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The Clintons Will Pay Back $86,000 For Gifts That They Are Keeping

CHAPPAQUA, N.Y. — Answering criticism, former President Clinton’s office announced Friday that he and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton will pay for thousands of dollars in controversial gifts they received last year. The gifts include $7,375 worth of furniture received from Denise Rich, the ex-wife of a fugitive financier Clinton pardoned Jan. 20, his last day in office.

Bill Clinton’s eleventh-hour pardon of Rich’s ex-husband, Marc Rich, shielding him from charges he evaded $48 million in taxes, clouded the president’s exit from office. While the pardon is irreversible, a congressional committee will begin hearings into the propriety of it next week.

“As have other presidents and their families before us, we received gifts over the course of our eight years in the White House and followed all of the gift rules,” Clinton said in a statement faxed to news agencies by his chief of staff, Karen Tramontano.

“While we gave the vast majority of gifts we received to the National Archives, we reported those gifts that we were keeping,” the statement said. “To eliminate even the slightest question, we are taking the step of paying for gifts given to us in 2000.”

Others gifts being repaid include flatware, televisions, clothing, china and artwork. Among the people to be repaid are Hollywood moviemaker Steven Spielberg and actress Kate Capshaw for $4,920 worth of china, actors Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen for $4,787 worth of china, and actor Jack Nicholson for a golf driver worth $350.

The Clintons will pay back $86,000, the office said, slightly less than half the value of the $190,000 in gifts they kept when leaving the White House last month.

Office Space

Separately Friday, Clinton addressed the controversy swirling around his choice of office space, saying taxpayers will be asked to pay only part of the rent on the pricey, 56th-floor Manhattan office he has his eye on. Private donations will cover the rest, he said.

“I don’t want the taxpayers to be taken for a ride,” Clinton said, adding that the public part of the lease would be $285,000 — the same amount the government pays for former President Reagan’s office in California.

The overall rental cost of more than $650,000 a year is more than the combined costs for offices for the nation’s other living former presidents. Former President Bush’s Houston office rents for $147,000 a year, Reagan’s Los Angeles office for $285,000, Jimmy Carter’s Atlanta office for $93,000 and Gerald Ford’s office near Palm Springs, Calif., for $99,000.

Presidential Perks

When the chief executive leaves office they all receive an annual $157,000 pension, health care, even lifetime free postage. In addition, each former U.S. president submits an annual budget to the federal government to cover office, equipment, travel and other expenses.

    Ronald Reagan

  • Pension $157,000
  • Staff salaries 96,000
  • Staff benefits 24,000
  • Travel 16,000
  • Office: Los Angeles, Calif. 285,000
  • Postage/telephone 25,000
  • Other 81,000
  • TOTAL: $684,000

    George Bush

  • Pension $157,000
  • Staff salaries 96,000
  • Staff benefits 35,000
  • Travel 57,000
  • Office: Houston, Texas 147,000
  • Postage/telephone 28,000
  • Other 50,000
  • TOTAL: $570,000

    Jimmy Carter

  • Pension $157,000
  • Staff salaries 96,000
  • Staff benefits 5,000
  • Travel 2,000
  • Office: Atlanta, Ga. 93,000
  • Postage/telephone 50,000
  • Other 106,000
  • TOTAL: $509,000

    Gerald Ford

  • Pension $157,000
  • Staff salaries 96,000
  • Staff benefits 24,000
  • Travel 50,000
  • Office: Rancho Mirage, Calif. 99,000
  • Postage/telephone 19,000
  • Other 31,000
  • TOTAL: $476,000

    Bill Clinton

  • Pension $111,000
  • Staff salaries 30,000
  • Staff benefits 11,000
  • Travel 11,000
  • Office: New York City (see below) 57,000
  • Postage/telephone 10,000
  • Other 26,000
  • TOTAL: $256,000

In his first expansive comments to reporters about life after the White House, Clinton said Thursday that his semi-cloistered time in Chappaqua — sleeping late, walking the dog, skimming rather than studying the newspapers — has helped him recover from the strain of leading the country.

“I’ve got eight years of accumulated, real exhaustion,” Clinton said Thursday, occasionally stopping to sign autographs and pose for snapshots with Chappaqua residents outside a restaurant. “Everybody I talked to said, ‘You’re going to go up there and you’re not going to have any idea how tired you are.’ For the first time … I can get up when I want to get up.”

Not that he’s a slugabed. He said he has been getting up about 8 a.m. “I try to sleep,” he said. “I’m really trying to get myself in good shape, and with this great kind of therapy — transition therapy — working on the house, putting the books up and the pictures and making sure everything’s in working order, that’s been just great,” said Bill Clinton.

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