Try our new search engine

Notes Seem To Contain No Bombshells

But White House is agonizing over whether to make them public

WASHINGTON (AllPolitics, June 24) -- So, after all that legal wrangling, what was in Hillary Clinton's lawyers' notes, anyway? Nothing explosive, it seems.

Still, sources tell CNN that very high-level meetings have been underway all day involving top White House officials and attorneys trying to decide whether to make the lawyers' notes public.

The Supreme Court on Monday refused to hear the White House's claim of attorney-client privilege to keep the notes secret, and the administration turned the notes over to Whitewater Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr late Monday night.

White House sources continue to maintain there is nothing incriminating in the notes. They describe an emphasis on the first lady's long-lost Little Rock billing records, which had just been discovered a few days prior to her grand jury appearance.

The other set of notes focused on a conversation about events following the death of Vincent Foster, who was White House deputy counsel and a close friend of the Clintons.

According to a source familiar with the notes, Mrs. Clinton gave answers "in personal terms, not legal terms," and that she described herself as "in terrible grief" at the time.

Still, at Mrs. Clinton's grand jury appearance, she was asked, according sources familiar with her testimony, about discussions right after Foster's death with her close friend Susan Thomases and her chief of staff, Margaret Williams.

The grand jury wanted to know whether Mrs. Clinton had any role in shielding documents in Foster's office from investigators following his death. Those same questions came up in congressional Whitewater hearings in July 1995. "I would encourage you not to be so certain that there's something sinister going on here," Williams said then.

As for the long-missing billing records that were discovered in the White House residence, the first lady said she had relied on her personal aide, Carolyn Huber, to locate them, which Huber says she finally did, months before she knew what she'd found. "I just picked 'em up and plunked 'em down in [a] box," Huber said in January 1996.

The high-level discussions going on in and around the White House are characterized as a debate between lawyers, who are trained to publicly disclose as little as possible, and political operatives, who want to prove their insistence there is nothing incriminating or embarrassing in the notes.