Starr’s Report Already Weighs on Washington

The Report is being written now.

While most of the nation is enjoying a late-summer weekend, independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr’s lawyers are working in a suite of nondescript offices on Pennsylvania Avenue, halfway--both geographically and procedurally--between the White House and Congress.

So far, their doors have disgorged only shredded drafts and empty Domino’s pizza boxes. But one day this month, perhaps as early as this week, an unmarked car will deliver a stack of papers to the sergeant at arms of the House of Representatives.

Thus will The Report arrive.

For weeks, the nation’s leaders have been talking about the economy and education and Russia, but never far from their minds has been Starr’s report.

No one, not even Starr, knows exactly what his report on President Clinton’s conduct will say, or in what form it will be. The independent counsel still has some decisions to make.

But almost everyone expects it to be a turning point: a single, clear declaration of charges against the president and perhaps the beginning of the end--either of this scandal or his presidency.

Already, a battle of leaks and trial balloons has broken out to shape public and congressional opinion for the day the report arrives.

A Clinton ally, seeking to discount the report’s impact in advance, whispers that it will be about mere sex--nothing but a personal attack on the president.

No, counters a Starr partisan, the report will be about abuses of constitutional power--a way of compelling the nation’s sober attention.

“I expect Starr will submit an absolutely blistering report,” said one Clinton advisor who offered a balanced, perhaps even honest, forecast on the condition that he not be identified.

“They will connect a lot of the dots and make a strong circumstantial case for obstruction [of justice]. I assume there will be gory details on acts sexual, which will give grist for the moralists. I assume there will be some additional new facts.”

There could well be enough, he conceded, to spark more serious action in Congress to censure the president--or even to impeach him. But Clinton will not “submit,” he warned. The president will fight any such moves “tooth and nail.”

Starr and his aides have refused to describe the report in advance, but lawyers and others who have been in contact with the independent counsel’s staff say that it will be exhaustive--perhaps more than 300 pages long--and will include some lurid new details about the president’s relationship with former intern Monica S. Lewinsky.

Starr to Focus on Offenses, Not Sex

The focus, however, will not be on sex. Instead, Starr and his aides appear bent on proving three kinds of legal offenses on Clinton’s part: perjury, obstruction of justice and a broader transgression called “abuse of power.” If details about the president’s sex life are included, lawyers in contact with Starr say, they will serve only to show how often and how baldly he lied under oath.

Inside the White House, the president’s beleaguered defenders sound more worried about sex than perjury or other potential criminal issues. Officials in the Clinton camp say that they believe Starr’s case for obstruction of justice and abuse of power is weak.

But, startled by congressional Democrats’ furious reaction to the president’s admission of an affair with Lewinsky, they have no desire to revive the subject.

“If Starr includes in his report so-called lurid material that does nothing to alter the conclusions already reached about the president’s relationship with Ms. Lewinsky, then it will be clear that his only agenda is a partisan and even personal attack on President Clinton, with the objective of destroying him,” said Lanny J. Davis, a former White House aide and one of the president’s semi-official defenders.

In the end, Starr may well submit several versions of his report: a summary that could be released to the public, a longer version that would go only to members of the House Judiciary Committee, and an appendix of detailed evidence that might remain under lock and key. The decision on what details leak out would be in the hands of the Republican-led Congress.

Report Is Only an Interim Document

The document Starr is preparing is not the final report that will detail all the findings of his 5-year-old investigation, which began with charges stemming from the defunct Arkansas land development known as Whitewater. Instead, this is an interim report to Congress, required by law whenever an independent counsel finds “any substantial and credible information . . . that may constitute grounds for an impeachment.”

Accordingly, lawyers say, Starr has decided to restrict this report to the Lewinsky affair and related issues that might be impeachable. Whitewater and other issues will not be included.

The report is expected to focus on three kinds of charges:

* Perjury: In his 1997 deposition in the sexual misconduct lawsuit brought by former Arkansas state employee Paula Corbin Jones, Clinton testified that he had not had sexual relations with Lewinsky and did not remember ever being alone with her. In his Aug. 17 appearance before Starr’s grand jury, according to lawyers close to the case, Clinton insisted that his testimony had been “legally accurate,” although misleading.

