THE SMELL OF BAD JUDGMENT

Testimony in front of the Senate committee investigating the Whitewater affair revealed the most damning evidence to date. Jean Hanson, Treasury Department general counsel, said that her boss, the beleaguered Roger Altman, told her to give the White House information on the Madison Guaranty investigation. Earlier in the day, an official of the Resolution Trust Corporation (RTC) acknowledged that information was given to the Clinton Administration, but that he had no idea the material, regarding the failed Arkansas S&L, would be passed on to the White House. "It was supposed to be confidential . . . and the RTC breached that responsibility," said John Ryan, acting head of the agency, in the second day of Senate hearings into contacts between the Treasury department and White House officials. But RTC officials added that they had never been pressured by the Clinton Administration to change their investigation. The Office of Government Ethics, a non-partisan federal agency, released a re