Critics Rip Counsel’s Probe into Clinton’s Private Life

Responding to a report that Whitewater prosecutor Kenneth W. Starr is investigating President Clinton’s private life, Clinton’s advocates, including two former White House attorneys, unleashed a furious assault on Starr for conducting “a salacious witch hunt,” and demanded that he either renounce it or quit.

“Looking into the president’s private life is nothing more than prurient excess,” Abner J. Mikva and Jack Quinn, former chief counsels in the Clinton White House, said Wednesday in a joint statement.

Such an inquiry would be “completely irrelevant to the purpose of the Whitewater investigation . . . a gross abuse of Starr’s authority and . . . prosecutorial misbehavior that should gravely concern all Americans,” they said.

The firestorm was sparked by a Washington Post report that said Whitewater investigators have sought intimate details of Clinton’s past personal relationships in interviews with Arkansas state troopers.

In a statement released Wednesday, Starr defended his inquiry and said statements that he is investigating the president’s personal life are “incorrect.” He said his staff is interviewing witnesses “with whom the subjects of this investigation have been associated, and who therefore may possess relevant factual information. We have no control over who those persons might or might not be.”

According to the report, Starr sought to interview certain of Clinton’s female acquaintances in a bid to check the accuracy of his sworn statements.

“It’s very legitimate to ask those questions,” said Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah). “It’s uncomfortable, but yes, they have the right to do that . . . because it might relate to perjury or obstruction.”

But Clinton’s defenders Wednesday responded to the revelations in tones of moral outrage: “It is intolerable, and it is wrong,” said Clinton’s private Whitewater attorney, David Kendall.

The reports sparked a sharp deterioration in the increasingly hostile relationship between the White House and the independent counsel. Starr’s critics have accused him of mounting a partisan vendetta while failing to establish a case against the president and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton over the Whitewater land deal and related issues.

Earlier this week, however, Starr’s probe seemed to gain a new lease on life when the Supreme Court let stand a lower court’s ruling that the White House had to supply him with notes of conversations between Mrs. Clinton and White House attorneys.

In a statement Wednesday, Kendall said that if the latest disclosures about the Whitewater inquiry are true, they are “indicative of an investigation that has lost its way.”

“It is out of control,” he said. “No one’s personal life should be subjected to a desperate dragnet by a prosecutor with unlimited resources.”

Clinton did not respond Wednesday when reporters tried to shout a question at him above the din of a helicopter about to take him to a conference on family values in Nashville, Tenn.

But White House aides did not seem unhappy with the idea of Clinton’s legal tormentor on the receiving end of controversy. “We’re not taking any position--but it’s easy to understand why people would find this curious,” said Mike McCurry, the White House press secretary.

Robert Bennett, an attorney who represents Clinton in the separate matter of a sexual harassment suit being pressed by Paula Corbin Jones, said: “For the independent counsel to pry into Mr. Clinton’s sex life is a frightening abuse of the grand jury process and the law enforcement power.”

Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) issued a statement saying, “This kind of crass invasion of individual privacy, if true, is indefensible, whether the target of these tactics is the president or any other citizen. It is outrageous, and it is sickening. It is character assassination, not a criminal investigation and it is wrong.”

Times staff writer Janet Hook contributed to this story.