Even some Clinton associates acknowledge that the president’s only real defense here is that he was testifying about an issue that was ruled irrelevant in a civil suit that was later dismissed.

* Obstruction of justice: After Jones’ lawyers began looking for other women who had had sexual encounters with Clinton, Lewinsky got considerable attention from the president and his associates: visits to the White House, a job offer at the U.S. mission to the United Nations, help from lawyer Vernon E. Jordan Jr.

After Lewinsky was subpoenaed, Betty Currie, the president’s secretary, turned up at her apartment and retrieved a box of presidential gifts, allegedly so that Lewinsky would not have to turn them over to prosecutors. But the testimony on these issues is conflicting, and White House officials say they believe Starr’s case is weak.

* Abuse of power: Starr-watchers say the independent counsel plans to argue that--by encouraging other government officials to lie, by using his office and authority to conceal the truth and by resisting Starr’s efforts to learn the truth--Clinton abused his power as president. “I expect the report will say there’s been a broad pattern of abuse of governmental power so as to conceal private wrongdoing,” said Bradford A. Berenson, a conservative lawyer.

Sources say that one part of this charge will rest on testimony from Clinton’s former political advisor, Dick Morris, who said the president decided to resist Starr’s inquest after looking at polls showing the public would not accept a presidential admission of perjury. Another may cite Clinton’s attempts to derail Starr’s demands for testimony and evidence by invoking executive privilege and various forms of attorney-client privilege.

Some Republicans, including former independent counsel Joseph E. diGenova, argue that the “abuse of power” argument will prove powerful because it focuses on the president’s constitutional responsibilities. White House allies, on the other hand, are already dismissing it as a “kitchen sink” argument--the kind of charge a lawyer throws in to bolster a weak case.

It is the strategy of the president’s allies to turn the spotlight back on the unpopular Starr, to remind the public that the prosecutor is not impartial and neither are all of his witnesses.

“There will be hearsay and all kinds of testimony that may or may not be true, given in a setting by people who didn’t have the benefit of a lawyer there to represent them,” said Sen. Dale Bumpers (D-Ark.).

“I’m calling it ‘Starr’s story,’ ” said Sen. John D. “Jay” Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.).

The next step, Clinton allies say, may well be a full-scale rebuttal report: the case for the defense. The president’s private lawyer, David E. Kendall, has been compiling material for such a report, working under the handicap of not knowing exactly what Starr will say. (Starr does not plan to send the White House an advance copy of his report, lawyers said.)

White House lawyers and political advisors met at length Friday afternoon to plan their strategy for the next phase of the president’s defense, officials said. In a sign that the issue was moving from the legal to the political realm, the meeting was chaired by Deputy White House Chief of Staff John D. Podesta.

Until that meeting, one advisor jibed, decision-making on the scandal was “very much a cottage industry, and the cottage only had two in it”--the president and his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Hyde Doesn’t Want to be a ‘Larry Flynt’

Members of Congress are maneuvering as well.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.), who has said he does not want to go down in history as “the Larry Flynt of the House,” is looking for ways to restrict access to the report to members of his panel.

But other members of the House have objected that a report of such significance should be more widely available. Some have demanded that it be publicly released immediately.

At least initially, officials said, the report will be held under armed guard by Sergeant at Arms Wilson “Bill” Livingood, a former Secret Service agent who is the chief law enforcement official of the House.

After the House decides how widely to release the report, it is likely to do exactly nothing with it--at least, nothing formal. Members want to wrap up their legislative work in early October and go home to campaign for reelection.

Instead of conducting hearings, aides said, most members of Congress want to watch public reaction.

“There’s at least one, maybe two more acts to the opera,” said a senior Democratic aide. “Part of this is waiting for the report. The next scene is how that’s handled, how the press treats it. That’s hard to predict.

“What’s the public’s reaction? I just don’t know how the public reacts to a report that’s really salacious.”

Times staff writers Edwin Chen, Janet Hook, Robert L. Jackson, Marc Lacey, Alan C. Miller and David G. Savage contributed to this report.