Whitewater Fingerprints Fail To Shed New Light

An FBI fingerprints report failed Tuesday to clear up the mystery over the nearly two-year disappearance of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s legal billing records in the White House.

The Senate Whitewater Committee said the FBI found the prints of the first lady and the late White House lawyer Vince Foster along with four White House and law firm staffers.

“This FBI fingerprint information raises important questions that the committee will examine in the coming days,” said committee chairman Sen. Alfonse D’Amato, R-N.Y.

But Clinton spokesman Mark Fabiani said, “This is good news for the White House: Yet another Whitewater allegation has evaporated.”

The fingerprint check was conducted to find out who may have handled the records before they mysteriously reappeared in the living quarters of the White House last summer. The documents, under subpoena for two years, were turned over to investigators earlier this year.

The White House had stated already that Hillary Clinton reviewed the records during the 1992 campaign when the Whitewater controversy first surfaced. And Foster, her one-time law partner who committed suicide in 1993, had made notes on the documents.

There have been Republican allegations that close associates of the first lady may have been involved in concealing the documents after taking them from Foster’s office on the night of his death.

The documents concern the first lady’s work for a failed Arkansas S&L - owned by the Clintons’ Whitewater land development partners - that is at the core of the controversy.

The four other prints belong to: White House staffers Carolyn Huber, who found the records; Mildred Alston, Hillary Clinton’s former secretary and now a White House special assistant; Sandra Hatch, a file clerk at the first lady’s former law firm; and Mark Rolfe, a paralegal for the Clintons’ private attorney.

“It’s perfectly possible that these people have non-sinister explanations,” said Mike Chertoff, the committee’s Republican counsel, who said the committee would question the staffers.