A CLUE FROM THE CLUELESS

By DAVID VAN BIEMA

SHE WAS NOT AT FIRST AWARE OF WHAT she had found. Carolyn Huber periodically cleans out the book room, the cluttered space next to Hillary Clinton's third-floor White House study where small gifts to the President accrue. Last August, Huber came across a sheaf of folded computer printouts. Musing briefly that they looked like legal billing sheets, she carried them off in a box with some knick-knacks. It was not until Jan. 4 that, while straightening her own East Wing office, she looked a bit more closely. At that point, as she testified last Thursday before Senator Alfonse D'Amato's rapt Whitewater Committee, "I sat down for a few minutes and thought." Then, she said, "I called Mr. [David] Kendall," the Clintons' private lawyer. And then she rang her own attorney.

Nixon had Rose Mary Woods. It now looks as though the role of Embattled Loyal Retainer is sewn up, for Whitewater purposes. Huber has acted as an office manager for Mrs. Clinton for so long that Chelsea is said to regard her as a grandmother. It must pain her immensely that her 116-page discovery has renewed investigators' interest in the residential quarters of the White House and may help sustain the inquiry through the presidential-election season.

The billing records Huber found clarify the extent of Hillary Clinton's legal work for Madison Guaranty, the savings and loan owned by the Clintons' Whitewater partner, James McDougal. They had been under subpoena by both Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth Starr and the Resolution Trust Corporation, but the Clintons had maintained they were lost. The notation in the papers of 60 hours billed by Hillary to the Madison account has sparked further investigation and connected her with the dubious Castle Grande real estate deal.

To make matters worse, Republicans suspect that the records may have been in deputy White House counsel Vincent Foster's office after his 1993 suicide. About the time the records appeared in the book room, D'Amato's panel was inquiring whether documents had been improperly removed from Foster's office after his death. As it happens, the documents are annotated in Foster's hand. Kendall, White House aide on Whitewater, responds that he has "no reason to believe these records were ever in Foster's White House office."

The worst news for the Clintons is the appearance of the records in plain sight. Huber told the committee she was in the book room days before her discovery and saw no papers on the table. Asked if she thought someone had deposited them deliberately in the interim, she answered, "Someone had." If the papers were knowingly withheld while under subpoena, that someone might have committed a felony.

A colossal game of Clue commenced, played for blood. Declared North Carolina Republican Lauch Faircloth: "We have no choice but to depose the First Lady and Mr. Clinton on the reasonable assumption of possible obstruction of justice." That may be premature, since in addition to the Clintons, the book room is accessible to guests, some servants and Huber herself. But the list is finite, the White House keeps a guest log, and Starr is said to have the fbi dusting the printouts for fingerprints.

For the past couple of weeks, Mrs. Clinton has considered trying to steal D'Amato's thunder by going voluntarily before his committee. That, some White House aides think, would be the climax of the hearings, and then the sensation would be over. But that scenario supposes, maybe too hopefully, an end to discoveries like Carolyn Huber's.

--By David Van Biema. Reported by James Carney and Viveca Novak/Washington

With reporting by JAMES CARNEY AND VIVECA NOVAK/WASHINGTON