Clinton Team Asks 3-4 Days for Defense

In an aggressive effort to derail the impeachment process in the House, White House officials Friday asked the House Judiciary Committee for three to four days to present a thorough defense of President Clinton.

During that time, the president’s lawyers would call witnesses to testify on standards for impeachment and for prosecution on perjury, obstruction of justice and abuse of power, according to a letter from the president’s lawyers.

The White House witnesses also would challenge the way independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr’s office gathered its information against Clinton.

The president’s lawyers would conclude their defense by presenting “a final argument as to why, given the law, the facts and these circumstances, this committee should not report out articles of impeachment to the full membership of the House of Representatives,” said Gregory B. Craig, White House special counsel, and Charles F. C. Ruff, counsel to the president, in a letter to the committee.

The GOP-led committee, which had set aside one day for a White House defense and cross-examination by committee members, did not immediately respond. By late Friday evening it was unclear how much time the White House might get to make its case and what impact that could have on the tentative committee schedule for bringing the matter to a full House vote sometime later this month.

The White House gambit did succeed, however, in almost instantaneously raising the level of political interpretation and bickering.

A lawyer for the Judiciary Committee suggested that the Clinton administration was trying to muddle the impeachment process and perhaps extend it into next year, when Republicans will have a smaller majority in the House because of Democratic gains in the November elections.

Defense of Clinton Called Key Reason

“This is an obvious and desperate political ploy to push the inquiry into the new Congress where the Democrats potentially have more votes,” said Paul McNulty, a Republican lawyer on the committee.

A senior White House official dismissed that notion and stressed that the lawyers’ intent is to “defend the president vigorously” in the face of a highly political and partisan process.

The committee also slammed the president’s counsel for requesting in a second letter that committee members not question the president’s attorneys when they are presenting their case.

“The president’s lawyer is admitting that he has no exculpatory evidence and wants to make a presentation but doesn’t want to answer any questions about the facts in the case,” McNulty said. “What is the White House afraid of?”

Ruff argued that the president’s lawyers would not be presenting evidence or acting as “fact witnesses” but analyzing the information already before the committee in a kind of closing argument.

The White House offensive came at the end of a roller-coaster week in which the Judiciary Committee surprised and exasperated the White House with on-again, off-again decisions--first to include campaign finance improprieties in its inquiry and then to exclude them, all in the space of two days.

White House officials said that the committee’s helter-skelter approach had knocked them back on their heels, making it difficult to develop a counterattack just days before the committee’s votes on articles of impeachment.

“You look at the lurching of the committee this week--it’s all over the place,” said Doug Sosnik, assistant to the president. “It’s not been easy to figure out what the target is. In that environment, it’s hard to plan beyond day to day.”

So, with the prospect of historic votes on impeachment looming ever closer, the White House tried to up the ante in the arena of public opinion. A key element of that strategy was to attack the committee for approaching its grave constitutional task in a cavalier manner.

Each day White House spokesman Joe Lockhart has intensified his critical rhetoric, painting the process underway on Capitol Hill as blatantly partisan and calling the committee’s changes in direction chaotic.

That provoked a response by an irked Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.), Judiciary Committee chairman. “We will not be intimidated by rhetoric or name-calling,” he said in a statement Friday before the White House sent its letter to the committee.

Lockhart said that he has been turning up the volume intentionally to try to wake up the public to the fact that its president might be about to be impeached.

“We’re in a bizarre circumstance where people are not taking this seriously because they can’t believe Congress would do this,” Lockhart said in an interview Friday. “And Congress is moving forward with perhaps their most solemn responsibility in almost a cavalier political way.”

Lockhart conceded he is concerned that his effort may fall short. The full House vote is considered too close to call.

And the person who might be most able to grab the country’s attention on the issue--Clinton--has taken himself off the field.

“This is a subject that he has said is out of his hands,” Lockhart said.

Hyde had invited the president to defend himself before the committee and Clinton’s lawyers clearly want to argue that his attempts to conceal his affair with Monica S. Lewinsky were wrong but do not constitute impeachable offenses.

In indicating Friday that they hoped to stage a longer and more detailed defense than was expected, Clinton’s lawyers also appeared to be hoping that their intensive effort would convince Americans that the threat of impeachment is real.

Ruff and Craig noted in their letter that Hyde had stated in a Nov. 19 committee hearing that “the president’s counsel will have unlimited time to present his witnesses at the end of our hearings, when they are ready to do so.”

Public opinion polls show that two-thirds of Americans oppose impeachment and the White House believes that, if they were paying attention to the process, there would be more public outrage.

Part of the White House strategy is to depict the congressional process as frivolous.

“Three times in a week they’ve changed the scope of this thing,” complained one senior White House official. “We’re talking about impeaching a president--the most solemn decision Congress can make outside of declaring war. If they were talking about declaring war and three times in a week they changed which country they were going to declare war on, it would not inspire confidence.”

At the same time the White House is publicly trying to shame the Republicans for their impeachment proceedings, it is quietly trying to make deals with lawmakers.

Top White House officials made overtures this week to Republican House members both on and off the Judiciary Committee to talk about alternatives to impeachment--such as an official censure or reprimand.

Lockhart indicated Friday that even a fine against Clinton was not out of the question.

“There are a lot of people who are open to the idea [of an alternative to impeachment] and some aren’t,” said one top White House official about his efforts to sway Republicans toward an alternative. “It’s hard to generalize.”

But White House officials complained that they have not made any progress toward a deal, in part because the only GOP leader who has engaged in the process is Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Texas), who is determined to push for impeachment.

Trying to Draw In Livingston

With lame duck Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) largely out of the picture, White House officials are trying to prod incoming Speaker Bob Livingston (R-La.) into action. They do not believe that anyone with any political savvy would want the impeachment of a popular president to be his first and defining action as House leader.

“We hope the new speaker will bring a national perspective to this problem and will make decisions that will reflect the national interests,” a senior advisor said.

White House officials admit that, while they can try to have some impact on the process, their hands largely are tied, both because the Constitution gave Congress full authority over impeachments and because of the president’s decision not to fight personally.

“It’s hard to stop the train when you’re the one being tied to the tracks,” said one political advisor to the president.

Times staff writer Richard A. Serrano contributed to this story.

* DOWNPLAYING VOTE: The message in Republican circles is that impeachment is equal to censure. A11