President Hints at Misconduct by Starr

President Clinton, in his most critical comments yet about the Whitewater investigation, said Monday that “there is a lot of evidence” to support Susan McDougal’s claim that independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr is trying to force her to provide damaging testimony against the Clintons--even if it is false.

The comments came as The Times learned that federal judges in Arkansas, acting on another Whitewater front, decided last Friday to ask Atty. Gen. Janet Reno to decide whether Starr should be forced to respond to a legal complaint that he is too political to serve as independent counsel in the case.

That complaint, filed in Little Rock earlier this month by a Democrat acting as a private citizen, argues that Starr’s longtime involvement in Republican politics and other activities constitute conflicts of interest that should disbar him and disqualify him from running the Whitewater investigations.

Clinton’s comments Monday came close to accusing Starr of misconduct. In a televised interview on PBS’ “News Hour with Jim Lehrer,” Clinton said “the facts speak for themselves” on whether Starr is shaping his investigation to get the president and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Clinton said McDougal and her lawyer contend prosecutors “did not want her to tell the truth. They wanted her to say something about us whether it was the truth or not.”

”. . . There’s a lot of evidence to support that,” Clinton added.

Clinton does not appear to be in any direct political jeopardy from the independent counsel, who has said he will not take any action between now and the election that might influence the outcome of the contest. Still, McDougal’s refusal to answer questions that bear on the Clintons’ truthfulness raises issues that the president might want to address.

Starr’s office said Monday that the prosecutor would have no comment on Clinton’s observations.

The action by the U.S. district judges in Little Rock came in response to a petition filed by Francis T. Mandanici, 50, a public defender in New Haven, Conn., and a graduate of Boston’s Suffolk Law School.

Mandanici said he researched the issue of the independent counsel and decided to file his petition after reading numerous news accounts and editorials of Starr’s Republican activities and his legal representation of interests that oppose Clinton. “I’m arrogant enough to think that one man can make a difference,” Mandanici said.

Mandanici’s petition cited Supreme Court decisions that require prosecutors to be disinterested and free of compromising influences and loyalties. It argues that Starr’s own activities on behalf of Republican and conservative causes, as well as his representation of tobacco industry and other interests opposed to the president, constitute a conflict of interest that should disqualify him.

The petition alleges that Starr also has had a personal and financial conflict of interest by refusing to remove himself from decisions involving the Resolution Trust Corp., an important agency in Whitewater matters, after being notified that the RTC had sued Starr’s law firm. The firm eventually paid a settlement of $325,000 in response to the RTC’s charge that it had provided negligent representation of a failed savings and loan institution.

The decision to refer the matter to Reno came during a contentious closed-door meeting in which the eight judges present could not agree on whether they themselves should order Starr to respond to the charges.

Acting on a proposal by Judge Bill Wilson, a Democratic appointee and critic of the way the Whitewater investigations have been handled, the judges deadlocked, 4-4, on whether they should compel Starr to respond. Four Democratic appointees voted to direct Starr to reply to the allegations, while another Democratic appointee joined three Republican appointees in voting no.

“There were some strong opinions expressed, but it was civil,” one source said of the debate.

Whitewater deputy independent counsel John Bates declined to comment on the matter. Starr was not available.

Earlier this year, in a slap at a higher court, Wilson accused a panel of three Republican judges of the U.S. 8th Circuit Court of Appeals of relying on “triple hearsay” in unfairly removing Judge Henry Wood from presiding over a Whitewater trial.

The panel had disqualified Wood, a Democratic appointee, on grounds that he was a friend of President and Mrs. Clinton, who are subjects of Starr’s investigation. Wood was among those who voted to order Starr to respond to the petition.

The Monday night televised interview with Clinton covered a range of topics unrelated to Whitewater.

Clinton had praise and sympathy, but no censure, for Dick Morris, the advisor who resigned from White House service last month amid allegations that he gave away government secrets to a prostitute.

In his lengthiest comments to date on the matter, Clinton said he saw no need to investigate whether such secrets were leaked “because now it obviously doesn’t matter anymore. I mean, we’ve gone on. We’ve got a good campaign team.”

“If it did happen . . . let’s just say it happens, it was obviously part of a much larger personal crisis. And I don’t believe that we serve each other well by making comments that make a lot of sense when you’re rational and don’t make any sense for people at all when they’re in a personal crisis,” he said.

Clinton called Morris “a very gifted man. A very brilliant man.” He insisted Morris was interested in issues, and was not “just a political person in the purely political sense.”

Clinton offered no criticism of Morris for secretly brokering a multimillion-dollar deal for a book on his experience in the White House, a subject that has brought harsh criticism from White House aides.

Clinton insisted that he does want the Democrats to regain control of Congress in November, despite many observations that a more liberal Congress might thwart his second-term agenda.

He portrayed congressional Democrats as centrists like himself, citing their votes for reducing the deficit, paring government, taking steps aimed at fighting crime and altering the federal role in education. He also mentioned their votes to pass the Family and Medical Leave Act.

“I don’t believe these are wildly liberal measures,” he said.

Responding to charges that he has sharply shifted his agenda to the right during his term, Clinton said he had remained true to the agenda he had forged as Arkansas governor, and the one he laid out in 1992.

“There’s been study after study after study saying I have either done or worked very hard to do 80% of what I outlined in 1992,” he said. “One book [that] came out said it was over 90%.”

The studies mentioned by Clinton included one by the Knight-Ridder media chain, aides said, and another by Tom Patterson, a Syracuse University professor who writes about the news media.

The reference to a 90% completion rate was to a book by Thomas Bloom and Bruce Henderson titled “State of the Union.”

Clinton said he was aware that many second-term presidencies have not left records of accomplishment. But he said he believes that is “because the presidents ran for reelection and got reelected because they’re satisfied with the job they’ve done, but they didn’t have an agenda.”

He said he was not giving credence to the polls that show him with a strong lead. He realized that “the weight of history is against us,” since only two Democratic presidents, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, have been reelected in this century.

Clinton also appeared to take a swipe at William J. Bennett, the former education secretary who has been a sharp Clinton critic while working recently with several conservative think tanks.

Republicans “make a living condemning the national government, but they can’t bear to be without it. They spend their whole time trying to take it over. They’ve even got these vast think tanks, this whole array of people who are miserable when they’re not in the national government, even though they think it ought to not do anything.”