TRIPP: ''Most [White House gifts] didn't make it to the gift unit"
Report claims Clintons took White House furniture a year ago.
February 9 - One Clinton critic says the former president will become a 'poster child on how not to leave the White House.' NBC News' Lisa Myers reports.
By Lisa Myers
NBC NEWS CORRESPONDENT
WASHINGTON, Feb. 9 - Twenty days after he left the presidency, there were new questions Friday about whether the Clintons removed even more government
property from the White House without disclosing it. The new questions come to light from a government list of furniture the Clinton's returned to the White House on Wednesday night.
IT INCLUDES not only $28,000 in gifts listed on their financial disclosure sheet but also six new items that the Clintons had not even reported taking with them: a gaming table inlaid with the presidential seal, a television armoire, two prints and two more tables. The Park Service says virtually all the items taken and returned are in fact government property.
A spokesman for the former president says the gifts were given to the Clintons when he was president-elect, before he officially took office, so they didn't have to be disclosed. She says the Clintons considered them personal gifts but sent them back "just to be safe." However, The Washington Post reported Friday that the Clintons started shipping White House furniture to their new home in New York more than a year ago, without revealing it.
Clinton critics see a pattern.
"We have never seen a president leave office in a more tawdry fashion," said Chuck Lewis of the Center for Public Integrity. "In fact, Bill Clinton will go down as the poster child on how not to leave the White House. I mean, you cannot top what he has done in the last few days, the last three weeks - it's beyond the pale."
There was also more uproar about the pardon of fugitive billionaire Mark Rich. Time magazine reported Friday that Rich's ex-wife, Denise, gave the Clinton presidential library at least $400,000 and, sources said, pledged even more.
"We need to find out why," Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind., chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, "and I don't think Bill Clinton has given a proper explanation as to why he pardoned Marc Rich." Rich pardon probe widens
GOLF CLUB CONTROVERSY
And if that weren't enough, there was also a new controversy over the fact that Clinton played golf Wednesday at what many say is a segregated golf club - exclusive Indian Creek Country Club in Miami.
The Democratic mayor of Indian Creek Village, Len Miller, said Clinton should not have played there.
"This club does not like people like me," he said, "people who are Jewish or people who are of color."
Clinton spokesman Jake Siewert said that the president doesn't condone discrimination and that he pardoned Marc Rich on the merits of his case. He also said the former president deserves some space.
"I think he has a right to a little bit more of a life as a private citizen now," Siewert said. "And it might be time for the media to lighten up a little bit."
But even the president's friends complain that he keeps giving ammunition to his enemies. Said one embarrassed Democrat: "This is a nightmare. It will never end."
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