That Revision Thing

By Michael Duffy/Washington

Once more the reporters filed in one door of the West Wing's Roosevelt Room, and once more presidential advisers arrived by another to explain new details in Hillary Rodham Clinton's commodities trading in the 1970s. Until that moment, the White House had stated that Mrs. Clinton had, in a 10-month period, turned a $1,000 investment into a remarkable $100,000 profit in one trading account and lost $1,009 on a second.

Now that story was changing. David Kendall, the Clinton's personal attorney, announced that the second account had shown a previously unreported gain of $6,498 on trades in copper, sugar, wheat and lumber futures. The Clintons, he said, would immediately pay $3,315 in back taxes and $10,134 in accrued interest to the U.S. Treasury and $514 in taxes and $652 in interest to the state of Arkansas. Employing a phrase that became notorious during Watergate, John Broder of the Los Angeles Times wryly asked if the previous explanation had become "inoperative." John Podesta, the White House staff secretary, replied half jokingly, "That's inoperative."

Welcome to the Clinton White House, where the explanations for the Whitewater scandal are nothing if not kaleidoscopic. Details on commodities trading and tax deductions are valid for about 10 days, or until new documents turn up. Even when the facts are on the Clintons' side, the Administration has trouble making its case. And when they aren't, the explanations are conflicting and changing. As a senior official said last week, "The problem hasn't been the guts of what happened. The problem is the way that we've talked about it."

The White House has helped keep the story going by altering its version on an almost daily basis. At first, the White House said Mrs. Clinton did the trading herself, with the help of several advisers, including James Blair, then an outside counsel for Tyson Foods, Inc., the largest agribusiness in Arkansas. But now, the White House acknowledged, Blair, acting on Mrs. Clinton's advice, placed most of the trades himself. Blair, currently Tyson's general counsel, told TIME last Friday he probably "transmitted" all but two of 32 trades. "I turned the order in," said Blair. "Did I create the order? No. Did I trade the order without her consent or without her signing on it? No."

A senior official also corrected the President's assertion at a town meeting two weeks ago that Mrs. Clinton withdrew from the commodities market when she became pregnant and "got cold feet" after being asked by her brokers to cover potential losses. There was no "margin call," the White House official said; instead, Mrs. Clinton stayed in the market until after Chelsea was born, netting more than $10,000 in three trades the week of her birth.

The records Clinton released last week go a long way toward eliminating suggestions that Mrs. Clinton profited from a form of trading that would have allowed a benefactor to "allocate" winning contracts in her account. The White House also released a statement from Leo Melamed, former chairman of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, which asserts that while Mrs. Clinton's account was "at times thinly margined" (meaning she sometimes lacked the deposits to cover potential losses), "nothing in these records appears to reflect any trading violations on the part of Mrs. Clinton."

Left unexplained by the White House was how Mrs. Clinton turned a $1,000 investment in one account into a $5,300 profit in a single day. That, said an Administration official, remains a "problem." And there continues to be political concern at the White House that the commodities trades in general could undercut Clinton's vows to work on behalf of those who "work hard and play by the rules." As an official admitted, "There are two issues: Did she get in with less money than most people? And did she have to come up with less money in the crunch? You can make the case that she did, but you can also make the case that ((Mrs. Clinton's brokers)) did that with other customers."

The Clintons' legal advisers asserted that they are reluctant to release information in part because they do not want to upset special counsel Robert Fiske, who in addition to probing the Clintons' finances is investigating Arkansas banker James McDougal, the couple's Whitewater partner. "They are not going to give up records," said an adviser to Mrs. Clinton, "without Fiske saying it's O.K. to do so."

That may help explain why the public has yet to see a variety of documents that investigators say are crucial to understanding how money moved in the Whitewater deal. Fiske has reason to be interested in the check ledger from the Whitewater corporate account, which might indicate whether money flowed from the land corporation to Clinton campaign operations. It might also explain why the Clintons have not released their personal canceled checks or bank statements, which could vouch for their claim that they invested and lost $46,636 in Whitewater.

But then again, it might not.