Searching for the Missing Pieces

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Why would a lawyer ask the Justice Department to subpoena some of the papers of his own clients -- especially if those clients are the President of the U.S. and his wife? White House senior adviser Bruce Lindsey has a simple . answer: "Privacy." Indeed, subpoenaed papers become part of the record of a criminal investigation, unavailable for release under the Freedom of Information Act and thus shielded more effectively than otherwise from Congress and the press.

Accordingly, on the day last week that the Justice Department received a request under the Freedom of Information Act to make public files on Whitewater Development Corp. -- an Arkansas land venture in which Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton were partners -- the White House announced that those files were under subpoena. David Kendall, the Clintons' personal lawyer, had asked for that subpoena almost two weeks earlier, on Dec. 23 -- the day Clinton announced he would turn over all the files to Justice "voluntarily." As it happened, Justice lawyers were already drafting a subpoena; Kendall persuaded them to broaden it and demand more documents than they originally wanted to see. Kendall handed over about half the papers last week, after a couple of days of confusion and contradiction: the White House had first announced that all the papers had been turned over, and then that none would be for a couple of weeks because they had to be "cataloged."

Had the President wanted to amplify whispers of "cover-up" into roars, he could hardly have devised a better strategy. And the Administration promptly compounded the damage. Besieged by demands that she appoint a special counsel to look into the case, Attorney General Janet Reno steadfastly refused to do so at this time. That "might be a possibility," she said, if Congress passes a new law authorizing her to ask a court to choose a special counsel (the old law expired in 1992). But if she were to name one on her own now, said Reno, no one would believe the counsel would be "truly independent." To critics the reasoning seemed lame, and even inside the White House some aides were offering to bet that a special counsel will be named soon. But it might be too late to save Clinton from suspicion that he resisted as long as he could.

Altogether, it seems as if the President, the First Lady and their aides have forgotten everything they learned about damage control during the bitter campaign of 1992. Old Washington hands point out that suspicions of hiding a scandal usually hurt a President far more than the scandal itself. That seems especially true in this case. The affairs of Whitewater and its partners -- the Clintons, James McDougal, the owner of a failed Arkansas savings and loan, and his wife Susan -- were so convoluted that they defy quick summary. Even the questions that the dealings raise are too complex to fit on a bumper sticker. The press and television paid almost no attention until recently, and then largely because it developed that a file relating to Whitewater had been removed from the office of White House counsel Vincent Foster after he committed suicide last July (that file is one of the papers Justice subpoenaed and Kendall handed over last week).