WHITEWATER TRICKS

By JAMES CARNEY/WASHINGTON

This was it. finally, White House officials said, they were beginning to put the Whitewater controversy behind them by getting it out in the open. On July 9, Mark Fabiani, a deputy White House counsel, summoned reporters and showed them what he described as all the documents on Bill and Hillary Clinton's investments in the Whitewater land deal that had been kept in the office of Vince Foster, the White House lawyer and close friend of the Clintons' who committed suicide on July 20, 1993. For two years, the Clintons and their aides had fought to prevent those 72 pages from becoming public. Yet upon examination, they appeared mostly innocuous. News stories the next day reflected the White House's message: in the handling of Foster's documents, it had done nothing wrong and had nothing to hide.

Like other Whitewater disclosures, however, this one proved neither full nor final. Republican members and staff of the Senate Banking Committee, which begins a new round of Whitewater hearings this week, insisted to reporters that the White House was holding back. And sure enough, there was more: roughly 100 pages from Foster's files on the Clintons' 1992 tax returns, which the White House quickly released Thursday after hearing the Republicans' accusation.

This time, however, the records were not so banal. They showed that Foster was worried about how to treat on their tax returns the $1,000 the Clintons received for selling their stake in Whitewater that year. The reason: though the Clintons had claimed during the campaign that they lost $68,000 on Whitewater, their accountants could document only $5,800 worth of losses for tax purposes. The issue was "a can of worms you shouldn't open," Foster wrote in notes to himself. Rather than trigger an irs audit of past Whitewater deductions by claiming a loss, the Clintons took Foster's advice and reported a $1,000 capital gain. Republicans are sure to suggest in the hearings that one reason aides removed documents from Foster's office after his death was to hide his concerns about the Clintons' taxes.

There is yet another clue to why last week's disclosure took so long. Though the documents generally support the White House contention that Foster's involvement in Whitewater was limited, they also show for the first time a link between Whitewater and James Blair, another old Arkansas friend of the Clintons'. Back in 1993, Americans had yet to discover that in the late 1970s, Hillary Clinton, following Blair's advice, had turned a $1,000 investment in the commodities market into a $100,000 profit. Making public in 1993 that Blair helped sell the Clintons' stake in Whitewater might have led reporters to Mrs. Clinton's commodities trading. When that story broke last year, commodities experts raised questions about how Mrs. Clinton could have invested so heavily without the legally required collateral. The issue still rankles the White House. "It's not Whitewater they're worried about," a top Administration official told Time last week. "It's Hillary's finances. They're worried about the $100,000 she made."

Led by New York's Al D'Amato, the committee's hearings this week will focus sharply on a single period: what went on in the White House office of Foster the night of his suicide and the days that followed. The Clintons may wish to put Whitewater behind them by next year's re-election campaign. But if last week is any indication, they have a tendency to trip over their own finale.

--With reporting by Ann Blackman and Suneel Ratan/Washington

With reporting by ANN BLACKMAN AND SUNEEL RATAN/WASHINGTON