By
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON - A top Clinton administration official said reports that he threatened White House computer technicians with jail time and the loss of their jobs over lost administration e-mails were untrue.
At a court hearing yesterday, attorney Mark Lindsay, the assistant to the president for management and administration, reprised testimony he gave to Congress last spring, saying claims that he threatened employees were "absolutely not true."
He also said he doesn't recall meeting for more than a few seconds with Betty Lambuth, the White House contract employee who made the allegations, and said he never told her to keep quiet about some e-mails that might not have been saved.
In testimony to the House Government Reform Committee last March, Lindsay acknowledged asking that employees keep quiet about the issue, but said he never threatened anyone.
Lindsay, 37, has been accused by Lambuth of threatening her with jail if she talked about the e-mail. Lindsay said he asked workers to keep quiet because he did not want a lot of office gossip on the subject.
White House officials earlier this year said thousands of e-mails, including some from Vice President Al Gore's office, were not properly archived. As a result, the messages were never reviewed by White House lawyers to determine if they should be turned over to investigators under subpoena in cases ranging from the Monica Lewinsky scandal and Whitewater to campaign fund raising.
The computer problems - which White House officials learned of in June 1998 - did not become public until February, and then in a lawsuit over the Clinton White House's gathering of FBI background files of Republican appointees from past administrations.
The $90 million class action suit was filed by Judicial Watch, a conservative legal organization that has filed several lawsuits against the administration.
U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth has been holding hearings for several weeks to determine how to retrieve the messages and get them to investigators.
In a declaration unsealed in March, Lambuth said that after she informed the White House of the problem, Lindsay told her ``that if I or any of my team who knew about the e-mail problem told anyone else about it we would lose our jobs, be arrested and put in jail,'' she said.
Lambuth said Lindsay specified that she was not to tell even her private-sector boss, Steve Hawkins, who she said eventually removed her from her White House assignment when she refused to tell him about the e-mail problem.
Lambuth said she and her co-workers dubbed the e-mail problem "Project X," and because of the threats, she and her staff took to meeting in a park close to the New Executive Office Building and in a nearby coffee shop when discussing the matter.
Lambuth, who left the White House in July 1998, said she still works for CEXEC, a subcontractor for Northrop-Grumman that helps run and maintain the White House computer system.
Former White House employee Sheryl Hall, who first unearthed the e-mail problem, alleged in a declaration that "when the contractors told the White House about the problem, they were threatened, warned not to discuss it. They were told the documents were classified."
