Whitewater Panel Subpoenas Records

The Senate Whitewater committee voted Thursday to issue 49 subpoenas for records from President Clinton, first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton and a variety of other Washington and Arkansas figures involved in the investigation.

Avoiding a potential constitutional clash, the panel’s Republicans acquiesced to Democrats and decided to defer issuing a subpoena for the Clinton lawyers’ notes of the independent counsel’s interrogations of the Clintons.

The independent counsel, Kenneth W. Starr, has declined to provide the committee with the evidence and testimony it has sought, including the transcript of the questioning of the Clintons, because he has not completed his investigation.

The Republicans also decided Thursday to recall two of Hillary Clinton’s closest advisers, Margaret A. Williams and Susan P. Thomases, for another round of questioning next week about whether Hillary Clinton had played a role in the decision to prevent Justice Department investigators from examining the papers of Vincent Foster two days after his suicide in 1993.