Washington ? The prosecutor’s final report on Whitewater concluded the Clintons’ Arkansas land venture benefited from criminal activity and that the president and first lady gave factually inaccurate testimony, but that there was not enough evidence to prove the former first family engaged in wrongdoing.

The Clintons’ lawyer called the five-volume report, the product of a $70 million, six-year investigation, “the most expensive exoneration in history.”

Independent Counsel Robert Ray’s report, released Wednesday, said that “some of the statements given by both the President and the First Lady during official investigations were factually inaccurate,” but added that there was not enough evidence to prove either of the Clintons lied.

There was evidence that Bill Clinton should have suspected financial improprieties at his Whitewater business partner’s financial institution, the report said.

It also said investigators had gathered testimony from a confidential White House witness and two others that called into question Hillary Rodham Clinton’s sworn denial she had nothing to do with the disappearance and mysterious 1996 discovery of billing records from her law firm.

The witnesses said they saw Mrs. Clinton “carrying records which had the appearance of the billing records in July 1995,” long after the records had been subpoenaed. The records weren’t turned over to prosecutors until January 1996.

A jury “could conclude that Mrs. Clinton had the billing records in the White House in August 1995 or thereafter,” the report said. “But the evidence was insufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Those billing records ultimately revealed Mrs. Clinton had done legal work for Whitewater partner James McDougal that was later used by McDougal to conceal illegal acts on a real estate project, the report said. Mrs. Clinton is now a U.S. senator from New York.

Ray’s report also chastised the former president for his repeated attacks on the Whitewater investigation, which Clinton dismissed over the years as politically motivated and unfair.

“By calling a duly authorized law enforcement investigation ‘bogus,’ the president impugns and undermines not just this office but also courts, judges and juries who together have validated this investigation and the prosecutions brought,” Ray wrote.

The report is the final product of an inquiry that  along with its offshoots  cast a cloud over the Clinton presidency, had three different prosecutors, prompted a presidential impeachment and created bitter divisions between Republicans and Democrats.

While the Clintons were never prosecuted, the investigation ensnared several of their friends and political supporters. Whitewater business partners James and Susan McDougal, close friend Webster Hubbell and former Arkansas Gov. Jim Guy Tucker were among 14 people convicted of crimes.

Ray finished the report last fall and stepped down recently to run for the U.S. Senate in New Jersey as a Republican. The three-judge panel that supervised his investigation released the report Wednesday after giving time to the parties affected by it to review the document.