Clinton Interviews Attorney General Candidates

President Clinton held his first meetings with candidates for attorney general Thursday, his spokesman said, and sources said that U.S. District Judge Rya Zobel of Boston was among those interviewed.

White House Communications Director George Stephanopoulos confirmed that Clinton met with “at least one” candidate for the job as he tried to find a replacement for Zoe Baird, who withdrew from consideration last week amid controversy over her hiring of undocumented workers as domestic help.

Zobel, 61, is a highly regarded federal judge who has handled a number of extremely complex cases, including litigation involving asbestos and a massive patent-infringement case that Polaroid Corp. brought against Kodak in the 1980s.

Zobel is a native of the former East Germany who came to the United States as a child with her family fleeing communist rule. She became one of the first women to graduate from Harvard Law School and became a partner at one of Boston’s most prestigious law firms before President Jimmy Carter tapped her for the federal bench in 1979.

“If you took a poll of lawyers who practice in the federal court, she would probably be considered among the two best judges in the building,” a Boston legal source familiar with the judge said. Prosecutors, however, have at times been dismayed by what they consider her comparatively light sentences in some criminal cases. Unlike Clinton, Zobel opposes the death penalty--a possible source of problems should she be nominated.

Sources familiar with the selection process, however, say Clinton continues to have a number of candidates in mind for the job and will have interviewed several before making a final decision. No announcement of a replacement for Baird is likely until sometime next week, White House officials said.

Clinton has also been considering former Watergate special prosecutor Charles Ruff. Had Baird been confirmed, Ruff would have been her top choice for the department’s No. 2 job, a source close to the selection process said.

In addition, White House officials have interviewed Andrea Ordin, the U.S. attorney in Los Angeles during the Carter Administration, for a senior Justice Department post, sources close to the process say. Ordin is one of several candidates under consideration for one of the top posts but has told officials that she does not wish to be considered for the attorney general’s job itself, the sources said.

Several other candidates have been widely rumored to be in contention for the post, including Janet Reno, the U.S. attorney in Miami, and Drew Days III, a professor at Yale Law School and former head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division under Carter.

Days was in Washington on Thursday to attend the funeral of former Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, but it was unclear if he met with Clinton.