Starr Vows to Quickly Conclude Clinton Probe

Independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr said Monday that he is moving as quickly as possible to conclude his investigation of President Clinton, promising to finish his work before First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton’s possible run for the Senate next year.

Speaking with reporters a few days after reaching his fifth anniversary as Whitewater counsel, Starr said that his final report on the long-running inquiry would be complete and factual, but he did not say when it might be filed.

“We are trying to move forward very, very rapidly in that respect, and we are doing so,” he told reporters in Atlanta at a conference of the American Bar Assn. “I would anticipate that the final report will come at the earliest practicable moment.”

He dodged questions on whether he might seek to indict the president either before or after Clinton leaves the White House.

“It would be inappropriate for me to be commenting at all about the future of the investigation,” he said.

Legal experts said that it is unclear whether an incumbent president could be indicted, but there has been speculation that Starr might bring charges once the president becomes a private citizen in January 2001.

Starr said that his report will cover all aspects of the investigation, including the Clintons’ Whitewater land transactions in Arkansas in the 1980s and the president’s affair with former White House intern Monica S. Lewinsky.

The Lewinsky scandal led to Clinton’s impeachment by the House last fall and his acquittal after a Senate trial earlier this year.

“It would need to be a comprehensive final report that is factually straightforward, that does not engage in characterization,” Starr said.

“It’s clear that the Congress did not want a final report to be an avenue for alleging that one or more individuals engaged in criminal conduct,” he said.

Meanwhile, in a taped interview aired Monday on NBC-TV’s “Today” show, Starr spoke of his frustration over the president’s early denials about Lewinsky, his shock over Congress’ handling of his Lewinsky report and his endorsement of a federal judge’s recent sanctioning of Clinton.

Legal authorities said that Starr’s decision to speak out was not surprising, considering his public “vilification,” which Starr himself acknowledged. And with the independent counsel statute having expired June 30, and Congress unwilling to extend it, Starr may leave office soon for a position at a law firm or law school, turning over completion of his final report to subordinates, according to some former associates.

In the television interview, Starr said he was chagrined that Clinton had not been forthcoming at an early date about his sexual relationship with Lewinsky.

“Why couldn’t we just have the truth, deal with the truth and get it on the table?” he asked. He suggested that the president could have said, “Here it is. These are the facts. They’re not pretty.”

Starr called the president’s early denials “an extraordinarily sad day.” Clinton has conceded that his conduct was inexcusable. However, he said he resented the Lewinsky inquiry at the time, viewing it as an unnecessary intrusion brought on by his political enemies.

Asked about the first lady’s accusations last year that Clinton’s problems resulted from “a vast right-wing conspiracy,” Starr said he “simply took it as her sense of loyalty in light of the president denying the facts.”

Still, Starr repeated his criticism of House leaders for making public all the salacious details of his impeachment report on the Lewinsky matter.

“The Congress, for better or for worse, chose to make this public in an extraordinary way, including putting it on the Internet and the like, without any screening,” he said. “I was horrified.”

Shouldering some of the blame, Starr said that he should have done a better job in warning lawmakers that his report contained “sensitive material.”

A former appellate court judge himself, Starr praised a recent ruling by U.S. District Judge Susan Webber Wright that Clinton must pay $90,686 in penalties for lying in his civil suit deposition last year about his relationship with Lewinsky.

The Arkansas jurist said that the sanction was to cover some legal expenses of plaintiff Paula Corbin Jones as well as “to deter others who might consider emulating the president’s misconduct.”

“I thought it was very strong language,” Starr said of Wright’s ruling. “This is a very distinguished judge who looked at the facts and came to these conclusions. And I would just add that the system did, in fact, work.”

Starr hinted that the public has grown weary of his long-running investigation, which he noted has exposed him to “vilification” by many critics.

He quipped that there are two unofficial books describing jobs available in the nation’s capital--the “plum book” listing the most desirable openings and the “prune book” containing jobs nobody wants.

The independent counsel’s job is at “the top of the list in the prune book,” Starr said.