Whitewater Panel Rejects Offer Members Plan To Issue Subpoenas To Strip Attorney-Client Confidentiality From Meeting Under Scrutiny

Rejecting a last-minute offer from President and Hillary Clinton’s lawyer, Senate Whitewater Committee Republicans launched a plan Thursday to issue subpoenas designed to pierce the confidentiality surrounding a crucial two-hour Whitewater meeting.

Sen. Alfonse D’Amato, R-N.Y., dismissed a compromise from the Clintons’ personal attorney as not meaningful or new, and scheduled a committee meeting for this morning. D’Amato said that instead of offering to provide information about the Nov. 5, 1993, Whitewater meeting, the White House wanted questions limited “to things that happened before or after this meeting.”

The Clintons are asserting a claim of attorney-client privilege for the meeting, whose participants included four presidential advisers and David Kendall, the Clintons’ lawyer who tried to negotiate an agreement with the Senate.

Waiving attorney-client privilege - as the Senate wants the Clintons to do - would open the presidential aides, and possibly even Kendall, to grand jury questioning in the Whitewater criminal investigation of prosecutor Kenneth Starr.

The lengthy discussion on Nov. 5, 1993, at Kendall’s office followed months of information-gathering by the four White House aides on Whitewater. The committee is trying to find out what use the aides made of the information, some of it highly sensitive law enforcement data about a criminal investigation of a savings and loan owned by the Clintons’ Whitewater partners.

Senior White House adviser Bruce Lindsey and former associate White House counsel William Kennedy refused to testify about what went on at the meeting. Senators “remain committed to finding out what happened,” D’Amato said in a statement.

Committee Republicans want Kennedy’s handwritten notes of the session at Kendall’s private law office. And D’Amato said the committee would consider several subpoenas, possibly demanding testimony from the participants as well as documents.

Conversations among a client’s lawyers are considered confidential, but the issue is complicated because four participants in the meeting were White House aides.