Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, April 23, 1994 TAG: 9404250171
SECTION: NATL/INTL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: STATE
SOURCE: Boston Globe
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
Speaking for more than an hour with a skeptical White House press corps, Clinton said that she received no special treatment when parlaying a $1,000 investment into $100,000 in commodity trades in the late 1970s and that neither she nor President Clinton was aware of alleged irregularities in the Whitewater land deal.
``I was lucky,'' Clinton said when asked about her good fortune in the commodity market. ``I had absolutely no reason to believe that I got any favorable treatment.''
She called Whitewater ``a passive investment'' in which the Clintons lost money and risked even more. ``We saw no records; we saw no documents,'' said Clinton, adding that she and the president had ``absolutely'' no knowledge that money from a failing Arkansas savings and loan association was channeled through the Whitewater accounts.
Wives of previous presidents have hosted reporters on discussions about pet issues or matters of human interest, but Friday was the first time in the nation's history that a first lady was called upon in an antagonistic forum to defend her conduct as a professional or an investor.
Acknowledging that her earlier resistance to public inquiries about her finances may have been a mistake, Clinton said that ``I've always believed in a zone of privacy, and I told a friend the other day that I feel after resisting for a long time I've been rezoned.
``I think I resisted it in ways that may have raised more questions than they answered,'' she added.
Indeed, Clinton's performance was the latest gambit selected by the Clintons in their strategy to put Whitewater behind them via a policy of ``full disclosure.'' The White House has released tax returns, commodity trading records and other documents in recent weeks, staged a prime-time presidential news conference, and admitted that the Clintons failed to report $6,000 of Hillary Clinton's trading profits to the Internal Revenue Service.
Clinton's performance failed to satisfy Republican critics. Sen. Alfonse D'Amato of New York held his own news conference after hers, repeating Republican suggestions that there is something rotten at Whitewater's core.
In Friday's showdown, Clinton capably fielded several challenges to her account of the commodity trades by reporters who wondered if her adviser in the trading, Arkansas lawyer James Blair, had gotten her favorable treatment in an attempt to buy her husband's good graces for Tyson Foods, the giant agricultural processing company for whom he worked.
Not so, Clinton said.
Blair and his wife, Diane, ``are among our very best friends,'' she said. ``My husband performed their marriage ceremony. I was the best person at the wedding, ... and I found it a little bit surprising that anyone would suggest that because in 1980, right during the time that this was all going on, when my husband ran for re-election, Tyson supported his opponent.
``People whom I knew were much bigger traders, like Jim Blair and others, they lost money,'' Clinton said. ``Why would Jim Blair try to help me get favorable treatment that he couldn't get for himself? I mean, it doesn't make any sense to me at all.''
Similarly, Clinton said there was no conflict of interest when she represented her business partner in Whitewater, James McDougal, and his Madison Guaranty thrift before a state regulator appointed by her husband.
``I'm glad you asked that,'' Clinton said, echoing a frequent refrain of her news conference. ``That's another thing that I feel has gotten quite confused in the telling.''
According to Clinton, she was listed on correspondence regarding a single Madison matter only because a young lawyer at her firm needed a partner to serve as ``his backstop'' in requesting a technical opinion from the state.
``Madison got no benefit at all from the answer of that legal question,'' she said, and in fact her firm returned part of the $2,000-a-month retainer she had arranged with McDougal. ``I sent him a check back.''
by CNB