WASHINGTON White House officials released a list Saturday of damage that they say was done by outgoing staffers of President Bill Clinton, including obscene graffiti in six offices, a 20-inch-wide presidential seal ripped off a wall, 10 sliced telephone lines and 100 inoperable computer keyboards.
For months, Democrats had questioned the administration’s credibility because officials refused to document charges of vandalism they made in the week after President Bush’s inauguration. In April, the General Accounting Office said it was unable to confirm damage, in part because of what it called a “lack of records” from the White House.
Most of the incidents described Saturday by White House press secretary Ari Fleischer were said to have occurred in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, adjacent to the White House. Pornographic or obscene greetings were left on 15 telephone lines in the offices of the vice president and the White House counsel and in the scheduling and advance offices, Mr. Fleischer said. As a precaution, all phones were disabled and reprogrammed, he said.
The details were provided to The Washington Post after several days of inquiries about the degree of White House cooperation with the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress. The agency said in April that it “found no damage” at the White House.
The agency said that it could reach no further conclusions because the White House said it had no written record of damage.
The letter did not mention the Eisenhower building, where most of the damage was reported.
White House officials had said they did not release the information sooner because of Mr. Bush’s desire to “move forward and not live in the past.”
The vandalism brouhaha started the day after Mr. Bush was inaugurated with boasts by Clinton staffers that they had removed the “W” keycaps from their computers, and escalated when Mr. Fleischer said Jan. 25 that departing aides had “cut wires” and performed other acts that the administration was “cataloging.”
The next day, though, Mr. Bush said that there “might have been a prank or two,” and Mr. Fleischer said the catalog consisted of mental notes kept by one aide.
Mr. Fleischer said Saturday that the written list was prepared Friday, based on the recollections of officials and career government employees, in response to Democrats’ “suggestion that the Bush White House made things up.”
Clinton administration officials said the size of the list did not measure up to the luridness of the charges. Former press secretary Joe Lockhart said the vandalism charges were an attempt to “make the new administration look good by comparison to the last one.”
The only incident Mr. Fleischer described in the White House itself involved a photocopier in the West Wing that had pictures of naked people interspersed with blank photocopy paper so deep in the tray that they were still popping out weeks after the inauguration.
Mr. Fleischer said that workers were able to affix new “W” caps to many computers but that 100 keyboards had to be replaced.
He said that two historic doorknobs were missing and furniture and desks were overturned in 20 percent of the Eisenhower offices.
