First Lady Says Critics ‘Don’t Want To Know The Facts’ Hillary Clinton Calls Whitewater ‘Investigation In Search Of Scandal’

Scorning her critics, first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton Friday gave her most detailed explanation in more than a year of her role in a questionable Arkansas land deal and accused Republicans of mounting a dishonest, politically motivated investigation.

“This is an investigation in search of a scandal,” she said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times. “This is not about finding out the truth. And I regret it very much.”

The first lady acknowledged that some of her earlier recollections of details in the Whitewater affair and related issues might have been faulty, and said she understood why Americans might question her integrity after seeing her under nonstop attack.

“For four years on a regular basis I’ve been accused or criticized or attacked for all different kinds of things,” she said. “So that with every step forward that people might take in getting to know me, inevitably there comes some kind of counterattack, starting with the Republican Convention in 1992.”

But she dismissed the idea of holding a news conference to answer Whitewater questions or of appearing before the Senate subcommittee investigating Whitewater. The committee, she said, would not be a fair forum.

“The questions keep changing,” she complained. “The people asking them don’t want to know the facts, especially if they don’t support their accusations.”

Specifically regarding Whitewater, Hillary Clinton said:

She is alternately “angry” and “sad” about the human toll from the scandal - a law partner in jail, friends and staff facing criminal charges and mounting legal fees, and perhaps even the suicide of her former law partner, Vince Foster, the White House Counsel found dead in July 1993.

She said she firmly believes that law firm billing records the White House says it just discovered last week support her previous statements that Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan - the thrift whose owner is at the heart of the Whitewater scandal - was not a significant client. She acknowledged that people “quibble with my definition of significant.”

The records show that Rose Law Firm, where she was a partner, worked on Madison matters a total of 60 hours over 15 months - or about an hour a week. “This was not a major undertaking on behalf of anyone, including myself.”

The comment was in answer to allegations by such critics as Sen. Alfonse D’Amato, R-N.Y., chairman of the Senate Whitewater investigating committee and a strong supporter of presidential hopeful Sen. Bob Dole, R-Kan., and New York Times columnist William Safire, who this week called the first lady a “congenital liar.”

Among the accusations are claims that the first lady has lied about the extent of her involvement with Madison and that she withheld documents that would establish the nature of her work with the thrift.

Asked about the belated discovery of a copy of the law firm’s billing records - two years after they were subpoenaed - she said: “I cannot answer for where that box has been … because I don’t know. But the important (point) is, when it was found, it was immediately turned over and it does support what I have been saying for four years.”

What would a young Hillary Rod ham, who worked eight months on the House Judiciary Committee investigating Richard Nixon’s involvement in Watergate, have thought if a box of records like that had turned up in the White House?

“We would have thought ‘Hurray,’ they have finally turned over documents which they have withheld for years. But there is no comparison between what this White House has done and what happened in the past.”

In fact, she rejects comparisons being made by her political opponents between Watergate and Whitewater, and says there will never be an Oliver Stone movie called “Rodham.”

“That will never happen,” she said, stiffening.

She associates columnist Safire with those Nixon faithful who can’t forget Watergate. “I cannot take Mr. Safire seriously,” she said. “I worked with the committee that impeached President Nixon. Safire worked for President Nixon. The best I can tell, he is still working for President Nixon.”

She thought it was “pretty funny” that her husband reportedly suggested this week that Safire deserved a punch in the nose for his comment.

Whitewater was a failed Arkansas real estate project jointly owned by Bill and Hillary Clinton and McDougal, who purchased Madison later. The thrift was seized by federal regulators in 1989.

An independent counsel is investigating whether Whitewater caused the losses at Madison and whether federally insured deposits from the savings and loan were siphoned off through Whitewater to benefit Clinton’s 1984 gubernatorial campaign. The investigation also is examining whether White House officials mishandled the Whitewater-related papers in Foster’s office after his suicide.

When Clinton talked about White water and other controversies, she seemed to yield to emotion only when she describing conversations between herself and her friend Susan Thomases and chief of staff Margaret Williams during the days after Foster’s death.

“We were talking about our grief, about his family, about how this could happen … Sometimes we were just sobbing on the phone. I remember very well.”

She also became impassioned when asked how someone who is always hailed as a brilliant political strategist has been caught by political stumbling in her years in Washington in such matters as health care, Whitewater, dismissal of White House travel office employees and now even a fuss over why collaborators on her book were not named in acknowledgments.

“I think I did not understand Washington,” she said.

“I didn’t understand how it’s a city that thrives on rumor and gossip and innuendo. That had not been my experience up until now, and I have learned a lot. But I guess I see it a little bit differently.”

In an interview with journalist Barbara Walters Friday on ABC-TV’s “20/20,” the first lady also rebuffs a rumor that she was romantically involved with Foster, a White House deputy counsel, and denies an oft-told rumor that she threw a lamp or a Bible in anger at the president and reprimanded Secret Service agents for reporting it.

She asserts that she was not the driving force behind the 1993 firing of the travel office staff. And she says she did not supervise the removal of files from his office after Foster.

“There were no documents taken out of Vince Foster’s office on the night he died. And I did not direct anyone to interfere in any investigation,” she told Walters. “We have nothing to cover up. We’ve tried, maybe not as smartly as we could have, to answer people’s questions.”

When asked by Walters about “the recurring rumor about you and Vince Foster,” the first lady replies that “Oh, he was one of my dearest friends, Barbara.

“He was a colleague, he was a partner, he’d been a friend of my husband’s since they were boys - of 4 or 5 years of age - and I miss him. I miss him very much. And I just wish he could be left in peace, because he was a wonderful man to everyone who knew him,” she said.