Gingrich Calls on President to ‘Cooperate’

With Democrats clamoring for a quick end to the investigation of President Clinton, House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) angrily challenged the White House on Friday to be as cooperative as he believes he was in his own ethics case.

Gingrich, who was almost toppled last year after a protracted ethics investigation, called on Clinton to stop fighting legal appeals, offer his own unbridled testimony and take other steps the speaker maintains he took to settle his case before the House Ethics Committee.

“The fastest way to get this over with is for the president to instruct his staff to cooperate, waive attorney-client privilege and be prepared to totally cooperate,” Gingrich said in an interview with reporters and editors of The Times.

Faced with opinion polls indicating that most voters still do not believe Clinton should be impeached, Gingrich said polling should not affect Congress’ handling of the matter. The legal grounds for possible impeachment of Clinton--such as obstruction of justice--are similar to the ones raised against former President Nixon and must be judged strictly on the merits, not public opinion, he said.

And he launched a bitter attack on the White House and other Democrats for trying to cut short the inquiry after Clinton spent seven months denying he had had an affair with former intern Monica S. Lewinsky.

“What you see today is a deliberate effort to short-circuit the rule of law in favor of a nice political effort,” Gingrich said. “It is disheartening to have the level of spinning by this White House, and the level of arrogance and duplicity by this White House. To this day, they haven’t told the truth.”

In related developments Friday:

* The House Judiciary Committee met behind closed doors all day and into the evening deciding which materials from independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr’s investigation should be released next week. They took 25 votes, most of them unanimous, to redact mostly personal material from some of the files, as well as grand jury testimony and an interview transcript from three unidentified individuals.

The committee agreed unanimously to release--with some sensitive portions erased--the audiotapes Pentagon employee Linda Tripp made of her telephone conversations with Lewinsky.

But the committee returned to its partisan ways when deciding whether to ask Starr to send to the House the additional material still in his files. Republicans blocked that measure, saying Starr had already said he would allow Democrat and Republican committee staffers to jointly review the material in Starr’s office.

And in a post-meeting press conference, committee members resumed their partisan sniping.

* Clinton traveled to Chicago and San Jose to raise money for Democratic candidates in the November elections--but he could not completely leave the scandal behind. The beneficiary of the $250,000 Chicago fund-raiser, Rep. Glenn Poshard (D-Ill.), who is running behind in the Illinois gubernatorial race, skipped the event.

Before leaving Washington on Friday, Clinton attacked the GOP-controlled Congress for failing to deliver the appropriation bills even though the government’s fiscal year ends next week.

* A member of the legal team for Paula Corbin Jones, who filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against the president in 1994, confirmed that “we’re in the midst of negotiations” with Clinton’s attorneys to reach “a substantial monetary settlement” to end the suit.

Other legal sources said the amount under discussion is between $500,000 and $1 million. The lawyer, John Whitehead, president of the Rutherford Institute of Charlottesville, Va., said in a CNN interview that Jones no longer would insist on an apology from Clinton as part of a settlement, reasoning that a large payment would be “a tacit admission” of her charges.

* The FBI denied that it has decided against investigating whether White House operatives had disseminated information about House Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry J. Hyde’s (R-Ill.) affair with a married woman in the late 1960s. Republican House leaders last week asked FBI Director Louis J. Freeh to investigate the rumors of White House involvement and whether it constituted an attempt to obstruct the House’s consideration of impeachment proceedings.

“We’re looking at it carefully to see if there is jurisdiction and a legal basis to go forward,” an FBI official said.

Gingrich’s latest comments about the Clinton investigation come at a time when his role in the House’s potential impeachment inquiry has become a matter of considerable controversy. Although Gingrich insists that Hyde is calling the shots, White House officials and other Democrats have seized every opportunity to portray Gingrich as the key strategist. Clearly, Democrats see political advantage in having Gingrich as the public face of the impeachment push because he, far more than Hyde, is a controversial Republican partisan that unites Democrats in their enmity toward him.

Gingrich, in the interview, was clearly frustrated by that effort to put the spotlight on him, and acknowledged the liabilities of having a pronounced role.

