Clinton Aide Resisting Grand Jury Questions

Presidential confidant Bruce R. Lindsey has declined to answer some questions before a federal grand jury, setting the stage Thursday for a Watergate-style battle over the White House use of executive privilege to keep certain information secret.

According to people familiar with the matter, lawyers representing both Lindsey and President Clinton were unsuccessful in pressing their objections to the questions before Norma Holloway Johnson, the chief federal district judge who is overseeing the proceedings.

The hearing before the judge--attended by Lindsey, White House Counsel Charles F. C. Ruff and others--was closed to the public and lasted about an hour.

“They are resisting certain questions,” said one lawyer who is sympathetic to Lindsey’s position.

With the grand jury not scheduled to hear further testimony until Tuesday, Ruff told associates that he hopes to negotiate a compromise with independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr. Lindsey testified for about four hours Wednesday and for about that long Thursday.

Starr’s staff of prosecutors and FBI agents is investigating the nature of Clinton’s relationship with former White House intern Monica S. Lewinsky and whether the president and his aides encouraged her or others to lie under oath about it.

The outcome of the dispute over executive privilege is likely to affect whether Starr can get answers from an inner circle of White House advisors about their knowledge of Clinton’s dealings with Lewinsky.

The taciturn Lindsey, Clinton’s friend for 30 years and his closest aide, is a central figure in that small echelon.

Ruff, by taking his position on executive privilege to Judge Johnson, has moved beyond rhetoric to action in attempting to shield from prosecutors the conversations that Lindsey may have had with Clinton about Lewinsky. If the White House took the additional step of appealing a ruling by Johnson, the dispute could be tied up for months.

This could stall until well into Clinton’s final term the report of Starr’s investigation, which is expected to be presented to Congress for possible consideration of impeachment proceedings.

But Ruff, himself a former Watergate prosecutor, was said by other officials Thursday to be acutely sensitive to the negative implications of formally asserting executive privilege--because the doctrine remains synonymous with former President Nixon’s attempt to prevent the release of the Watergate tapes. This was a determining factor in his eventual resignation.

It is against that backdrop that Ruff hopes to reach an accommodation with Starr over the next several days that would make it unnecessary for Clinton to take the final step of formally asserting executive privilege, lawyers said.

“Ruff has told Starr that, ‘We want to work it out,’ ” said one lawyer. “Chuck wants an accommodation.”

The formal assertion of executive privilege--one symbolic step beyond the unsuccessful White House efforts to persuade Johnson to limit the questioning of Lindsey--would require Clinton’s direct participation.

This was made explicitly clear during the Watergate investigation by U.S. District Judge Gerhard A. Gesell, when he ordered Nixon to detail what part of five subpoenaed tapes the president considered shielded by executive privilege.

“This statement must be signed by the president, for only he can invoke the [executive] privilege at issue,” Gesell wrote on Jan. 25, 1974, seven months before Nixon resigned.

Reflecting the significance of the battle over Lindsey’s testimony, Clinton retained a new outside attorney Thursday to press the White House position that executive and ancillary legal privileges should shield certain information from prosecutors.

Spokesmen for the president were unwilling or unable Thursday to discuss the status of Lindsey’s grand jury testimony or the overarching issue of executive privilege. As they have in the past, they sought to avoid even using the term “executive privilege” in their public pronouncements, using instead derivatives, such as “presidential communications” privilege.

“The White House counsel, Charles Ruff, is continuing to try to resolve this matter regarding the confidentiality of communications,” James Kennedy, a spokesman for Clinton, said in a prepared statement. “We are unable to discuss anything that was before a sealed hearing or before the secret grand jury.”

Federal law, however, does not prevent a witness, including Lindsey, from discussing questions or answers provided before either a grand jury or a judge, according to legal experts. Moreover, Johnson has not issued a gag order.

Lindsey was typically circumspect on the proceedings. Before the lunch hour, he told reporters: “In my judgment, it has been cordial. It may not be the judgment of the other side.” When he exited the grand jury room Thursday afternoon and was asked how the questioning had gone, Lindsey said: “It was lengthy.”

Ruff, for his part, declined to discuss the events as he arrived and left the courthouse.

But Atty. Gen. Janet Reno made public Ruff’s position on executive privilege, in a letter she released to reporters Thursday morning.

In the letter, addressed to Ruff and written Wednesday, Reno effectively announced that the president’s chief White House lawyer believes that information being sought by Starr is protected by the executive and attorney-client privileges.

The information Ruff is seeking to withhold, Reno wrote, “consists of communications between the president and his staff and among his staff that relate to the president’s performance of the responsibilities of his office.”

The attorney general added: “You have stated your opinion that the information is protected by the presidential communications and attorney-client privileges.”

Reno’s letter addressed a request from Ruff that the attorney provide Justice Department lawyers or a private counsel to handle litigation that might unfold on the privileges.

The attorney general said that, although “normally” the Justice Department would handle such matters directly, in this instance she supported the retention of an outside lawyer to assist the White House.

“In the particular circumstances presented here . . . “ Reno wrote, “we believe that the better course would be for the department not to assume direct representation.”

Instead, she told Ruff that a special attorney should be appointed over whom the department would exercise no control. By the time Lindsey arrived at the federal courthouse, the White House had retained the outside lawyer--W. Neil Eggleston. He served earlier as a deputy White House counsel and is regarded as a trusted legal advisor to First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Eggleston also represented the White House in an executive privilege dispute last year, involving documents sought by the independent counsel who is prosecuting former Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy.

Reno, appearing Thursday at her regular weekly meeting with the media, declined to elaborate on the decision to seek an outside lawyer’s representation of the White House on executive privilege. She cautioned reporters to “not jump to conclusions”--such as that the Justice Department disagrees with the White House position on privilege issues.

A Justice Department official explained that ordinarily the attorney general would balance the law enforcement interests involved in prosecutors’ requests for information with the institutional interests presented by the White House.

But in this instance, Reno cannot weigh the law enforcement side of the issue, because that is known only to Starr as independent counsel. Thus an outside counsel is needed to represent the White House position against that presented by Starr.

In another development Thursday, Lewinsky’s father, an oncologist who lives in Los Angeles, was quoted at length for the first time on the controversy that has enveloped his family.

In an interview with ABC-TV’s Barbara Walters, to be broadcast tonight, Bernard Lewinsky was asked: “Do you think your daughter could have made up a whole relationship with the president that didn’t exist?”

He responded: “I can’t imagine her making that up.”

Times staff writer Cecilia Balli contributed to this story.