Victim of circumstance

the proud old arkansas firm where hillary clinton used to practice law is one of the innocent victims of the frenzy surrounding the whitewater investigation.

By Mollie Dickenson

Jul 27, 1998 | During the four-and-a-half-year Whitewater probe of the Clinton administration, dozens of innocent individuals and entities have been swept up into independent counsel Kenneth Starr's and congressional Republicans' investigative machinery -- only to emerge with tarnished reputations, huge legal bills and the inability to do anything about their predicament.

Nowhere have so many people been tainted as in Little Rock, the close-knit Arkansas state capital, where subpoenas, depositions, indictments, convictions -- and acquittals -- have touched hundreds of lives.

One institution left reeling from a multitude of media and congressional allegations is the once-venerable Rose Law Firm, where Hillary Rodham Clinton used to practice law. Three of her partners, Vincent Foster, William Kennedy III and Webster Hubbell, joined the Clintons in Washington after their 1992 victory, but only Kennedy, who was Foster's associate White House counsel, escaped back to Little Rock -- and the firm -- with comparatively minimal damage.

The Rose firm itself was accused of having a conflict of interest between its (and Hillary Clinton's) representation of Jim McDougal's Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan and the firm's later representation of the U.S. government against Madison's auditor. It was also accused, falsely, of having "shredded" Madison and Whitewater documents -- a story that led the national news shows when broken in 1994 by the conservative Washington Times newspaper.

The Rose firm was again falsely implicated when Hillary Clinton's infamous "missing" billing records turned up in the White House in January 1996, two years after they were subpoenaed.

And while an independent investigation into all the Rose charges eventually determined there was virtually no substance to them, the firm -- the oldest west of the Mississippi River, established in 1820 -- has been seriously, and permanently, damaged.

One charge frequently leveled by Clinton detractors is that the White House is continually putting roadblocks in the way of Starr's investigation. At the top of this list are the missing Rose firm billing records of Hillary Clinton's 60 hours of work over 15 months for McDougal, which had been removed from firm files in order to answer New York Times reporter Jeff Gerth's questions in March 1992, during the presidential campaign.

Ignored by the media and Clinton critics is the fact that when they did surface, the records substantiated Hillary Clinton's public and sworn statements.

Sworn testimony given in deposition by both President Clinton's personal lawyer, David Kendall, and White House Special Counsel Jane Sherburne, who were the first to question White House secretary Carolyn Huber after she located the records, tells a largely unreported story.

Sherburne, who was hired in January 1995 from the Washington law firm Wilmer Cutler & Pickering to manage the response to all Whitewater investigations, says that Huber was at first "very unsure about when or where she had found the records in the book room," a catch-all storage room in the family quarters of the White House. When Huber later testified, her story had become "precise," says Sherburne. She surmises that Huber, a former Rose Law Firm secretary, "had packed them up in the governor's mansion in Little Rock before the Clintons moved to Washington."

All the Clintons' boxes were stored elsewhere, says Sherburne, and then brought, a few at a time, to the book room, where Huber unpacked them and determined what should be done with the contents.

"But in the rush to clear out the book room in 1995 to make office space for the people who were going to help Mrs. Clinton write her book, ["It Takes a Village"], Carolyn probably threw the billing records she had unpacked into a box along with the old shoes and empty hangers that were also in the box, and moved it to her office to deal with later."

So much for the "mystery."

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