Federal investigators are trying to determine whether a file relating to a failed Arkansas savings and loan owner and his investment firm was taken from the White House office of Vincent W. Foster Jr. after he committed suicide in July, law-enforcement officials said Saturday.
The officials said investigators have been told that Foster, the deputy White House counsel who died of a single gunshot wound to the head on July 20, kept a file in his office on James McDougal, Clinton's former business associate, and on Whitewater Development Corp., a real estate investment firm under scrutiny in a separate Justice Department inquiry in Arkansas.But the officials said no such file was listed in the inventory of items in Foster's office conducted July 22.
One law-enforcement official said Saturday that it was possible that papers dealing with McDougal and Whitewater had been turned over to Foster's widow in a box of personal property given to James Hamilton, the family's lawyer.
The officials did not say how investigators learned of the existence of the file, and the circumstances surrounding it are murky.
The officials also said that the inquiry was being hampered by a lack of cooperation from the White House.
They said some administration officials whom investigators sought to interview had engaged in time-consuming negotiations about being represented by lawyers. They also said that investigators strongly suspected that White House officials may have misled them.
The investigators said there could be an innocent reason for the papers' disappearance, or that Foster may have taken the papers himself before his death.
But they have not ruled out the possibility that the file was removed to keep it out of the hands of investigators. "Nobody knows the answer yet, but that's the direction it's headed in," one senior law enforcement official said Saturday.
The White House comments about the file came as law enforcement officials said that Foster had also kept a previously undisclosed diary about his activities. One official said it contained intimate observations about the 1992 campaign and had entries after Clinton took office in January.
The diary, first reported Saturday by The Washington Post, was never voluntarily disclosed by the White House. The Park Police, whose investigators examined it, never said it existed, although the diary is mentioned in a still undisclosed report by the agency on its investigation into Foster's death.