THE Senate Whitewater committee has ended 14 months of investigation bitterly divided over the role of Mrs Hillary Rodham Clinton.
While the Republican majority has strongly suggested that she was involved in covering up aspects of fraudulent Whitewater dealings, the Democratic minority has accused fellow senators of playing politics in a presidential year.
"The American people deserve to know, and now can take comfort in knowing, that this year long investigation shows no misconduct or abuse of power by their President or First Lady," the Democrats said in their dissenting report.
They further commented that "the venom with which the majority focuses its attack on Hillary Rodham Clinton is surprising even in the context of the investigation."
The report of the committee, headed by Senator Alfonse D'Amato, runs to over 700 pages and thousands more of documents and testimony from 150 witnesses. But the Republican majority is only able to suggest wrongdoing by Mrs Clinton based on circumstantial evidence.
The report concludes that she had a "powerful motive" to hide her law firm billings for work she did in Little Rock, Arkansas, on property developments now known collectively as Whitewater.
The billings had been subpoenaed by the committee two years ago, but were missing until they turned up mysteriously earlier this year in the White House. An aide to Mrs Clinton said she found them on a table in the presidential living quarters.
The Republicans suggested that Mrs Clinton may have wanted to conceal her knowledge of a fraudulent land development called Castle Grande in Arkansas. Last week a former employee of a failed bank involved in the development, Mr Don Dent on, claimed that she had summarily dismissed his warning that her dealings could be improper.
The majority report says that her "billing records and the evidence indicate that Mrs Clinton either had knowledge of or consciously avoided the fact that the Castle Grande transaction potentially violated bank regulations. That knowledge provides a powerful motive to protect the billing records from careful scrutiny by investigators," the report says.
The Democratic minority, relieved that nothing more incriminating has emerged from the 14 months of hearings, criticised the report as a "blatantly political game of tag". They accused the Republicans of making irresponsible claims of possible obstructions of justice".
A White House spokesman dismissed the Republican accusations as "nothing new". He praised the Democratic dissenting report as a "powerful document that puts into context what the committee has done at great expense to the taxpayers for no other reason than to do political damage to the President."
The release of the Senate committee report is seen as an anticlimax, as virtually all its findings have been known before and much of it was heavily leaked at the weekend.
The fact that after 14 months of investigation, no proof could be found of actual wrongdoing by the President or the First Lady will be a boost for Mr Clinton. But he faces the start of new Senate hearings later this week into the so called "Filegate" affair concerning the abuse by the White House of confidential FBI files on Republican opponents.