Senate Backs Return of Outside Counsels : Investigations: The law inspired by Watergate expired in 1992. The GOP dropped efforts to delay measure after a Democrat won the White House.

The Senate, reviving a Watergate-inspired law that expired in 1992, voted Thursday to authorize independent prosecutors to investigate high government officials accused of crime.

With a Democrat in the White House, leading Republicans dropped efforts to delay passage of the measure, and it was quickly approved by the Senate on a 76-21 roll call.

President Clinton and Atty. Gen. Janet Reno have endorsed the bill, and the House is expected to give it swift approval when Congress reconvenes early next year.

“It is the one safeguard we have that nobody, regardless of how high in government, can be above the law,” Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell (D-Me.) said.

“This statute helps assure the public that criminal wrongdoing by high-level executive branch officials will not be buried or tolerated,” said Sen. William S. Cohen (R-Me.), a co-sponsor of the measure.

Recently, some Republicans have demanded the appointment of an independent counsel to investigate allegations that Commerce Secretary Ronald H. Brown accepted at least $700,000 from the Vietnamese government to help ease a U.S. trade embargo against Vietnam. Brown has denied the charges as absurd.

The independent counsel law, first approved in 1978 in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal that drove Richard Nixon from the presidency, was reauthorized in 1983 and 1987 but expired last year in the face of a Republican filibuster.

Nixon’s firing of special prosecutor Archibald Cox in the 1973 “Saturday Night Massacre” in the midst of the Watergate inquiry led to public outrage and the appointment of Leon Jaworski to head an independent investigation. Five years later, Congress enacted and President Jimmy Carter signed into law legislation to allow appointment of special prosecutors.

The new legizslation would permit a special panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington to name a special prosecutor to investigate charges of wrongdoing against a President, vice president, Cabinet officers, top campaign officials and others whose investigation by the attorney general might result in a conflict of interest. But no independent counsel could be named without a request from the attorney general.

A new feature would give the attorney general the power to seek appointment of a special counsel in cases involving alleged criminal violations by members of Congress. The Senate, however, rejected, 67 to 31, a proposal requiring the appointment of a special counsel when members of Congress are accused of breaking the law.

Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.), a leading opponent of the bill, argued that independent prosecutor Lawrence E. Walsh has conducted a seven-year “runaway investigation” of high officials in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George Bush. The investigation was ordered to look into allegations that officials of the Republican administrations were involved in a deal to sell arms to Iran and to use the proceeds to aid the Contras in Nicaragua.

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“Mr. Walsh and his army of lawyers have destroyed reputations, harassed families and run up a tab of more than $40 million billed directly to the taxpayers,” Dole said. He argued that the Justice Department should be trusted to perform prosecutions of high-level officials rather than turn to an outside counsel.

Dole managed to get approval for changes that would place several restrictions on future special prosecutors, including limits on the language used to describe unconvicted targets of investigations in a final report of their actions.

In addition, the bill would allow a court to decide whether an independent counsel’s work should be terminated after two years or the expenditure of $2 million, whichever comes first, rather than a minimum three-year time period as provided in the original version of the legislation.