White House to Keep Privilege Veiled

The White House signaled Friday that it will not disclose publicly whether President Clinton invokes executive privilege to shield his top advisors from questions about the nature of his relationship with former White House intern Monica S. Lewinsky.

And in a related development that could pose another obstacle for independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr, the Justice Department moved toward claiming a legal privilege for Secret Service agents, department sources said late Friday.

The department is prepared to argue that Secret Service agents should not have to testify about what they witness while protecting the president. The privilege--likely to be absolute but with a range of exceptions--would be the first officially claimed for the chief executive’s bodyguards.

However, the Justice Department will assert that privilege only if its officials are unable to work out an agreement with Starr to limit the scope of the grand jury’s questioning of the agents, officials emphasized. So far, the grand jury has heard testimony from only one person connected to the Secret Service: retired uniformed officer Lewis C. Fox.

On the matter of executive privilege, disclosing whether and when Clinton invokes it would violate the rules of secrecy that govern the federal grand jury process, said White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry.

McCurry did not hesitate, however, to convey the president’s support for the long-standing, if controversial, principle of executive privilege.

“I think this president, like previous presidents, recognizes the importance of preserving confidential communications,” McCurry told reporters. “That’s a long-standing principle that presidents have fought for, going back to Thomas Jefferson.”

Starr, meanwhile, hinted that he is prepared to challenge a White House claim of executive privilege because “the grand jury could use facts, could use information. . . . I think the public is best served when the information comes out.”

Starr’s staff of prosecutors and FBI agents is investigating the Clinton-Lewinsky relationship and whether the president and his aides encouraged the former intern or others to lie under oath about it.

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White House counsel Charles F.C. Ruff has been seeking a way to avoid a legal confrontation on the provocative matter of executive privilege. The administration has argued that Bruce R. Lindsey, Clinton’s confidant and a White House attorney, should not be required to answer certain questions about his talks with the president.

At the same time, White House officials are uncomfortable with the Watergate-era association of executive privilege, a defense that President Nixon used in a bid to block release of tapes of Oval Office conversations.

“I don’t think discussions of executive privilege are necessarily helpful in a public opinion sense, under any circumstance,” McCurry conceded Friday. But he declined to elaborate.

“You all know exactly what I mean,” he said.

A confrontation in court could come Tuesday, when Lindsey is scheduled to resume his testimony before the grand jury.

Speaking to reporters outside his home in northern Virginia, Starr defended the aggressiveness of his investigation.

“We’re really trying to move very quickly to gather facts, and I think it is in the national interest for us to move as quickly as we can,” he said.

During the course of Lindsey’s two-day appearance this week before the federal grand jury, White House lawyers met twice with chief U.S. District Judge Norma Holloway Johnson to argue against certain lines of questioning.

According to people familiar with the matter, lawyers for both Lindsey and the president were unsuccessful Thursday in pressing their objections.

Asked Friday if executive privilege had become an obstacle to his investigation, Starr replied: “You are asking a question about what is going on with the grand jury,” which operates under a veil of secrecy. “I can’t comment on whether a privilege has been invoked, but a privilege is a legal right that may be the subject of litigation if one is invoked.”

Fox, the retired Secret Service officer, testified for about two hours Tuesday. He did not discuss his testimony afterward, but he has said in media reports that he saw Lewinsky go into the Oval Office on a weekend afternoon in late 1995.

Starr is understood to be seeking testimony from plainclothes Secret Service agents on the president’s protective security detail. Starr’s inquiry has been hit with a barrage of criticism, most recently from Lewinsky’s father.

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Bernard Lewinsky, a Los Angeles cancer physician, said in an interview with ABC’s “20/20” program: “I think he’s totally out of control. My daughter has not done anything from the federal point of view. She’s not a murderer. She’s not a spy.”

In particular, the father took offense at Starr’s interrogation of Marcia Lewis, his former wife. “To pit a mother against her daughter, to coerce her to talk. . . . To me, it’s reminiscent of the McCarthy era, of the Inquisition. And even, you know you could stretch it and say the Hitler era.”

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Times staff writer Ronald J. Ostrow contributed to this story.