Ex-Whitewater Investigator Claims Her Privacy Invaded Senator And His Counsel Made Former Prober’s Letter Public

A former federal investigator who helped start the Whitewater criminal probe has complained to the Senate Ethics Committee that her constitutional rights were violated when a personal letter she wrote was made public in a Senate hearing last week.

The complaint filed by former Resolution Trust Corp. investigator L. Jean Lewis charges that Sen Paul Sarbanes, D-Md., and his chief counsel, Richard Ben-Veniste, violated her right to privacy in taking the letter from a computer disc she provided the Senate Whitewater Committee under subpeona.

The disc contained information about the RTC’s Whitewater investigation. Sarbanes and Ben-Veniste are accused in the complaint of “exhuming” the letter and perhaps other material that Lewis had long ago deleted from the disc.

Sarbanes said he welcomed any review the Ethics Committee deems appropriate. “Counsel acted properly in this matter, which involved a disc from a government computer used by Jean Lewis at work,” he said in a statement released by this office.

Lewis’ letter, written to a friend in February 1992, a month before she was assigned to the investigate the failure of a savings and loan owned by President Clinton’s Whitewater business partner. In it, Lewis compares a relative’s propensity to lie to that of the most “astute politicians.” In an aside, she refers to Gennifer Flowers’ then-current allegations that she had an affair with Clinton and calls Clinton, who denied the charges, a “lying bastard.”

The Democrats raised the letter to try to show Lewis was biased against Clinton when she conducted an RTC investigation into the failed Madison Guaranty S&L. Lewis referred the matter to the U.S. attorney’s office for criminal investigation, naming the Clintons as potential witnesses.

“The fact that technology exists that enables government officials to invade a citizen’s privacy does not mean that the citizen forfeits that fundamental right,” said the letter from Lewis’ attorney, Mark R. Levin of the conservative Landmark Legal Foundation.

“… When Senator Sarbanes and Mr. Ben-Veniste apparently made the conscious decision to revive Ms. Lewis’s deletions - using computer technology to reverse her deletions and recreate documents - it is indisputable that they were specifically intending to invade Ms. Lewis’ privacy.”