ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

TOM STRONG

WASHINGTON (AP)—Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun on Thursday scoffed at new questions about her handling of a $28,750 windfall her mother received while on Medicaid, one year after the controversy erupted amid her history making campaign.

At issue is an unsigned, unaddressed, typed letter that discusses disbursement of her mother’s proceeds from a timber sale on inherited land.

Moseley-Braun purportedly wrote her mother that she had helped ‘‘launder’‘ proceeds from the sale, according to The New Republic magazine and WMAQ-TV in Chicago.

Moseley-Braun said she neither wrote nor had any part in preparing the letter, and had never written a letter using the term ‘‘launder.’‘

The Chicago Democrat said she had not seen the letter until a television reporter showed it to her during an interview in the fall of 1992, amid her successful campaign to become the nation’s first black woman in the Senate.

The interview was not aired until Wednesday night.

‘‘How can I be held to account for every anonymous, unsigned, fell-out-of the-sky piece of paper. No person can respond to that,’‘ she told reporters Thursday.

Her lawyer, Louis Vitullo, said in an interview ‘‘it’s unauthentic, it’s unsigned and I think it’s baseless.’‘

WMAQ Wednesday night aired Moseley-Braun’s interview with an NBC-TV reporter that was conducted last year.

Moseley-Braun said in the interview she did not remember the letter. Asked if she could say she never wrote it, Moseley-Braun replied: ‘‘No, I can’t. … It’s a pretty damning letter.’‘

On Thursday, she told reporters: ‘‘I looked at it and reacted. I was frankly stunned that we weren’t talking about issues.’‘

Campaign strategists held a meeting after the session with the NBC reporter at which consultant Gerald Austin said Thursday he asked Moseley-Braun about the letter.

‘‘She said she wrote a lot of letters that were more cathartic. She threw them away. Some she mailed. She didn’t recall whether she wrote this or if she did write it, whether she mailed it. I did not surmise that she had written it,’‘ Austin said in a telephone interview from his home in Columbus, Ohio.

Campaign spokesman David Eichenbaum, who works in New York, did not return messages left at his home and office Thursday.

The magazine also detailed campaign unrest, citing workers’ concerns about campaign finances and an investigation into charges of sexual harassment against campaign manager Kgosie Matthews, who became Moseley-Braun’s fiance.

Asked about the magazine article, Moseley-Braun said ‘‘I jokingly but not so jokingly said this morning, Liar, liar pants on fire (to) about half the stuff that’s in there.’‘

The financial controversy erupted late in the 1992 Senate campaign over a $28,750 windfall that Moseley-Braun’s mother, Edna Moseley, received in 1989 from a sale of timber rights. Moseley was a Medicaid-supported patient in a Chicago nursing home.

The money should have been reported to the state, which might have used some of it to defray Mrs. Moseley’s state-supported care.

Instead, Moseley-Braun helped her mother distribute the money among herself and other family members. In the final week of the campaign, Moseley-Braun paid the state $15,239.92 to cover what should have been used for her mother’s medical expenses.

The issue dogged her campaign in the final weeks but did not stop her from handily defeating Republican Rich Williamson.