By
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON - Four months before President Clinton leaves the White House, prosecutors brought the six-year Whitewater investigation to an anticlimactic end, concluding there is "insufficient" evidence that the president or the first lady committed a crime.
The White House breathed a sigh of relief that Robert Ray's businesslike statement contained no harsh language that could cause trouble in Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign to win a Senate seat from New York.
Ray's six-page statement dissipated a cloud that bedeviled the Clintons since the 1992 election campaign and that made Clinton the most investigated president since Richard M. Nixon, who resigned rather than confront impeachment and removal from office.
"I'm just glad that this is finally over," Hillary Clinton said, questioning why so much money was spent. The president ignored a question about Whitewater as he strolled through the White House Rose Garden with Italian Prime Minister Guiliano Amato.
Ray has one major piece of unfinished business in the record $52 million independent counsel investigation - a decision whether to indict the president after he leaves office for his conduct in the Monica Lewinsky scandal. A grand jury was impaneled in July in Washington to help make the decision.
It was the same independent counsel office under Ray's predecessor, Kenneth Starr, that first catapulted the Lewinsky scandal onto the front pages and spurred Clinton's impeachment and Senate trial, where he was acquitted.
Ray said his office investigated at least seven separate criminal allegations involving the president or his wife in Whitewater.
"This office determined that the evidence was insufficient to prove to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt that either President Clinton or Mrs. Clinton knowingly participated in any criminal conduct," Ray said.
However, the prosecutor cited "delays in obtaining relevant evidence" - including the refusal of Whitewater real estate partner Susan McDougal to testify, "the failure by the White House" to produce Hillary Clinton's law firm billing records until 1996 and legal challenges to turning over White House lawyers' notes of conversations with Mrs. Clinton.
The White House was low-key in its response.
"Robert Ray is now the latest investigator to complete an examination of the transactions related to Whitewater Development Co. and conclude that there are no grounds for legal action," White House press secretary Joe Lockhart said.
Lockhart rejected Ray's complaints of White House delays. "We just don't believe that there's merit to any of those suggestions," he said.
Hillary Clinton told a meeting in Albany, N.Y., of state members of The Associated Press that "I think ... most New Yorkers and Americans ... made up their minds a long time ago about" Whitewater.
"I think that taxpayers have a right to ask why was all this money spent, especially since ... the conclusions were readily available five years ago," she added.
The Clintons' legal defense fund has raised $8 million over 2 1/2 years. The fund says the Clintons still owe about $4 million in legal fees.
Ray's statement was in sharp contrast to the bitterness the investigation engendered in Washington and across America for most of Clinton's presidency as Democratic defenders clashed with Republican opponents over the merits of the allegations.
The Whitewater allegations investigated by Ray included:
-Whether the president gave false testimony in the trial of Whitewater partners Jim and Susan McDougal and Arkansas Gov. Jim Guy Tucker when Clinton denied being aware of a fraudulent $300,000 loan or borrowing money from the McDougals' failed savings and loan. The office concluded it could not prove Clinton "knew of the ($300,000) loan or that his testimony regarding the loan was knowingly false."
-The disappearance of Mrs. Clinton's law firm billing records, which vanished after the 1992 election and mysteriously surfaced in the White House in 1996, long after they had been subpoenaed. The prosecutor said the evidence concerning the billing records was "inconclusive" as to whether "any person, including Mrs. Clinton, knowingly or willfully possessed the billing records with the intent to obstruct justice."
The billing records disclosed Mrs. Clinton had done legal work on a fraudulent land development south of Little Rock, Ark., called Castle Grande that was owned by Jim McDougal. Questioned about her work on the development and for the McDougals' S&L, Mrs. Clinton said on 99 occasions in a 2 1/2 -hour interview with federal regulators in 1996 that she was unable to recall it. An indictment accused Webster Hubbell, Hillary Clinton's former law partner, of concealing his and Hillary Clinton's legal work on the fraudulent development. Hubbell pleaded guilty to a felony in the case, but maintains Mrs. Clinton did nothing wrong.
-Whether $700,000 in payments that Clinton supporters gave Hubbell was part of an effort to keep Hubbell from cooperating with the investigation. Ray said the evidence was "insufficient" to prove a "quid pro quo to Mr. Hubbell."
The investigation left a record tab and 14 convictions, including those of the McDougals, Hubbell and Tucker. The $52 million cost also covers three other investigations - probes of the Lewinsky scandal, whether Mrs. Clinton lied in the White House travel office firings and the White House's gathering of hundreds of FBI background files of past Republican appointees.
The McDougals were convicted in a 1996 fraud trial stemming from the collapse of their Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan, which failed at a cost of $73 million to taxpayers.
Jim McDougal died in prison and Susan McDougal served a year and a half behind bars for refusing to tell a federal grand jury whether President Clinton testified truthfully in the case.
When prosecutors finally got to question Mrs. McDougal last year for the first time, she said more than 40 times that she did not recall various business deals related to the Whitewater real estate venture with the Clintons and the failing S&L, asserting that her husband had handled most financial matters.
