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Ex-Clinton aide to tell of Foster `burn bag’ - Senate Whitewater hearings continue with focus on death of deputy counsel
The Washington Times - Tuesday, July 25, 1995
Author: Jerry Seper, THE WASHINGTON TIMES
A former White House aide has told congressional investigators she was ordered to have a bag of documents burned after they were retrieved from a White House suite housing the office of Vincent W. Foster Jr. on the night of the deputy counsel’s July 1993 death.
Sylvia M. Mathews said in a deposition that she was aware some of the documents in the bag were from the Foster office but that White House Counsel Bernard W. Nussbaum decided the papers were not relevant and ordered them destroyed.
Ms. Mathews, a White House special assistant at the time, now serves as chief of staff at the Treasury Department.
As the second week of special Senate Whitewater committee hearings gets under way today, Ms. Mathews is expected to be grilled by Republicans on the special committee - led by Sen. Lauch Faircloth of North Carolina - about the “burn bag” she retrieved from a cleaning crew after Mr. Foster’s body was found in a Northern Virginia park.
The special committee also will ask other witnesses, including former top Clinton adviser David Watkins, why a White House aide with no security clearance was sent to search the Foster office the night of his death while U.S. Park Police were barred because of “national security” reasons.
“It’s clear the committee will be looking to question White House aides very carefully on what happened to that bag, and why there were national security concerns about Park Police officers entering the office but no similar concerns about White House staff,” said a source close to the committee.
Ms. Mathews, according to a summary of her committee deposition, told Senate investigators that after hearing no note was found with Mr. Foster’s body on July 20, 1993, she retrieved the “burn bag” taken by a cleaning crew from the White House counsel’s suite.
She said she took it to the office of Roy Neel, then the White House deputy chief of staff.
She told investigators Mr. Nussbaum was immediately notified that the bag had been recovered; he decided that because it had been not in Mr. Foster’s office, but in the White House counsel’s suite, it should be burned because of the “sensitivity of the documents.”
Ms. Mathews said she was aware that some of the documents in the bag were credit-card receipts from Mr. Foster. It was not clear yesterday, however, what specific papers from the Foster office would have been in the bag.
She also told investigators that Dee Dee Myers, White House press secretary at the time, was present when the bag was turned over to Mr. Neel.
(snip)
The Death Panels should move along seamlessly now.