Two weeks after President Clinton and his wife, Hillary, vowed to turn over all personal records relating to their investment in a failed Arkansas land deal, their lawyers are still assembling the files.
White House officials said Monday that the Clintons had authorized their personal lawyer, David Kendall, to give Justice Department investigators files that were kept in the office of Vincent W. Foster Jr., the deputy White House counsel who killed himself July 20.But Kendall also is retrieving related documents that were stored in Clinton's Little Rock campaign archives. Administration officials say the contents of those files were made public during the 1992 presidential campaign in response to reporters' inquiries about the land deal.
The files will be ready for delivery to the Justice Department "in a couple of weeks," White House officials said.
"Mr. Kendall has been collecting and cataloging the records and making routine preparations for their delivery to the department," said Dee Dee Myers, the White House press secretary. "This includes indexing and verifying that accurate and complete copies of all documents are made. The purpose of this process is to insure a complete and accurate delivery of the documents."
After at first suggesting that the White House counsel's office had been overseeing the compilation of the files, Myers later corrected herself, and said the counsel's only role had been to send the documents to Kendall in August.
"We handed over the Whitewater documents in support of an ongoing investigation into Madison Guaranty," she said. "There is no other investigation that we know of ongoing, and I don't think we have anything to add to what we've already said about this."
Whitewater Development was at the heart of a failed real estate venture that the Clintons say cost them $69,000 in the 1980s.
The Clintons were partners in the venture with James McDougal, a businessman who headed the Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan in Arkansas. Madison later failed and is under investigation.
Clinton refused to answer questions about the matter Monday. When asked whether he would support naming a special prosecutor to investigate the land deal, he said: "I have nothing to say about that. I've said we'll turn the records over."