White House Crisis Fever Cools, but Starr Resolute

The scandal fever that gripped the nation’s Capital the last few weeks has cooled a notch, and Bill Clinton’s public standing remains high.

But in a simple conference room a dozen blocks from the White House, independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr is drilling relentlessly at the foundations of the Clinton presidency. And despite the surface calm, lawyers on both sides believe Clinton’s political survival still hangs on the course of Starr’s inquiry over the next few months.

Day after day, Starr is hauling reluctant White House aides before a secret grand jury, demanding remorselessly that they tell everything they know about the president’s habits, his movements, his private moments, his guests. The prosecutor has grilled Clinton’s secretary, his personal assistant, even the steward who brings the president a Coca-Cola in the afternoon.

Starr’s aim: to determine whether Clinton lied under oath, or persuaded anyone else to lie, about his relationship with former White House intern Monica S. Lewinsky.

The charges Starr is pursuing--perjury, suborning false testimony, conspiracy to obstruct justice--have nothing to do with sex as such. Instead, they center on truth and falsehood.

And if Starr finds “substantial and credible information” indicating that Clinton committed any of those crimes, the independent counsel law appears to give him no choice: He must report it to the House of Representatives as grounds for possible impeachment.

“The threshold is low,” said Theodore B. Olson, a former high-ranking Justice Department official. “It merely has to be ‘substantial and credible.’ That doesn’t mean [Starr] believes it. That doesn’t mean it’s true. . . . As soon as the independent counsel gets it, he has to turn it over to the House.”

Joseph E. diGenova, a former independent counsel, said he expects Starr’s decision will come “a lot sooner than many people think. This grand jury is moving very fast. I would expect [Starr] to make a determination in 30 to 60 days.”

It is far too early to predict what Starr will do. Despite a flood of leaks from all sides, the evidence that Clinton encouraged false testimony--by persuading Lewinsky to deny facts about their relationship, for example--remains sketchy and unclear. And the president has strongly denied the charges.

In his latest comment, he told a news conference Friday: “I never asked anybody to do anything but tell the truth.”

But Starr has ignored the president’s denials--and declared that he is in this fight to the end.

“We want all the truth,” he said last week. “We want it completely, accurately. And we will satisfy ourselves that we are getting the truth.”

Republican leaders in the House are taking the prospect of an “impeachment report” from Starr seriously--although they say, with apparent sincerity, that they hope it does not come to pass.

Already, House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.) have held conversations on how to manage such a constitutional crisis--from the weighty political question of how an impeachment inquiry would proceed to the mundane matter of finding a secure room to store evidence.

Their initial consensus: Hyde would probably move slowly and hold general hearings on the charges Starr raises, rather than consider impeaching the president right away. But there would be no escape from the fact that impeachment was the issue on the table.

“Most people are hoping that Starr doesn’t dump it all on us,” said a House Republican close to Gingrich. “I don’t think it’s healthy for the country or for the institution. But [if Starr finds evidence of impeachable crimes], we can’t avoid it.”

Starr Seen Focusing on More Serious Charges

During the past week, Starr’s investigation intensified in ways that could be ominous for the president.

The independent counsel emphasized he is not focusing principally on the question of whether Clinton had a sexual relationship with the 24-year-old former intern, nor even on whether Clinton falsely denied such a relationship in sworn testimony for the sexual-harassment lawsuit Paula Corbin Jones filed against him.

Instead, Starr said, he is focusing on more serious charges: “A possible obstruction of justice, intimidation of witnesses and subornation of perjury.”

By calling a long list of Clinton aides as witnesses, Starr sent another signal: He is not relying solely on the still-unobtained testimony of Lewinsky to make his case.

Lewinsky touched off the investigation by telling a friend, Linda Tripp, that, after consulting with the president and Washington lawyer Vernon E. Jordan Jr., she lied about her relationship with Clinton in her testimony for the Jones lawsuit. Tripp recorded some of her conversations with Lewinsky and eventually contacted Starr’s office.

Clinton partisans have questioned Lewinsky’s credibility; Starr has worked methodically to line up corroborating evidence, including a demand for testimony from the Secret Service agents who guard the president.

Last week, a piece of physical evidence emerged as well: a box of gifts Lewinsky received from Clinton but later returned to his secretary, Betty Currie.

Starr’s investigators are trying to determine whether the president or one of his closest longtime associates, Deputy Counsel Bruce R. Lindsey, asked Lewinsky to return the gifts, people familiar with the matter said.

