Stalemate Over Notes May Be Letting Up D’Amato Offers To Meet White House Part Way In Dispute
Locked in a battle of wills with President Clinton, the Senate Whitewater Committee chairman on Saturday offered to meet White House demands part way to try to resolve a dispute over a presidential aide’s notes.
But Sen. Alfonse D’Amato said his committee will not slow its plans to challenge in court Clinton’s refusal to turn over the notes. “There’ll be no more delays,” he said.
Meanwhile, the White House disclosed that Whitewater prosecutor Kenneth Starr has issued a subpoena for the same notes at the heart of the dispute between the administration and the Senate committee.
D’Amato, R-N.Y., said in an interview with The Associated Press that he would be willing to send a letter to Starr urging him to acknowledge that if the White House released the disputed notes, Clinton would not be surrendering his right to keep conversations with his lawyer private.
“I would be willing to send a letter saying we do not feel that there would be any waiver of any privilege, that the administration’s turning over the notes would not be deemed a waiver in our eyes. And we would urge that he would accept the same position,” D’Amato said.
White House press secretary Mike McCurry said later on CNN’s “Evans and Novak” that if all parties to the Whitewater matter agreed the submission of notes would not constitute a waiver of Clinton’s attorney-client privilege, “those notes will be in the possession of the committee in a nanosecond.”
However, D’Amato would not accept the White House’s original condition that an agreement from Starr had to be secured before the notes would be released.
His panel re jected such a condition last week, before voting to challenge Clinton’s refusal in federal court.
“I’m not going to go along with the idea that we need his or anybody else’s approval. We are entitled to the truth. … We are not going to slow down on moving ahead” with plans to seek a court challenge, D’Amato said.
The Senate is scheduled to vote on the request for a court challenge Wednesday. McCurry said in his CNN interview Saturday that if there is no negotiated agreement by then, Clinton would ask Democrats not to filibuster in an effort to block the vote. “The president believes it should be resolved by the courts for the simple reason that it’s a dispute between the legislative branch (and) the executive branch and he believes as a constitutional matter it ought to be the courts and the judicial branch,” said McCurry.
The White House, which has been trying to halt the politically damaging escalation of the dispute, reacted cautiously to D’Amato’s offer. “We think it is a step in the right direction,” said spokesman Mark Fabiani.
Earlier this month, D’Amato’s committee subpoenaed the notes taken by former presidential aide William Kennedy at a Nov. 5, 1993, meeting, saying it needed them to help determine whether presidential aides misused confidential information they obtained in 1993 about two ongoing Whitewater criminal investigations.
The White House denies it interfered with either investigation.