Clinton Insists He Would Not Seek a Pardon

President Clinton said Thursday that he neither wants nor would seek a pardon for any crimes he may have committed in office, despite signs that new independent counsel Robert W. Ray is actively considering seeking an indictment against him after the president steps down.

“The answer is, I don’t have any interest in it [a pardon]--I wouldn’t ask for it,” Clinton said at a meeting of newspaper editors here. “I am prepared to stand before any bar of justice I have to stand before.”

His comments marked the first time that Clinton has personally forsworn a possible pardon since Ray disclosed in March that he plans to revisit the case. Vice President Al Gore outlined the president’s view on pardons in a speech to the same editors’ group on Wednesday.

But Republicans saw a loophole. “Clinton said today that he would never ask for or want a pardon,” said Republican National Committee Chairman Jim Nicholson. “The real question, perhaps the question of the year, is whether or not he will accept a pardon. Once again, Clintonian-speak rears its ugly head.”

Clinton also told the American Society of Newspaper Editors that he is “glad [that] I didn’t quit” the presidency when he was impeached by the House 16 months ago. “I’m not ashamed of the fact that they impeached me,” he said of the GOP-led House. “That was their decision . . . and it was wrong.”

And he insisted that any move to revive the Whitewater and Monica S. Lewinsky scandals would be punishing him unnecessarily. He said that an independent counsel already has cleared him in the Whitewater case and that he had “paid for” the Lewinsky affair in personal travail.

Ray’s disclosure that he is considering indicting Clinton after the president leaves office came as a surprise. His predecessor, Kenneth W. Starr, said he had found credible evidence that Clinton had committed perjury but had not yet decided whether a jury might convict him.

Ray said on ABC-TV’s “This Week” in March that one reason to indict Clinton after he leaves office in January is to demonstrate the larger principle “that no person, including the president of the United States, is above the law.”

If Clinton were indicted after he left office and Gore were elected to replace him, it would put the new president in a similar position to the one then-President Ford found himself in 1974 after he replaced Richard Nixon, who resigned in the face of the Watergate investigation.

Ford pardoned Nixon on grounds that trying him would be too traumatic for the country, but he sparked voter resentment that some analysts said helped lead to his defeat in the 1976 election.

The latest inquiry came to a head Wednesday when Gore, asked about the question of a pardon after he had spoken to the editors, asserted that Clinton already had “said publicly some time ago that he would neither request nor accept a pardon.”

While Clinton did not specifically say Thursday that he would not accept a pardon if one were offered, he essentially confirmed the thrust of what Gore had ascribed to him the day before.

“I wouldn’t be surprised by anything that happens,” the president said Thursday, alluding to the possibility that he might be indicted, “but I’m not interested in being pardoned.”

At another point, the president mused: “I don’t think it would be necessary.”

Clinton said that a 1996 review of the Whitewater case, conducted for the Resolution Trust Corp. by a Republican law firm, essentially had exonerated him: “It said neither my wife nor I did anything wrong.”

And while conceding that he “made a terrible personal mistake” in the Lewinsky scandal, he asserted: “I think I have paid for it . . . quite a lot. . . . I struggled very hard to save my relationship with my wife and daughter.”

Clinton also sought to portray the impeachment as part of a strategy by congressional Republicans to push him out of office.

Noting that the Senate voted not to oust him from office, he said he is “proud of what we did there, because we saved the Constitution of the United States.”

Clinton said the impeachment “was wrong . . . as a matter of law, Constitution and history.”