This is how scandals get started: Jean Lewis at the RTC.

• Author: Cantor, Carol
• Position: Resolution Trust Corp. official who implicated Pres. Clinton in Whitewater scandal - Cover Story

Looking over old Whitewater articles, as I had occasion to do recently, can be an almost alarming experience--all those now-forgotten "revelations," all those blinking bureaucrats who were hauled briefly before us. A Time cover story from early 1994 alleged possible criminal behavior by presidential advisor George Stephanopoulos. Stephanopoulos had complained about the appointment of Republican Jay Stephens to head the Resolution Trust Corporation's civil investigation of the failure of the Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan. The story was decorated with a memorable "President's Men" photograph: Stephanopoulos, a fresh hatchling of evil, and the scandal-shadowed Clinton brooding darkly over the President's ... itinerary? If it's only the cover that's remembered now, it's because the story within was a thin tissue of dubious might-ifs, based on a leak from a panicky administration official.

The swirl of activity around the RTC is an instructive episode in the bizarre series of events known as 'Whitewater." The press has devoted enormous attention to allegations that Clintonites tried to interfere with the agency, which was created to clean up failed savings and loans. Meanwhile, we've heard only the thinnest of scraps regarding another story at the RTC--how political opponents of the Clintons went out of their way to tie them to illegal activity to Madison and used tactics that are, at the least, questionable.

In 1992, for example, President Bush's chief counsel, C. Boyden Gray, called Albert Casey, then head of the RTC, to ask about a criminal referral that mentioned the Clintons. Referrals are a collection of data indicative of possible wrongdoing, based on which the Justice Department decides whether to prosecute. Gray wasn't even supposed to know such a referral existed. The mere fact that he called Casey was a violation of the integrity of the RTC--which is supposed to be entirely independent of the executive hranch. (Casey, appropriately, avoided further contact with Gray.) Needless to say, this story didn't make the cover of Time. It barely got covered at all.

Perhaps the most dramatic instance of skewed press coverage on the matter of Madison and the federal investigation into it. however, is the story of L. Jean Lewis, the RTC s chief investigator for Madison. Lewis wrote the two sets of criminal referrals involving the Clintons and recommended that the U.S. Attorney in Little Rock take action. Those referrals were central to the...