Two congressional committees and the office of the independent counsel are investigating whether the White House hid thousands of e-mails pertaining to President Clinton's scandals, including the FBI files, the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and Chinese and other campaign finance abuses, the Washington Times reports.
The probes come in the wake of a lawsuit filed on behalf of a former White House computer operations manager who has accused the Clinton Administration of hiding the subpoenaed e-mails and threatening retaliation against anyone revealing them.
That former manager, Susan Hall, told the Times at least four thousand of the e-mails involved or had to do with Lewinsky, the former White House intern with whom Clinton admitted having an affair after denying it for a year. Hall says others of the e-mails involved the White House's receiving secret FBI files on former Reagan and Bush Administration officials, information on picking corporate bigwigs for overseas trade trips, and campaign finance activities during the 1996 re-election campaign.
The White House e-mails, the Times says, had been subpoenaed by a federal grand jury, the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, and the House Government Reform Committee. Hall objected to First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton provoking abuse toward her, she told the Times, after she objected to using career White House workers and the White House database for illegal political activities.
Clinton addressed an earlier Washington Times report on the e-mails after his Internet security summit Feb. 15. "If the American people knew how much of their money we'd have to spend complying with requests for e-mails, they might be quite amazed," he told reporters at the summit, "but we certainly have done our best to do that. There has never been an intentional effort to do that, and I think that we are in full compliance. I believe we are."
The Times says investigators center on accusations that the e-mail messages were not delivered under subpoena to a federal grand jury and three congressional committees as required by law, and want to know whether White House officials obstructed justice and concealed the documents.
"The White House assured us they had given us everything, and we assumed that was true," says a senior Senate investigator, whom the Times did not name but was involved in an investigation of suspected Chinese involvement in the 1996 election campaign. "But maybe it wasn't. We are looking into it again and will try to determine if we need to proceed in a new direction."
The House Government Reform Committee wants answers as well, the Times says. Spokesman Mark Corallo tells the paper that panel is looking into the accusations, saying committee attorneys have had trouble from the outset from the White House.
"If it turns out we don't have everything, that will be a problem," he tells the Times. "We are looking into this, and we intend to ensure that we get all the documents relevant to our ongoing campaign finance investigation."
The Times says independent counsel Robert W. Ray's office has already contacted Hall, who told the paper earlier this week about the failed e-mail surrenders, saying the White House marked them classified to keep the probes frozen until after Clinton leaves office.
Hall now leads computer operations at the Treasury Department. She tells the Times contractors working at the White House discovered a computer glitch in May 1998 showing that 100,000 White House e-mail messages involving nearly 500 computer users had not been turned over as part of a search to comply with subpoenas from the grand jury and the committees.
She said the missing messages were found when the contractors discovered one of four White House Lotus Notes e-mail servers handling the mail for the 464 White House computer users had been mislabeled, the Times says, and that a search of e-mail under the subpoenas was incomplete.
Hall also says when the contractors tipped off the White House to the glitch, they were told not to discuss it and that the documents were marked classified, the paper continues. "In fact," she told the paper, "a White House official told one of the contractors they had a jail cell with his name on it if he discussed the matter."
Hall left the White House when she was demoted for questioning the propriety of the Clinton Administration's use of a database for political purposes, the Times says. She's sued in the case, accusing Mrs. Clinton and nine White House appointees of job harassment and reprisals for her complaint, the paper continues.
