GOP Questions Legality of Clinton’s Defense Fund : Inquiry: As Whitewater hearings near, House Republicans ask attorney general to determine if gift ban is being violated. Reno denies request.

Days before congressional hearings into the Whitewater case, House Republican leaders on Friday asked the Justice Department to explain the legal basis for President Clinton’s defense fund.

The GOP lawmakers, in a letter to Atty. Gen. Janet Reno, said that the fund appears to violate a ban on the President receiving gifts, except for those of “protocol and etiquette” traditionally given to a head of state. Exceptions to this ban do not allow gifts of cash to be solicited, they wrote.

The Republican request will go unfilled, however. A Justice Department official said that a response was being sent to the congressmen explaining that the attorney general does not provide legal opinions to anyone outside the executive branch. The official noted that the White House considers the defense fund to be legal.

The President and his wife, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, announced the fund last month to cover what they said could be legal bills as high as $2 million a year to defend themselves in the Whitewater inquiry and a sexual harassment lawsuit filed against Clinton by Paula Corbin Jones. Both matters occurred before Clinton’s inauguration in January, 1993.

The Republican letter was signed by House Minority Leader Robert H. Michel of Illinois, Minority Whip Newt Gingrich of Georgia and Rep. Dick Armey of Texas, chairman of the House Republican Conference. Containing a list of 13 questions about the fund, it asked Reno for her “written assurances” that the fund is legally permissible.

The letter said that the Justice Department during the Jimmy Carter Administration issued an opinion telling White House employees that they could not accept free or discounted legal services. Republican lawmakers suggested that there was no “ethical distinction” between this prohibition and the Clinton defense fund.

There was no immediate response to requests for comment from the White House counsel’s office. But Michael H. Cardozo, a Washington attorney and former State Department lawyer who helped establish the fund, said that all the questions raised by the GOP lawmakers “were carefully considered by the legal advisers” who worked to set it up.

“We believe that the trust fund more than meets all applicable legal statutes as well as ethical and administrative standards of conduct,” Cardozo said.

In the Whitewater inquiry, the Clintons have hired private attorneys because of the federal investigation of activities surrounding Whitewater Development Corp., an Ozarks real estate company in which they were partners while Clinton was governor of Arkansas.

The Jones lawsuit, filed in federal court in Little Rock earlier this year, alleges that while Jones was a state employee in 1991, then-Gov. Clinton made an unwanted sexual advance that caused her emotional distress and violated her civil rights.

The defense fund is the first for a sitting President. Former President Richard Nixon accepted donations to help cover some legal bills after he left office, but he paid the bulk of his legal fees himself.

The Clinton fund, with a list of prominent Americans as trustees, is formally known as the Presidential Legal Expense Trust Fund. It is structured as a grantor trust to protect the Clintons from having to pay gift taxes. Solicitations will be made to individuals only and their names will be made public, the White House has said. The maximum contribution will be $1,000.