GOP to Expand Impeachment Witness List

With the clock ticking down to Thursday’s impeachment hearing, House Judiciary Committee Republicans decided Tuesday to expand their witness list and said it may include Democratic fund-raiser John Huang and presidential confidant Bruce Lindsey.

Meanwhile, the panel’s Democrats--angry and feeling that they are being shut out of the planning process for the upcoming hearing--considered but then called off plans to boycott the session once the only previously announced witness, independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr, began his opening statement.

In other developments, Starr sent two more boxes of materials to the committee, these containing some of his evidence against former Justice Department official and Clinton friend Webster L. Hubbell. Starr maintains that this evidence justified the expansion of his Whitewater investigation to the President Clinton-Monica S. Lewinsky affair.

And the White House weighed in with a request for at least 90 minutes for the president’s lawyers to cross-examine Starr, triple the time offered by Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.).

Tuesday night Hyde rejected the request in a stern letter that warned against trying to put Starr on trial.

With tempers boiling on both sides of the fragile proceeding, the possibility grew that the impeachment hearings would dissolve into rank political bickering rather than provide any new substantial developments.

The last-minute additions to the hearing schedule appear to signal not a sharp change of course but a systematic effort by committee Republicans, many of whom are attorneys, to legitimize their controversial pursuit of impeachment.

The Republicans hope to use Huang and Lindsey to build a broader case of obstruction of justice against the president. By using that evidence to prove that Starr was justified in investigating Clinton’s relationship with Lewinsky, Republicans would argue that they also have sufficient grounds to vote on articles of impeachment.

In a brief Capitol Hill interview, Hyde said the next step in the process is finalizing of the witness list. He will do that today, he said, in a meeting with the panel’s GOP lawyers.

In their strategy session on Tuesday, Republican committee members discussed whether to call additional witnesses but left it to Hyde to finalize the list of others who might testify in what will be only the third impeachment hearing in the nation’s history.

“It’s a very reasonable assumption” that additional witnesses will be called, Hyde said. “We assume subpoenas will be necessary.”

Details Remain to Be Worked Out

Sam Stratman, the committee’s GOP spokesman, said that a few details need to be worked out before the broader witness list can be announced.

“It’s all about dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s,” Stratman said. “There are certain procedures to follow. There are certain courtesies to extend. It’s a good bet that additional witnesses will be called.”

Sources said that the Republicans are considering privately questioning Huang under oath and then, perhaps, bringing him to an open hearing as a witness.

Huang has provided Starr with information about payments to Hubbell that the special prosecutor believes could have been hush money paid so that Hubbell would not reveal alleged wrongdoing by the president or Hillary Rodham Clinton in matters related to the Whitewater real estate deal. Starr has used evidence of the Hubbell payments to argue that Clinton may have engineered a similar obstruction of justice in an attempt to buy Lewinsky’s silence about their affair.

The White House has tried to block testimony by Lindsey, a longtime Clinton lieutenant, but a recent Supreme Court action endorsed lower court rulings that Lindsey’s conversations with Clinton were not privileged because he was a White House lawyer. His testimony could be crucial if the Republicans hope to show a broader conspiracy of silence within the White House about the Lewinsky affair.

Despite the rancor Tuesday, Hyde said he met with Democratic leaders on the panel and that they never mentioned a threat to boycott the hearing. “I don’t think it’s a real threat,” Hyde said.

But earlier in the day, House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) hinted that the Democrats might not want to be a party to the hearings.

“If this thing keeps going the way it’s been going, Democrats may decide not to come to the hearing,” Gephardt warned. “This is not the way this should be done. It has not been done, by anybody’s judgment, in a bipartisan way, in a consensual way. And this is just not the appropriate way to handle this.”

But Democrats, after emerging from their own evening strategy session, said they would not boycott Starr’s testimony after all and instead hoped to end the process swiftly.

“Having only Kenneth Starr is a sham of a hearing. But on the other hand, you have this reluctance to have this be the major business of the Congress in . . . 1999,” said Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.).

But other committee Democrats still were riled up.

“If the hearing is conducted in a way that is patently unfair, the Democrats would have no choice other than to leave. But certainly that is a last resort,” said Rep. Robert Wexler of Florida.

Added Rep. Martin T. Meehan (D-Mass.): “It’s really a shame the process has become such a sham.”

Meehan said he does not need to hear from any additional witnesses because he has determined that even if everything in Starr’s lengthy report is true, he does not believe it rises to the level of impeachable offenses.

Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), the panel’s ranking minority member, was asked if he had any questions to ask of Huang. “I haven’t thought of any,” he responded.

White House spokesman Joe Lockhart also voiced exasperation.

“We hear from the committee officially that they want to call one witness,” he said. “We hear unofficially every couple of days they thought of a new witness, a new blockbuster witness.”

The White House sent Hyde a two-page letter asking for 90 minutes, rather than the 30 minutes offered by Hyde, for three Clinton lawyers to question Starr under oath on Thursday.

The letter, signed by White House Counsel Charles F.C. Ruff, said: “Anything less than 90 minutes would unfairly constrain our ability to explore the basis for Mr. Starr’s testimony and for any conclusions he may proffer.”

In his response Tuesday night, Hyde said:

“Your letter seems to indicate that you have a fundamental misunderstanding of your role in these proceedings. In my Nov. 16 letter, I noted that your role in these proceedings is to assist the committee in fulfilling its constitutional function. Participation by the respondent’s counsel is a matter of legislative grace.

” . . . Therefore, as representatives of the respondent in these proceedings, you shall be confined to allegations against the president, and the facts and evidence in question. You will not be permitted to inquire into other matters not bearing on the question of impeachment.

“I will reiterate my offer,” Hyde said. “One attorney . . . may question Judge Starr for not more than 30 minutes. Please advise me of your intentions by 12 p.m. on Wednesday.”

No immediate response was given by the White House.

The new material sent by Starr to Capitol Hill was described as largely more of his justification for expanding his inquiry from Whitewater to Lewinsky. The material included documents regarding Hubbell, as well as tapes made from his conversations in prison, sources said.

Times staff writers Ann Kim, Alan C. Miller and Ronald J. Ostrow contributed to this story.

Live video coverage of the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment hearings begins Thursday morning on The Times’ Web site: https://www.latimes.com/scandal