Lawyers to Defend Clinton Before Judiciary Panel

President Clinton’s lawyers on Wednesday accepted an invitation to mount a daylong defense against impeachment charges before the House Judiciary Committee, but they demanded detailed information from the panel before next week’s showdown.

Vowing to offer a “vigorous defense of the president,” who has declined to appear, the White House lawyers called on the committee to share with them backup material on all of the allegations, including the committee’s recent forays into campaign fund-raising improprieties and the allegations of Kathleen Willey that the president groped her outside the Oval Office.

“We will of course accept your invitation to appear before the committee and to present a defense on behalf of the president,” said the two-page letter, signed by White House Counsel Charles F.C. Ruff and special counsel Gregory B. Craig.

“In light of the committee’s sudden decision to expand its activities and to pursue additional avenues of inquiry, however, we must assume your invitation extends to these new matters as well.”

Judiciary Committee spokesman Paul J. McNulty said in response to the White House request: “We are certainly willing to notify the White House prior to its presentation next week of the issues it may wish to defend, although the president knows the truth better than anyone.”

In another sign of the battle likely to come, the White House requested from the committee information about the conduct of independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr.

That material includes records detailing the expansion of Starr’s jurisdiction from his original mandate to investigate Clinton’s investment in the Whitewater real estate development in Arkansas and other controversies to the Monica S. Lewinsky matter. The White House also is seeking information about the treatment of Lewinsky by Starr’s prosecutors during initial questioning of her.

Following the White House defense, scheduled for Tuesday, the committee could begin drafting articles of impeachment by week’s end. That could set up a committee vote by mid-December and, given no surprises, a full House vote sometime before Christmas.

The White House decision to mount a defense came as a federal judge gave impeachment investigators access Wednesday to secret Justice Department memos on Democratic campaign fund-raising practices, opening up the inquiry far beyond Clinton’s efforts to conceal his affair with Lewinsky.

The ruling by U.S. District Judge Norma Holloway Johnson gave a pair of congressional staff members limited access to memos from Charles G. LaBella, former head of the Justice Department’s campaign finance task force; FBI Director Louis J. Freeh; and others on the need for an independent counsel to investigate fund-raising in the 1996 presidential campaign.

Chief GOP counsel David Schippers and Democratic counsel Kevin Simpson spent four hours at the Justice Department reviewing the documents, forbidden to take notes or copy the papers in keeping with conditions recommended by the Justice Department and ordered by Johnson. The judge let them report the contents of the memos only to Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.) and Rep. John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, the committee’s ranking Democrat.

Conyers said his investigator reported to him that none of the memos “is in any way relevant to this committee’s consideration of possible impeachable offenses by the president.” GOP officials did not comment.

The judge’s written order reversed a decision she handed down last week denying the Judiciary Committee access to the memos, which contain secret grand jury information. Over objections by Democrats that the impeachment inquiry was veering wildly off course, the committee issued subpoenas for the documents Tuesday, prompting the judge to reconsider.

Atty. Gen. Janet Reno, who has resisted naming an outside prosecutor to investigate the donation controversy, had fought to keep the memos from lawmakers, saying their release could endanger continuing investigations. In August, a House committee recommended she be cited for contempt of Congress for her failure to turn them over.

Reno changed course once a formal impeachment inquiry was opened.

“Our efforts sought to appropriately balance the committee’s constitutional responsibilities with the needs of law enforcement,” Reno said in a statement. “We feel that today’s court order, granting our motion, has achieved a just balance.”

Rep. Asa Hutchinson (R-Ark.), a committee member who voted for the subpoenas and attended the hearing with Johnson, said her ruling was “a step in the right direction.”

At the same time, Democrats decried the committee’s decision to delve into the complicated fund-raising matter in the final days of the impeachment review.

“Having subpoenas go out on the campaign reform issue is absolutely ludicrous a week before we’re supposed to have a vote in the committee on impeachment under the Starr referral,” said House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.), who met with Clinton but said that they did not discuss impeachment.

Hyde said in a statement that Democrats’ real fear is not the committee’s lack of direction “but rather the fact that we are moving in the right direction--getting to the facts.”

At the White House, spokesman Joe Lockhart blasted committee Republicans for bringing the fund-raising matter into the impeachment inquiry.

“It’s obviously an odd situation where you have the Congress undertaking the most grave responsibility . . . short of declaring war and the [Republican] leadership saying that they don’t want anything to do with it,” Lockhart said.

But Republicans defended their move to inspect the memos, which they said Justice Department officials had told them contained indications of criminal wrongdoing by Clinton. Democrats disputed that point and wondered whether the panel was trying to break its year-end deadline.

The memos include a strongly worded Nov. 24, 1997, report from Freeh to Reno recommending that she name an independent counsel to investigate fund-raising abuses.

The House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment hearings can be seen on The Times’ Web site at:

https://www.latimes.com/scandal.