The Political Interest

By Michael Kramer

Did you catch that little-noted stunner in the midst of last week's Whitewater drone? If you were glued to the congressional hearings, to the repudiated diaries, sworn contradictions and "I don't recalls," you may have missed it. A year after the suicide of deputy White House counsel Vincent Foster, the Administration admitted that its previous accounts about the search of Foster's office following his death were, as the Nixonites used to say, inoperative. Even more amazing, the person at the center of this particular storm isn't the President; it's his wife.

To appreciate what the New York Times headlined New Misstatements, flash back to Mrs. Clinton's April 22 press conference. During most of that session, journalists sought to understand how a novice makes a bundle in the commodities market. The most benign spin on the First Lady's explanation that day is that she had an expert for a friend, although even that seemingly harmless tale refuted the initial story, which attributed Mrs. Clinton's success to her perusal of the Wall Street Journal.

The Foster matter arose only briefly during the hour and 12 minutes. "There's been a lot of concern and criticism" about the removal of documents from Foster's office, Mrs. Clinton conceded, but "I cannot speak to that in any detail" because " . . . I was not here, I was in Arkansas." And anyway, she added, "I believe ((the search)) was done in the presence of officials from the park police," which had jurisdiction over the case. That sounded fine: Mrs. Clinton was away, and the cops controlled the scene. But, as the park police confirmed to the Senate Banking Committee last week, they were only near the zone; they were not in it. They had been forced to "sit outside" Foster's office while White House aides segregated the material. Well, Mrs. Clinton might say today, "all I said in April was what 'I believed' to be true."

That kind of legalistic parsing might not rival the President's occasional hedging, but an actual exchange revealed the First Lady's own artful way with words. Near the end of her press conference, Mrs. Clinton was asked why her chief of staff, Maggie Williams, was "involved at all" in the document retrieval. "I don't know that she did remove any documents," Mrs. Clinton answered. "I didn't send anyone into ((Foster's)) office to retrieve anything," she elaborated several weeks later -- which was technically correct. It was Bernard Nussbaum, then the White House counsel, who distributed the documents. The whole truth, though, is that Nussbaum gave a file marked "Whitewater" to Williams, who then had it stored on the third floor of the White House residence. Five days later, the papers were transferred to the Clintons' personal attorney. They eventually reached special counsel Robert Fiske, but not voluntarily, as the White House first said. Fiske had to subpoena them. What's more, the White House now admits that Williams acted at Mrs. Clinton's direction after she phoned the First Lady in Little Rock. Mrs. Clinton may not have known all the details, but she was directly responsible for some of the details that mattered most -- and that she conveniently avoided mentioning on two occasions.

No one yet knows why the Clintons appear to have ignored the lesson of Watergate: the cover-up is invariably worse than the matters the participants seek to conceal. What we now do know, however, is that Mrs. Clinton is more like Mr. Clinton than anyone ever realized. Slick Willie, meet Slippery Hillary.