White House Aides Get Whitewater Subpoenas : Probe: Special counsel seeks files, testimony from nine officials. Resignation of presidential counsel appears near.

Whitewater special counsel Robert B. Fiske Jr. on Friday subpoenaed nine Clinton Administration officials, including White House counsel Bernard Nussbaum, whose resignation is widely considered imminent because of the way he has handled the Whitewater controversy.

Those subpoenaed include six White House aides who participated in meetings with Treasury Department officials about aspects of the Whitewater investigation.

Fiske was expected to subpoena Administration officials as part of his inquiry, but his decision to summon those involved in the White House-Treasury meetings makes clear that he also intends to examine those meetings to see if improprieties occurred.

Subpoenaed were Nussbaum, White House counselor Bruce Lindsey, Deputy Chief of Staff Harold Ickes, Communications Director Mark D. Gearan, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton’s chief of staff, Margaret Williams, and the First Lady’s press secretary, Lisa Caputo.

Fiske also subpoenaed three Treasury Department officials who participated in the meetings--Deputy Secretary Roger Altman, General Counsel Jean Hanson and Chief of Staff Joshua Steiner.

Nussbaum has been under steady fire for allowing the meetings to take place and for participating in them. Congressional Republicans and other critics have charged that the meetings could have allowed White House officials to interfere with the Treasury Department’s investigation of possible wrongdoing at the Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan, an Arkansas thrift that was involved in Whitewater events. President Clinton conceded Thursday that the meeting, two last fall and one last month, created an appearance of impropriety.

Lindsey has been the chief White House official handling Whitewater-related questions for Clinton. Ickes, Williams and Nussbaum met last month with Altman, who briefed them on procedures that the Resolution Trust Corp.--a Treasury Departmen agency--was following in pursuing the Madison Guaranty investigation.

Gearan and Nussbaum took part in a meeting last fall with Treasury Department officials at which the Madison Guaranty investigation was discussed. The officials asserted that the only topic discussed at the meeting was Madison Guaranty.

In a memorandum to the staff, White House Deputy Counsel Joel Klein said the subpoenas, which calls for the officials to appear in federal district court in Washington on March 10, covers “any and all documents and/or communications referring or relating to any contacts, meetings or conversations about or regarding Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan, its subsidiaries or affiliates” between White House staff and officials of the Treasury Department or the Resolution Trust Corp.

Klein warned that “the destruction of documents after receipt of this subpoena may constitute obstruction of justice” and suggested that, “if you have any doubt about whether a particular document is called for . . , you must save it.”

Klein also directed White House aides not to purge any computer records and directed officials to stop removing from the White House any paper, including trash thrown in wastebaskets.

White House Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers said staff members would fully comply with the subpoenas and that the White House would have no other comment.

President Clinton was informed of the subpoenas about 7 p.m., shortly before they were served, aides said, and he instructed the staff to cooperate.

The subpoenas, the first known to have been issued to White House officials in the investigation, perhaps temporarily delayed the resignation of Nussbaum, whose yearlong tenure as the White House chief counsel has been marked by frequent controversy.

Earlier in the day, Clinton conspicuously distanced himself from his embattled aide at a White House press conference, ducking several public opportunities to voice confidence in him.

“I have nothing more to add to what I said yesterday,” Clinton said when asked about Nussbaum.

Clinton’s reference was to remarks he made Thursday criticizing the meetings Nussbaum attended with Treasury Department officials.

“We have to be careful,” Clinton said at the press conference. “I think I have sent a very clear and unambiguous signal that there’s no point in letting a process mess this White House up when we have not yet been accused of any wrongdoing. And since there was no wrongdoing on my part, I want a full, complete, thorough investigation, and I want it to go forward unimpeded and then to be over.”

While Clinton did not mention Nussbaum by name, his words appeared to be a clear rebuke, given that Nussbaum’s job has been to oversee the internal processes of the White House to ensure that they do not “mess up.”

As he has done before, Clinton complained about the political use that Republicans have made of the Whitewater matter, saying that “there is no evidence of abuse of authority on my part as President, or any of the kinds of things for which their parties and Administrations were accused.

“The Republicans have behaved in a fairly blatant, bald and totally political way,” Clinton said. “Since they have often complained in the past of political motivation, I think that they would show a little more restraint and judgment in this case.”

But White House officials made clear that Clinton, who thought the Whitewater issue had been taken off his back by the appointment of Fiske as a special counsel earlier this year, also believes that he was let down by members of his staff, including Nussbaum.

Clinton and Nussbaum subsequently met in the Oval Office, and officials widely predicted that the presidential aide’s resignation would come later in the evening. But after news of the subpoenas, officials said the announcement would be put off, perhaps until after the weekend.

The 57-year-old Nussbaum has long been close to the First Family. As a lawyer on the House Judiciary Committee’s staff when it considered the impeachment of President Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal, Nussbaum hired the young Hillary Rodham and supervised her work. She, in turn, introduced him to her then-boyfriend, Bill Clinton, telling the skeptical New York attorney that one day he intended to run for President.

During the presidential contest, Nussbaum, who had subsequently carried on a highly successful career as a litigator, provided advice and counsel to Clinton during some of the campaign’s toughest moments, including the week that Gennifer Flowers publicly accused Clinton of carrying on a lengthy affair with her.

After the election, Clinton quickly turned to Nussbaum to take on the counsel’s job. In that post, he had some notable successes. He oversaw the process that led to the appointment of Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the Supreme Court and the selection of Louis J. Freeh to head the FBI.

But more often, Nussbaum seemed to pop up in the middle of problem areas. He was widely accused within the White House of having mishandled the aborted nomination of Judge Kimba M. Wood to be attorney general and the nomination of C. Lani Guinier to head the Justice Department’s civil rights division.

He also participated in the controversy that began with the firing of the staff of the White House travel office. In all three cases, Nussbaum appeared to lack the political antennae to sense danger ahead and keep Clinton away from it.

After his deputy, Vincent W. Foster, apparently committed sucicide last summer, Nussbaum supervised the White House effort to manage the investigation by police, leading to still-unsubstantiated, but nonetheless unresolved, accusations that he blocked investigators in an attempt to hide something.

Nussbaum’s defenders accused critics of having twisted his actions--ascribing sinister motives to innocent decisions. But even his friends conceded that Nussbaum consistently appeared to ignore the political and public aspects of representing a client who is President of the United States.