White House Denies Political Use of Database

WASHINGTON —  Attempting to douse new brush fires in the broadening campaign finance controversy, the White House denied Thursday that one of its own computer databases was used for political purposes.

A White House spokesman deflected a barrage of questions about the White House Office Database known as WhoDB that stores information on 350,000 White House visitors.

“The database was not used by the White House for any fund-raising capacity,” White House spokesman Barry Toiv said. “The DNC [Democratic National Committee] did not have access to it.”

The Times reported Thursday that, despite guidelines and legal opinions advising that the system could be used only for official government purposes, White House staff members frequently retrieved data on large political contributors and gave it to the committee to assist in raising money, according to a former DNC official.

The official, Truman Arnold, told The Times that his staff routinely used the information from the computer to identify candidates who might make increased donations.

“I kind of thought of it like [the commercial, nationwide database] Lexis/Nexis,” Arnold, a former finance chairman of the party, said in an interview Tuesday. “Everybody logged in. I didn’t know there was anything special about it.”

On Thursday, the Democrats issued a press release that said Arnold was “unavailable” and instead issued a statement under his name.

“I never heard of WhoDB until I read about it in the February [3] issue of Time,” the DNC quoted Arnold as saying. That issue of Time, which was distributed this week, ran a story on the database and quoted Truman as talking about it.

The national committee issued its own denial in the same press release. “To our knowledge, there was no use of the White House database by DNC officials or employees,” press aide Amy Weiss Tobe said in a statement.

The White House could not explain how a top Democratic official could speak so freely about the information he received from the computer to aid his fund-raising efforts if the database had been used only for official purposes.

“I don’t know what Truman Arnold said but I can tell you that the only use of the database would have been to consult it to see who had attended what events here at the White House and that would only be in the context of putting together an official event here at the White House,” Toiv said.

Toiv confirmed that the White House counsel’s office spoke to Arnold to check into his story.

“The counsel’s office has contacted him and . . . even after that conversation, we still do not have any information at the White House that the White House used the database inappropriately,” Toiv said.

The matter is being investigated by Rep. David M. McIntosh (R-Ind.) as one of several inquiries into the Democratic fund-raising efforts that helped put Clinton back in the White House for a second term.

“I think that the public is going to be outraged over the mixing of politics and government,” McIntosh said. “We haven’t seen this since the [Richard] Nixon administration.” McIntosh added that the White House had “continued to stonewall the investigation.”

Although the White House has provided large numbers of documents, McIntosh said, potentially damaging sections had been blacked out.

“Several key entries in the database look like they may have been fund-raising in nature,” McIntosh said. The part of the database made available to the committee “hints that they have been used as outreach tools in a campaign-style effort but the key paragraphs have been redacted out.”

Internal documents obtained by The Times indicate that First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton played a primary role in ordering the computer system installed and was briefed in detail on progress. But when questioned by reporters Thursday, Mrs. Clinton said:

“I would doubt that I was the person who ordered it. It struck me as something we needed. And that’s all I know about it.”

McIntosh was surprised by Mrs. Clinton’s comments. “The documents we have paint a very different picture,” he said. “And they’re from the White House.”

McIntosh said his investigators became suspicious that the White House wanted to use the database to help the Democratic Party in its political and fund-raising efforts because the system’s initial specifications said it would be “DNC system compatible.”

Toiv said that the White House counsel’s office is continuing to investigate whether the database, to which at least 120 employees had access, was used in any inappropriate ways.

Unlike most large database systems, the White House system lacks a basic audit function that monitors and records the activities of users for security purposes.