changes in grammar and wording. The records of a meeting are often important in determining the intent of Congress if a law is challenged in the courts.

Many of the alterations in the disputed transcripts were made, legitimately, at the request of the members involved. But some Republicans charged that they had not been informed of revisions made in their remarks. G.O.P. Whip Trent Lott of Mississippi complained of "a pattern and a practice of malicious misconduct aimed at discrediting and defaming members of this House." Republicans tried to force the House into establishing a special committee to pursue the matter of the doctored transcripts in public hearings. But on a largely party-line vote last week, the Democrats succeeded in having the matter referred to the Ethics Committee, not known for its investigative zeal, and there the matter will proceed in private. James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin accused Democrats of "stonewalling any effort to get to the bottom of this matter." He was among seven G.O.P. members who wrote to Attorney General William French Smith asking for a criminal investigation or a civil action to cover the costs involved in setting the record straight.

Meanwhile, Republican Congressman Robert Walker of Pennsylvania accused the Democrats of handling the investigation as "business as usual, while they have special prosecutors and all of that for the briefing-book scandal." Many Republicans also claim that the difference in publicity being given the two controversies reveals, in the words of Congressman Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, the "ultimate hypocrisy" of the press. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.