“They mousetrapped me,” he said. “The best thing I can do . . . is to let Henry Hyde explain it.”

Gingrich, Hyde Said to Meet Regularly

But other Republican lawmakers close to the process acknowledge that Gingrich is playing a major behind-the-scenes role. He meets regularly with Hyde and others in sessions that delve into nitty-gritty details of the investigation.

And whatever restraint Gingrich may exercise in public, he has been harsh in his criticism of Clinton in private. In a closed Republican caucus meeting last week, Gingrich jumped into the middle of the debate on whether too much explicit material was being released to the public.

At one point during the discussion, according to participants, Gingrich called Clinton a “misogynist,” one who hates women.

“He believes the president has done some terrible things and he’s astounded that he hasn’t been held accountable,” said Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.), a Gingrich confidant. “Once in a while it bubbles to the surface and, in my judgment, he doesn’t do himself justice when he speaks with such intensity.”

Shays also said that, privately, Gingrich has expressed fury that Clinton would get off lightly for his transgressions when Gingrich nearly lost his speakership after a two-year investigation of allegations that he made improper political use of a nonprofit organization.

In Gingrich’s case, the House voted in January 1997 to reprimand him and levy a $300,000 penalty, prompting some Republicans to oppose his reelection as speaker.

In the interview, Gingrich brushed off comparisons between his ethics case and Clinton’s troubles. But he contrasted Clinton’s conduct in this investigation--his denials, his legal fights to keep White House Deputy Counsel Bruce Lindsey and others from answering all questions--with Gingrich’s own response to the Ethics Committee.

“I waived attorney-client privilege; I instructed my staff to testify; I voluntarily turned over a million pages of documents; I personally testified,” Gingrich said. “What you have is an enormous effort today to short-circuit the process to exonerate someone.”

Rep. Jim McDermott of Washington, who was the top Democrat on the Ethics Committee during the Gingrich investigation, questioned just how cooperative Gingrich was back then. And he pointed out that, while Gingrich has pushed for public release of Starr’s investigative materials, the files on his own case have never been opened.

“I would say the speaker has interesting lapses of memory in his recitation of revisionist history,” said McDermott. “If the speaker wants to open up the record in his case, which is still secret, then I think people would take him more seriously in regard to the president.”

Presidential Press Secretary Mike McCurry challenged Gingrich’s suggestion that the White House has not cooperated with the House.

He said Clinton’s attorneys had met with Hyde and Rep. John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, the committee’s ranking Democrat, and “they’ll have a good working relationship.”

“I’m sorry the speaker doesn’t realize it,” he said.

Polls show that many Americans would like Congress to end the investigative process quickly and do not favor impeachment. A CBS/New York Times poll published Friday found that only 31% of those surveyed thought Congress should begin impeachment hearings--down from 36% who felt that way before the release of Clinton’s videotaped testimony in the Starr investigation.

Facts, Not Polls, Gingrich Says

But Gingrich said members of Congress should be guided not by polls and the views of their constituents, but by the facts of the legal case and their own consciences. He said lawmakers should feel comfortable going home to the voters and saying, “I’m going to uphold the Constitution. . . . If you want somebody who would subordinate their conscience to following some Mickey Mouse poll, vote for my opponent.”

Although Gingrich says he is not consulting the polls, he has been consulting other politicians in preparation for weighing an impeachment inquiry. He said he had talked to former President Ford, who succeeded Nixon after he resigned in the face of the Watergate scandal, and Kenneth M. Duberstein, a top aide to Reagan during the Iran-Contra scandal. And he has reviewed a two-inch-thick briefing book on the Watergate scandal from Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.), who was a member of the House Judiciary Committee during Watergate.

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Times staff writers James Gerstenzang, Robert L. Jackson, Ronald J. Ostrow, Richard A. Serrano and Elizabeth Shogren contributed to this story.

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Times on the Web: * Full video transcripts of Clinton’s testimony as well as all of the supporting documents that have been released by the House Judiciary Committee can be seen on The Times’ Web site. Go to: https://www.latimes.com/scandal