The senator, the judge, his wife and the coverage: Hillary and Bill aren't the only ones with some explaining to do in the Whitewater saga.

• Author: Clifford, George III
• Position: Sen. Lauch Faircloth, Judge David Sentelle, Pres. Bill Clinton, Hilary Rodham Clinton and the Whitewater case

In July 1994, Senator Lauch Faircloth and Judge David Sentelle lunched together in the quietly elegant Senate dining room. Just days later, a three-judge panel headed by Sentelle removed Robert B. Fiske Jr., a moderate Republican, from his position as independent counsel in the Whitewater affair - and replaced him with an active Republican partisan, Kenneth Starr.

Sentelle was supposed to be making his decisions free from political influence. Faircloth was a leader of the Republican charge against the Clintons on Whitewater; just weeks before, he had written Attorney General Janet Reno to complain about Fiske. So the lunch raised considerable controversy: Had Faircloth used the occasion to lobby or pressure Sentelle? Fiske's axing - after nine months and $2.5 million worth of work that had yet to produce material damaging to the Clintons - was precisely what Faircloth was after.

A year later came the news that approximately five months after the lunch and Fiske's replacement, Faircloth had hired Jane Oldham Sentelle, the judge's wife, as a receptionist for his Senate office. She had started in January 1995 at a salary of $20,000, which was later raised to $22,500.

That's more or less equivalent to the amount Rose Law Firm earned from its work for Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan in the mid-eighties - work that has come under intensive scrutiny partly because then-Governor Bill Clinton may have helped steer it his wife's way. As the recently released billing records show, the firm earned approximately $21,000 from representing Madison Guaranty; Hillary Clinton's take was about a third of that total.

Hillary Clinton used poor judgment by participating in an apparent conflict-of-interest; she may have even been modestly on the take. But the same could be said of the Sentelles. At the least, a senator and a ranking federal judge had thumbed their noses at the principle of keeping special prosecutors insulated from even the appearance of political pressure - the principle the Sentelle-led panel had cited in replacing Fiske, who had been appointed by Janet Reno.

And so for a Whitewater-fixated press corps avidly sniffing long-dead trails between Hillary Clinton and Madison like bloodhounds, Sentelle's hiring should have been a story with legs. Instead, the story of Jane Sentelle's job got almost no play. The Wall Street Journal ran a 28-word item on the front page in its "Washington Wire" Column. The Associated Press sent out a story by veteran...