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December 21, 1995
Web posted at: 8:15 p.m. EST
From Senior White House Correspondent Wolf Blitzer
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The White House said Thursday it had reached a deal with the House Republicans and will release subpoenaed Whitewater notes Friday morning.
"We are very pleased," said White House special associate counsel Mark Fabiani.
The agreement averts a legal battle to obtain the notes. The Senate voted on Wednesday night to go to court to enforce a subpoena for the documents.
The White House has been battling with House and Senate Republicans over the notes taken during a meeting in November 1993 between President Clinton's private attorneys and White House attorneys.
White House counsels Jack Quinn and Jane Sherbourne, together with the president's private attorney David Kendall, met late Thursday with Republican congressmen Jim Leach, chairman of the Banking Committee, and William Clinger, chairman of the Government Reform and Oversight Committee, to try to work out a mutually acceptable arrangement.
Going into the meeting, there was optimism that a deal would be struck.
The White House said earlier it would hand the document over right away if Leach and Clinger would agree that their release of the November 5, 1993, document does not represent a waiver of the president's right to lawyer-client privilege -- a condition that Whitewater Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr and Senate Whitewater committee chairman Al D'Amato had already agreed to accept.
The White House said it would then also make the document available to the news media together with what is described as some related "source material" that officials say will help put questions into some sort of context, i.e., newspaper articles, etc.
White House officials insisted that nothing in the document would be politically damaging to the president or the first lady. They say that they are anxious to release the document but want to make sure that all the respective investigatory bodies looking into Whitewater do not construe the release as a waiver of the president's right to maintain lawyer-client confidentiality.
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