White House Attacks Starr Over Inquiry

President Clinton’s allies took to the airwaves Sunday to renew their accusation that independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr is illegally leaking information about the Monica S. Lewinsky case as part of a witch hunt aimed at partisanship, not truth.

“I believe . . . that Ken Starr has become corrupt in the sense that Lord Acton meant when he said, ‘Absolute power corrupts absolutely,’ ” White House political advisor Paul Begala said on NBC-TV’s “Meet the Press.”

Begala, who coordinates Clinton’s political communications, defended the president’s refusal to detail his exact relationship with Lewinsky, a former White House intern who has reportedly told friends of a sexual affair with the president.

“This will all come out, but it ought to come out in a way that is fair to the rights of the president,” Begala said. “He has rights in this too . . . and we ought to try to protect those rights before we start launching into assisting with some press-led witch hunt. . . . We have a situation here where an investigator is, in the words of many thoughtful critics, out of control.”

In other television appearances, Sen. Robert Torricelli (D-N.J.) and other White House backers fired similar salvos at Starr--part of a concerted strategy for Democrats recovering from shellshock at the allegations.

Meantime, results from a new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll taken Saturday and released Sunday suggest that the White House attacks on Starr have hit home with the public and that the president’s approval rating continues to soar. Fully 64% of those surveyed believed that Starr had “partisan, political” motives for his investigation of the Lewinsky matter. And 57% said they thought the facts are now known and Starr should drop the investigation.

Of those surveyed, 79% said they approved of Clinton’s performance in office, up 7 percentage points in one week, despite the fact that 39% said they believe Clinton lied under oath about the matter.

Starr is investigating whether Clinton or others may have obstructed justice or otherwise broken the law in an effort to conceal an affair with Lewinsky. Clinton has denied having “sexual relations” with Lewinsky or urging her to lie. Saying he cannot comment while the investigation goes forward, however, Clinton has refused to explain reports that he gave Lewinsky gifts, that she visited the White House repeatedly after she had stopped working there and other details suggesting a personal relationship.

The new administration counterattack came as this week’s Newsweek magazine reported that Lewinsky told another colleague, White House staffer Ashley Raines, about a relationship with the president and played for her Clinton’s voice on Lewinsky’s home telephone answering machine.

Linda Tripp, who had worked with Lewinsky at the Pentagon, catapulted the controversy to public view by secretly taping numerous conversations with Lewinsky and turning over the contents to Starr. The Times reported last week that other acquaintances of Lewinsky have come forward to describe her accounts of sexual liaisons with the president.

The White House called the Newsweek report another suspicious leak.

“There appears to be a campaign of misinformation and intimidation that a person could only reasonably conclude comes from the independent counsel’s office,” White House spokesman Joe Lockhart said.

Polls show that the White House has been largely successful in deflecting accounts that Clinton urged Lewinsky to deny an affair when questioned in the Paula Corbin Jones sexual-harassment suit. Most Americans appear to view the Whitewater prosecutor with more suspicion than they do the chief executive.

The White House is furious about media reports last week describing the essence of grand jury testimony offered by Betty Currie, Clinton’s secretary. She reportedly said that Clinton and Lewinsky had been alone together. She also has reportedly said she was summoned to the White House by Clinton one weekend to discuss their mutual recollections. The reports said Clinton had asked Currie leading questions, seeming to seek her agreement that he and Lewinsky had never been alone.

Clinton aides have condemned Starr’s office for leaking the information. Starr, rejecting accusations that he is motivated by partisanship, has denied knowledge of the leaks and vowed to investigate how sensitive information is getting out.

Former presidential advisor George Stephanopoulos suggested on ABC-TV’s “This Week With Sam and Cokie” that some White House officials are privately beginning to raise the possibility of an even more explosive line of defense--that the president’s defenders might quietly threaten to expose the sexual dalliances and other transgressions of some of its critics in Congress and the news media if the investigation goes too far, especially if it moves into a congressional inquiry pointing toward possible impeachment.

“The president said he would never resign, and I think some around him are willing to take everybody down with him,” Stephanopoulos said.

Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) said the attack on Starr “is part of the strategy--they are the masters at tactics and strategies and trying to deflect the questions that are being raised.”

Lott expressed hope that Clinton would come forward with a fuller explanation of his relationship with Lewinsky, saying the continuing furor “is a distraction. I think it is damaging to the office of the presidency, and I think, you know, the people would like to get this behind us.

“But as long as it is not clear, as long as he won’t say what happened, the problem will hang out there,” Lott said.

Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.), a fierce administration critic who is leading the House investigation into Democratic fund-raising abuses, appeared on “Fox News Sunday” and accused the White House of sending its “attack dogs” after Starr, a man Burton characterized as fair-minded, full of integrity and deeply religious.

Former White House Chief of Staff Leon E. Panetta, appearing on CBS-TV’s “Meet the Press,” said: “The president ought to be given the benefit of the doubt. He said he did nothing, and I think he ought to be given that assumption, and he ought to be able to present his defense. But at some point he is going to have to tell the American people what the truth of that relationship was.”

At the same time, Panetta said, Starr “has got to assure that the investigation is not being motivated by anything else but a search for the facts and the law.”