White House usher asked about shipped items
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WASHINGTON - President Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton started shipping White House furniture to the Clintons' newly purchased home in New York more than a year ago, despite questions at the time by the White House chief usher about whether they were entitled to remove the items.
The day before the items were shipped out, chief usher Gary Walters said he questioned whether the Clintons should be taking the furnishings because he thought they were government property donated as part of a White House redecoration project in 1993, during Clinton's first year in office.
But Walters was told by the White House counsel's office that the items he asked about - which included an iron-and-glass coffee table, a painted TV armoire, a custom wood gaming table, and a wicker table with wood top - were "personal gifts received by the Clintons prior to President Clinton's assuming office."
Personal property brought to the White House by an incoming president does not have to be disclosed in financial reports.
The furnishings were sent on to the Clintons' new home in Chappaqua. They were not listed among the controversial gifts Clinton revealed the day before he left office this year that he and Hillary Clinton, elected to the Senate from New York, had taken with them.
However, government records show the gifts that concerned Walters did not arrive at the White House until after the Clintons moved in. One of these items, a Ficks-Reed wicker table, was logged in Feb. 8, 1993, about two weeks after his inauguration.
The widow of the manufacturer, Joy Ficks, said last week it was meant for the White House, not the Clintons, and she thought it would stay there.
Walters also recalled the Clinton's interior decorator had been soliciting gifts for a White House redecoration project at the time and was telling donors the furnishings were for the executive mansion rather than the Clintons personally.
"As far as we were concerned, they were government property," Walters said of all the gifts solicited by the Clintons' interior decorator, Kaki Hockersmith, for the $396,000 redecoration project.
This week, the Clintons returned the four items to the White House, along with other furnishings, after questions had been raised about whether they actually belonged to the Clintons. All the furnishings had been designated official White House property by the National Park Service in 1993.
Julia Payne, a spokeswoman for the former president, said the Clintons wanted to be "overcautious" in light of the concerns that had been raised, but insisted the Clintons or Hockersmith acquired the four items in Little Rock before they came to Washington.
"I don't know physically where the items were," Payne said, but "they (the Clintons) were not required to put them on their financial-disclosure form. He wasn't president yet."
Hockersmith did not return repeated calls seeking comment.
The Clintons came under strong criticism after disclosing they were taking with them $190,000 in gifts received over the past eight years. GOP lawmakers and other critics chastised Hillary Clinton, in particular, for accepting a rash of presents just before she joined the Senate and became covered by strict ethics rules that prohibit the receipt of any gift worth more than $50.
Bowing to such criticism, the Clintons decided Feb. 2 to pay for $86,000 worth of gifts given to them in 2000. This week, they agreed to return another set of gifts, including the four items questioned by Walters and another $28,500 in furnishings identified this week as having been legally designated as White House property by the National Park Service.
The armoire, the coffee table, and the wicker table were trucked to New York on Jan. 4, 2000, just before the Clintons moved into the $1.7 million home in suburban New York, Walters said yesterday. The gaming table and most of the other furnishings the Clintons returned to White House custodians this week had been taken from the White House last month in several shipments starting Jan. 4.
Walters said he accepted without a fuss the determination of the counsel's office that the gifts were personal Clinton property. But he said he'd been troubled all along by the lack of any donor letters.
Payne said, "No item, nothing, was removed without the approval of the usher's and curator's office."
Walters blamed himself for not raising any questions when the rest of the furnishings were taken last month. He said a Hillary Clinton aide, Eric Hothem, had told him these, too, were "the Clintons' personal property."
"I should have asked for more specifics on these items," he said. "I shoulder the blame for not saying, `Hey, wait a minute.' "
Tripp says Clintons didn't complete proper gift forms
WASHINGTON - President Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton did not always fill out the proper gift forms for presents received at the White House and kept some of them for themselves, according to Linda Tripp, whose tapes of conversations with Monica Lewinsky led to his impeachment.
"Most of it didn't make it to the gift unit," Tripp said last night on "Larry King Live," describing a roomful of presents sent to the White House by heads of state in honor of Clinton's inauguration in January 1993. "I know on many occasions it went to them."
She said that when she was filling out proper gift forms for logging in presents sent to the White House, that she was told, in so many words: "Take off your Bush hat. This is the Clinton White House."
Tripp, who worked in the Clinton White House for 1-1/2 years before moving to a Pentagon job, taped her conversations with Lewinsky that helped lead to Clinton's impeachment.
Customarily, political appointees resign with the change of administration. Tripp did not, and was fired from her $100,000-a-year position on Inauguration Day 2001.
The Clinton transition office had no comment on Tripp's remarks.