First Lady Faces Starr; Jones Inquiry Looms for Clinton

As President Clinton prepared for a weekend deposition in the Paula Corbin Jones sexual harassment case, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton faced separate questioning Wednesday from Whitewater prosecutors on the FBI files controversy.

Independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr and his aides quizzed the first lady under oath for about 15 minutes in the Treaty Room on the second floor of the White House residence.

The president’s lawyers, meanwhile, took measures to move Clinton’s Saturday morning deposition out of the White House--a deliberate attempt to avoid the spectacle of Jones, his accuser, striding into the executive mansion.

The back-to-back legal proceedings underscore the administration’s inability to shake controversy even as it attempts to seize the political agenda with the nitty-gritty of government: the State of the Union address at month’s end and the president’s 1999 budget proposal, due in early February.

“It is an interruption in the sense that they had to prepare for it and there are more important things they have to do,” one White House official said.

The first lady’s brief session with Starr focused on the Clinton administration’s acquisition in 1993-94 of hundreds of FBI background files of political appointees from previous Republican administrations--which Hillary Clinton continued to distance herself from under questioning on Wednesday. Starr and his aides provided no hint at the session that they have built a case of wrongdoing, officials said.

The first lady has said that she knew nothing about the acquisition of the FBI files. Their gathering has been roundly criticized as an invasion of privacy. She has also disavowed knowledge of the hiring of D. Craig Livingstone, the former aide who ran the office that got the files.

She repeated both those points to Starr on Wednesday, an official who was in the room said.

GOP lawmakers have remained suspicious, unwilling to write off the matter as a bureaucratic blunder and lay all the blame on Anthony Marceca, an Army aide at the White House who worked for Livingstone and actually gathered the files.

Besides Starr and two of his aides, the first lady was joined Wednesday by two of her private Whitewater lawyers, David E. Kendall and Paul Gaffney, as well as White House Counsel Charles F. C. Ruff and White House lawyer Sally Paxton.

“As the president has previously announced, he and Mrs. Clinton are cooperating fully with the independent counsel,” Ruff said in a written statement. “Mrs. Clinton voluntarily agreed when an interview was requested.”

Starr’s questioning of the first lady was not without precedent. As part of his wide Whitewater investigation, which began in 1994, Starr has deposed the president and his wife.

Clinton, however, will make history Saturday when he travels a block from the White House to the offices of his attorney, Robert S. Bennett: His questioning by Jones’ attorneys--with Jones looking on--will mark the first time a sitting president has given testimony as a defendant in a civil lawsuit.

Clinton, behind closed doors, will also for the first time face questions about Jones’ accusation that he exposed himself to the then-Arkansas state employee in May 1991 while he was governor.

A White House spokesman said Wednesday night it was not yet clear whether Hillary Clinton will attend the president’s deposition.

Since the lawsuit was filed in May 1994, the president has flatly denied that the incident occurred and said he is not sure he has ever met Jones. But settlement efforts have flopped.

In recent weeks, Jones’ new legal team, led by Donovan Campbell of Dallas, has upped its settlement demands from $700,000 to $2 million, increasing the likelihood that the case will go to trial as scheduled in May. Jones is also demanding a full apology from Clinton, which the president’s lawyers have sternly rejected.

A gag order imposed by U.S. District Judge Susan Webber Wright has kept the attorneys in the case off the talk shows, where they had exchanged broadsides in the past.

But Clinton himself offered a rare comment on the case this week, indicating that he is resigned to the fact that the dispute will not be settled and that he will “probably” stand trial in Little Rock, Ark., right in the middle of his second term.

“I just try to put it over in a little box and go on and do my work,” he told U.S. News & World Report on Tuesday.

Times staff writers Robert L. Jackson and Ronald J. Ostrow contributed to this story.