‘Serious Problems’ In White House Response Senator Claims Clinton Not Cooperating In Fund-Raising Investigation

The White House is refusing to live up to an agreement to provide documents to the Senate committee investigating campaign fundraising abuses, sources claimed this week.

Sen. Fred D. Thompson, R-Tenn., called White House chief of staff Erskine B. Bowles on Tuesday to complain that despite pledges of full cooperation by presidential aides, his investigators are receiving documents slowly and often with whole sections - even entire pages - blanked out, the sources said.

Asked about the issue, Thompson said there are “serious problems” with the White House responses to his committee’s document requests, but he said he hopes they can be worked out.

Michael Madigan, lead attorney on Thompson’s Governmental Affairs Committee, sent a letter to White House counsel Charles F.C. Ruff last month calling administration responses to the committee’s document requests “disturbing” and “totally unacceptable.”

But in an interview Thursday, Madigan called the committee’s relationship with Ruff and Lanny A. Breuer, a senior White House counsel, “excellent.”

As an example of the problems Thompson complained about, sources cited a committee request for information about fund-raiser Charles Yah Lin Trie.

White House aides insisted that 2-1/2 boxes of documents on Trie are so sensitive, the sources said, that senior committee lawyers would have to go to the executive mansion to review them and could not make copies. Three senior committee lawyers then reviewed the boxes for four hours on April 18 and discovered that the boxes contained routine material, much of it previously published, including public speeches, manuals, news articles, resumes and press releases.

The committee also has requested documents relating to former Democratic National Committee fund-raiser John Huang. The White House produced Huang’s phone logs but withheld everything on the pages except his name, sources said.