Clinton gave Lewinsky the gifts--which investigators say included clothing and jewelry--during the three years she was an intern, a White House staff member and a secretary at the Pentagon. Lewinsky returned the items to Clinton’s office in December, after she was subpoenaed to testify in the Jones lawsuit.

If someone told Lewinsky to return the gifts so she could testify she had no such articles, that could constitute an attempt to obstruct justice, lawyers said.

Currie was the Clinton assistant who often cleared Lewinsky to enter the White House, including on many occasions after Lewinsky was transferred to the Pentagon in 1996--visits that have yet to be explained. Currie was thus in a position to know of any private meetings between the president and the young woman.

The New York Times reported that Clinton summoned Currie to the White House on a Sunday in January, after he learned that Lewinsky’s visits were coming to light, and suggested to her--in what the newspaper portrayed as leading questions--that he had never been alone with Lewinsky. But Currie’s lawyer denounced the article and said the secretary did not believe Clinton had “tried to influence her recollection.”

Testimony Taken From Others at White House

Starr also took testimony last week from other White House aides who might have seen Lewinsky entering or leaving the president’s offices, including Bayani Nelvis, a steward who served the president refreshments.

According to accounts of the secret tapes made by Tripp of conversations with Lewinsky, the young woman told of having a sexual relationship with the president from the fall of 1995 until late last year. Clinton has denied any such relationship.

The prosecutor is also investigating whether Jordan, a close friend of Clinton’s, was seeking to ensure Lewinsky’s silence when he spent several days personally arranging a job offer for her in New York--at a time when Lewinsky had prepared but not filed an affidavit that denied a relationship with Clinton.

Starr’s willingness to compel sworn testimony from Clinton’s closest associates and the torrent of leaks that has provided public glimpses of the trouble the president may face help explain the untrammeled fury that the White House has unleashed against the independent counsel.

No longer is Starr’s investigation mired in the legal swamps of the decades-old Whitewater land deal. Instead, it now focuses on a short chronology of simple events--and a list of possible felonies that could put Clinton’s presidency in mortal peril.

Aides Appear to Expect Rough Times

And despite the president’s still-buoyant job approval rating--68% in a Times poll a week ago, the highest of his tenure--Clinton’s own aides are behaving as if they expect difficult times to come.

“We’re just taking it day-by-day,” one of the president’s closest advisors said last week, sounding distinctly harried.

White House officials heatedly insist that “resignation” and “impeachment” are two words that have never been breathed inside the executive mansion. And on Friday, when Clinton was asked by a reporter whether he had considered stepping down, he replied with an emphatic “never.”

But Clinton is a great reader of U.S. history, so he doubtless already knows the most important fact about impeachment: It is primarily a political and constitutional decision, not a legal one.

The process begins with the House Judiciary Committee deciding, in essence, whether the president should be indicted on various charges. Its recommendation is voted on by the full House, with a simple majority needed for passage.

The president is then tried in the Senate, with senators as jurors, House leaders as prosecutors and the chief justice of the United States as presiding judge. To actually remove a president from office requires a two-thirds vote in the Senate.

The Constitution defines the grounds for impeachment broadly: “treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”

“An impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history,” Gerald R. Ford noted when he was House Republican leader in the 1970s. Ford was vice president when Richard Nixon resigned in the face of impeachment proceedings.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Hyde has said he would not consider a sexual dalliance as grounds for impeachment but rather would require a serious offense against the legal system, such as perjury or obstruction of justice.

And Hyde, a cautious and widely respected conservative, has imposed a more practical test: Any attempt to impeach the president must have substantial support from Democrats, or it will not move forward.

“Nothing much will happen until the Democrats decide something should happen,” he said in a television interview.

Hyde has directed his chief counsel, Thomas E. Mooney, to monitor Starr’s investigation and plan for what his committee might do. Mooney was on the staff of the committee when it voted to impeach Nixon in 1974. One of his Democratic colleagues was a young lawyer named Hillary Rodham, who later married Bill Clinton.

For the time being, though, Hyde said he is sitting tight. “I’m going to wait for the evidence,” he said.

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Times staff writers Janet Hook, Ronald J. Ostrow and David G. Savage contributed to this story.

* STARR CRITICIZED

Lewinsky’s attorney accuses the independent counsel of using strong-arm tactics. A24