Sleaze Willie.

AS WE go to press, the White House is on its fourth explanation of why it collected FBI files on some 340 Republican former officials: a low-level official working from an outdated White House pass list inadvertently requested them from the FBI. It is unclear how long-lived this explanation will be, but there is plenty of reason to think it will go the way of its predecessors. Why, if garnering the files was such a regrettable mistake, did the White House stash them in a safe instead of returning them to the FBI? Despite initial White House claims that political appointees never reviewed the files, the employee who requested them, Anthony Marceca, admits he combed the files for "derogatory information," which he passed along to Craig Livingstone, a political appointee. It is possible--although this excuse has been worn to a nubbin by this Administration -- that this was all just "incompetence." Still, only in a Democratic Administration could such an episode not produce an eruption of media condemnation.

The FBI-file revelation comes just as the convictions of James and Susan McDougal in Little Rock have sparked renewed interest in Whitewater. But this is hardly coincidental. The FBI-file controversy echoes the theme of all the scandals loosely known as Whitewater--the Clintons' casual contempt for standards of propriety (and even the law) when they stand in the way of their interests, political, financial, or otherwise. Indeed, the FBI files came to light only after the White House partly backed down from its extraordinary claim of executive privilege over three-thousand pages of documents related to Travelgate. In Travelgate the Administration sacked the entire White House Travel Office to make way for Clinton cronies, sicced the FBI onto the former employees, then pursued a bogus prosecution of the Travel Office's former head, Billy Dale, ruining him financially and sullying his name (his is one of the FBI files that showed up in the White House). When it invoked executive privilege, the Clinton Administration effectively was saying that it considered avoiding further Travelgate embarrassment tantamount to protecting national security.

Which in the world of the Clintons makes perfect sense. Any conduct, no matter how questionable, which protects the interests of the Most Ethical First Couple Ever is ipso facto ethical too. This is surely why Saint Hillary finds herself in a tightening web of misstatements and evasions. White House stonewalling on Travelgate is aimed at protecting the First Lady from obstruction-of-justice charges for statements she made to federal investigators about her role in the firings. Mrs. Clinton seems to have made dubious statements a way of life. The Washington Post recently ran an exhaustive analysis of her accounts of Whitewater-related events, which showed "a four-year pattern of Hillary Clinton avoiding full disclosure, occasionally forgetting places and events that might embarrass her, and revising her story as documents emerge and the knowledge of her questioners deepens."

This blend of self-righteousness and deceit was supposed to carry the Clintons through their ethical challenges, and with the Administration's attacks on Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr beginning to bite a few weeks ago, it seemed they just might make it. But then the McDougal conviction vindicated Starr and ruined the strategy.

The Clintons still have their defenders, especially the shameless Democrats on the Whitewater committee, who are refusing to grant Clinton-accuser David Hale limited-use immunity to testify. Pace the Democrats, even if Hale is given this immunity, he still faces possible charges by a state prosecutor and must serve jail time for his federal convictions. But with Starr re-energized, the Clintons will face closer scrutiny anyway. On June 17 begins the trial of two Arkansas bankers accused of misusing more than $13,000 in bank funds to aid Bill Clinton's 1990 gubernatorial campaign. In 1991, Clinton appointed one of the bankers to the State Highway Commission, in what looks like an illegal quid pro quo. Clinton will say under oath, of course, that it was no such thing. And do so, no doubt, with a clear conscience.