Subscribe to one of our news e-mail lists . A former White House lawyer changed her earlier testimony in the White House e-mail controversy, saying she may have overlooked evidence that pointed to a possible problem with the computer system. The changes in testimony by Michelle Peterson stem from Independent Counsel Robert Ray's investigation into whether the White House covered up a computer problem in which hundreds of thousands of e-mails were not properly archived.
Presidential aides deny any cover-up.
The alterations in Peterson's testimony were contained in a declaration she filed last Wednesday in a civil case in federal court. During grand jury testimony last month, Ray's prosecutors confronted Peterson with a stack of White House e-mails that she checked in June 1998. Contrary to her earlier assertions, the stack did not duplicate in its entirety e-mails that had been turned over to Ray's predecessor, Kenneth Starr, in January 1998, and which Peterson also reviewed. White House spokesman Elliot Diringer said the two e-mails were the only differences in the two sets. Peterson gave the declaration in a lawsuit brought by a conservative group, Judicial Watch, on behalf of former White House employees in the Reagan and Bush administrations whose FBI background files were gathered by the Clinton White House.