Clinton: EPA Deliberately Misled City

WASHINGTON — Senator Clinton is stepping up her criticism of the federal government's response to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, expressing dismay yesterday at testimony from a White House aide that, she said, contradicted official reports.

Mrs. Clinton led a subcommittee hearing probing the Environmental Protection Agency's widely criticized assurances that the air in Lower Manhattan was safe to breathe a week after the attack, as well as its subsequent efforts to clean buildings in the area.

Much of the hearing centered on a 2003 report by the EPA inspector general that said the White House had revised an agency press release to downplay the risk of adverse health effects due to air quality.

"I recognize that EPA and everyone else involved were operating under unprecedented and extremely difficult circumstances," Mrs. Clinton said at the outset. "But I simply cannot accept what appears to have been a deliberate effort to provide unwarranted assurances — at the direction of the White House — to New Yorkers about whether their air was safe to breathe."

Under pressure from Mrs. Clinton, the chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, James Connaughton, acknowledged that presidential aides, including the deputy chief of staff at the time, Joshua Bolten, were involved in drafting and editing public statements, but he said her characterization of the White House as unduly interfering with the agency was incorrect.

"The statement in the final press release was the accurate one," he said.

Mrs. Clinton said she doubted that to be true, citing the increasing number of studies that have indicated a link between respiratory illnesses and the toxic dust cloud that hovered in the Lower Manhattan air for weeks.

After the hearing, Mrs. Clinton said it was "clear that we are still confronted by contradictions, misstatements, denial" about the federal role after the attacks.

She did not address the role of city government in the hearing and, notably, the name of Mayor Giuliani, her potential presidential rival, was not uttered.