Petition Asks Status of Clinton Ethics Inquiry

Seeking to resolve ethics complaints over President Clinton’s sworn statements in the Monica S. Lewinsky affair, a conservative legal foundation went to the Arkansas Supreme Court on Monday to try to move the court’s inquiry forward.

Officials of the Southeastern Legal Foundation filed a petition with the high court in Little Rock asking it to determine the status of the inquiry begun months ago by the court’s committee on professional conduct.

The committee has acknowledged that it is studying a contempt citation lodged against the president last April by a federal judge, as well as an earlier complaint filed by the foundation charging that Clinton had lied under oath and obstructed justice.

Officials of the foundation, a public-interest law firm, said at a news briefing here that the closed-door inquiry is taking much too long and there is “absolutely no evidence” of progress. A normal inquiry takes six months at the most, James Neal, the court committee’s executive director, has told The Times. He has declined to discuss the Clinton inquiry on grounds that it is confidential.

Neal, who has 10 days to answer the foundation’s request for information about the inquiry, had no response Monday.

The ethics panel has the power to initiate disbarment proceedings against Clinton or to suspend his lawyer’s license for two years, although the president has practiced law only sporadically since receiving his degree from Yale in 1973. As a law professor and state attorney general before serving five terms as governor, Clinton has been licensed to practice law only in Arkansas.

In her action last April, U.S. District Judge Susan Webber Wright found the president in contempt for deliberately misleading the court about his sexual encounters with Lewinsky, a former White House intern.

The judge declared that, when Clinton was asked during the Paula Corbin Jones sexual harassment lawsuit if he had ever been alone with Lewinsky or had engaged in sexual relations with her, he gave “false, misleading and evasive answers that were designed to obstruct the judicial process.”

Wright determined that Clinton misled the court in his January 1998 deposition in the Jones case, over which she presided, and later contradicted himself in his sworn grand jury testimony in Independent Counsel Kenneth W. Starr’s Lewinsky investigation.

In July, the judge fined Clinton $90,000 for contempt of court--the first such penalty ever assessed against a president. Clinton declined an opportunity to challenge the action, which Wright referred to the ethics committee.

L. Lynn Hogue, a law professor and chairman of the Atlanta-based Southeastern foundation, said that the group’s petition, a writ of mandamus, was filed “to compel some action” by Neal’s committee.

“This has dragged on far too long by any objective standard,” Hogue told reporters. “Lawyers are not above the law and this should be especially true of presidents and other high officials.”

Some legal analysts have speculated that the ethics panel may be waiting for Clinton to leave office before sanctioning him. But Hogue said: “There is no support in the rules for someone being entitled to a safe harbor or to immunity from accountability by virtue of their office.”

In their filing, Hogue and foundation President Matthew J. Glavin accused Neal of “dereliction of duty . . . by failing to conduct timely and efficient disciplinary proceedings against Mr. Clinton.”