Hillary Admits Guest List Boo-Boo

Senate candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton said Friday that she made a mistake in using a government list of White House party guests to solicit political contributions.

“This was my error, absolutely my error,” and not that of a campaign staffer, Clinton said at a Manhattan campaign event.

Clinton said the names were from a list of guests invited to a holiday party thrown by the Democratic National Committee at the White House last December.

The annual White House holiday event is customarily paid for by the president's political party, but the invitation list is considered government property and it is considered improper to use it for political purposes.

Clinton's Senate opponent, Rep. Rick Lazio, has repeatedly criticized her fund-raising practices, accusing Clinton of rewarding political contributors with invitations to stay in the Lincoln bedroom of the White House, and with using government resources for inappropriate political purposes.

"The Clinton campaign was today caught wallowing in a new web of illegal fund-raising tactics and deception," a Lazio campaign statement said.

Clinton said the names were inadvertently included with a list of people slated to receive fund-raising letters signed by the president.

“I have passed on names of people who have been involved in political activities from events I have attended and events the president has attended, and there was a mix-up,” Clinton said. “That list of names was included in what I passed on to the campaign.”

Clinton said that once the campaign realized there was a mistake it immediately moved to rectify the situation. “The practical effect was that five people made contributions totaling $225 and we're returning those,” she said.

Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson told the New York Times that the campaign had obtained the list after she accidentally mixed the list of 1,400 White House visitors with lists of political supporters.

The official White House list was later entered into the campaign's fund-raising rolls. Wolfson told the Times that of the 1,400 names transferred, 400 were of people who were not already on the rolls.

Wolfson said more than 350,000 people received the fund-raising letters signed by the president. He also said the 400 names had been purged from the campaign's lists.

The Washington Post said a Clinton spokesman told the newspaper several weeks ago “that the White House social office had investigated and found no mingling of its lists with Hillary Clinton's fund-raising appeals.” But the newspaper said one Post reporter received a fund-raising letter with his name misspelled in exactly the way it had been for an invitation to a White House party.

But Clinton said that the details of the mix-up show that it was not done intentionally.

“No campaign wold deliberately solicit the press with any hope of any kind of return,” she said.

On Friday, a new Marist poll showed Clinton and Lazio in a statistical dead heat. The poll showed Clinton leading Lazio by 47 percent to 43 percent among registered voters, which falls within the poll's margin of error of 4 percentage points.

A poll out last week from the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute had Clinton leading Lazio, 50 percent to 43 percent, among likely voters.