ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, March 9, 1996 TAG: 9603120026
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
A LONGER life for the U.S. Senate committee's Whitewater probe is not only called for, it is deserved. President Clinton and his wife have brought this upon themselves.
One can reasonably question, as Senate Democrats have, whether the Whitewater committee's politically charged hearings should be extended indefinitely into the fall election season. A compromise offered this week by the committee chairman, New York Sen. Alfonse D'Amato, will end the inquiry before the parties' conventions in August. On the other hand, an abrupt and arbitrary cutoff now would have left too strong an aroma of cover-up.
The committee's purported goal has been to determine whether Bill Clinton, as governor of Arkansas, or Hillary Clinton, as a partner in a Little Rock law firm, engaged in illegal activities involving a suspicious real-estate deal (Whitewater) and a failed savings-and-loan. So far, anyway, Whitewater's convoluted essence of land transactions, bank loans and political ties hasn't touched the president or caught the public's imagination as much of a scandal. A special prosecutor and federal bank investigators have brought charges and some convictions against a cast of Arkansas characters - but not the Clintons.
What's more, a Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation probe recently found no cause for legal action in the law firm's mishandling of Whitewater accounts, nor evidence that Hillary Clinton played a role in any fraudulent scheme. There has been no credible suggestion of presidential abuse of power, a la Watergate or Iran-Contra. The hearings unquestionably have provided an avenue for the highly partisan D'Amato - himself a subject of past ethics investigations - to harass and embarrass the White House.
And yet, no one deserves more credit than the White House for keeping alive the Senate investigations. Every time the committee has been about to run out of money, time or excuses to continue, it seems another "lost" file - long subpoenaed but missing for months or years - suddenly is discovered in the White House. The files never contain a smoking gun, yet their mysterious migrations and mishandling - on top of memory lapses by White House employees under oath - reinforce the impression that the president and first lady have something to hide.
While an earlier special prosecutor was regrettably replaced by Kenneth Starr, a partisan Republican critic of the Clintons, it's not as though this affair is all trumped-up wind. The Clintons were partners in the Whitewater real estate deal with James McDougal, who owned the failed S&L. This same S&L used Hillary Clinton's law firm for legal work. McDougal and his ex-wife are now on trial in Little Rock, along with Arkansas Gov. Jim Guy Tucker, accused of lying about nearly $3 million in federally backed loans.
None of which implies the Clintons' guilt, of course, particularly in any impeachable offenses. In any event, these events occurred long ago and far from Washington. Even so, the Senate inquiry can't be dismissed as merely a political witchhunt. Who can blame the committee for continuing to wonder whether the Clintons' lawyerly defensiveness might suggest there's something to be defensive about?
LENGTH: Medium: 58 linesby CNB