New Grand Jury Called to Investigate Clinton

The independent counsel in the Whitewater investigation has impaneled a new grand jury to explore allegations surrounding the Monica S. Lewinsky affair, raising new speculation about whether President Clinton could be indicted after he leaves office, those familiar with the investigation said Thursday.

Reports disclosing the existence of the grand jury first surfaced in Washington just hours before Vice President Al Gore was to accept the Democratic nomination for president in Los Angeles, triggering immediate denunciations from the White House.

“The timing of this leak stinks to high heaven and that is hardly surprising, given their past conduct” in the independent counsel’s office, said White House spokesman Jake Siewert.

“This is, after all, an office that’s been investigated for leaks and where the former spokesman has been indicted” for allegedly giving false statements about media leaks, Siewert said.

News of the grand jury even drew criticism from the campaign of George W. Bush. “We think the timing of this was wrong,” Bush spokeswoman Karen Hughes said in a television interview. “It was simply not appropriate for this kind of news to come out on Al Gore’s big day.”

Independent counsel Robert W. Ray’s office denied that it was the source of the leak and said it could not comment on the matter. “We can neither confirm nor deny” that a new grand jury has been impaneled, said Linda Flippen, a spokeswoman for the independent counsel.

The grand jury was created last month, sources said. Impaneling grand jurors does not necessarily signal that Ray intends to proceed with an indictment of the president next year. But it would represent an aggressive move on his part--”a shot across the bow,” in the words of one legal expert.

When Ray succeeded former independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr last October, he initially was seen in many circles as essentially a caretaker in the Whitewater investigation after the explosive turns the case had taken in its five years, including Clinton’s impeachment in connection with his misstatements about the Lewinsky matter.

But Ray quickly made clear that he intended to investigate the case fully himself, rather than simply writing a final report. While constitutional lawyers generally believe that a sitting president cannot be charged with a crime or convicted by any other means than impeachment, Ray has left open the possibility of bringing an indictment against Clinton after he leaves office in January.

Ray told The Times in June that “the determination of whether a crime has been committed is only the first step,” adding that “there must be a substantial federal interest in bringing a case” against the president.

Ray also has said that potential charges would center on perjury and obstruction of justice in the Lewinsky investigation, both of which were rejected by the Senate last year as grounds for impeachment.

Several legal observers said that Ray also might use a grand jury to explore why the White House failed to turn over thousands of e-mails in response to subpoenas on a number of investigative fronts. Republican critics have accused White House officials of obstructing justice.

A new grand jury “seems to signal that he is not willing to just wrap up his investigation and write his final report,” said Stephen Saltzburg, a law professor who served as an associate independent counsel in the Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan administration.

Solomon Wisenberg, a former deputy independent counsel under Starr who is now in private practice in Washington, said that “it’s difficult to assess the significance” of a new grand jury being impaneled in the long-running inquiry. “It could be nothing more than a vehicle to make sure once and for all that they have all relevant evidence,” he said.

Indeed, prosecutors have been known to impanel a grand jury with the idea that it would fail to bring an indictment, said Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University law professor who testified against Clinton during the impeachment proceedings. “That gives the prosecutor a degree of political cover and gets him off the hook,” he said.

But both Turley and Saltzburg said that seems unlikely in this case, in part because of the enormous time and expense already invested in the case. “You’d only [impanel a grand jury] if you really thought there were still things that you might prosecute. Otherwise it makes no sense to me,” Saltzburg said.

Word on the new grand jury, first reported by Associated Press, emerged a day after a special division of the U.S. Court of Appeals, which supervises independent counsels, issued a brief order reauthorizing Ray’s investigation for another year.

The three-judge panel said that terminating Ray’s office “is not currently appropriate,” even though Congress allowed the independent counsel statute to expire 14 months ago. Special counsels authorized by that statute are allowed to complete their work.

Although Ray has disposed of two matters he inherited from Starr, his prosecutors still are keeping the Lewinsky case “an open matter,” as well as a related inquiry into the issue of whether White House aides deliberately withheld some e-mails from Starr and congressional investigators. The White House has said that thousands of e-mails were lost inadvertently through a master computer breakdown but that some of this material duplicated documents already furnished to investigators.

A new grand jury with the power to subpoena additional witnesses and documents relating to the Lewinsky case only adds to Clinton’s post-impeachment troubles.

In April 1999, U.S. District Judge Susan Webber Wright of Little Rock, Ark., who presided over Paula Corbin Jones’ sexual harassment lawsuit against Clinton, found the president in contempt for false and misleading answers that he gave about the Lewinsky matter.

Wright later imposed a $90,000 penalty against Clinton, which the president paid without a challenge. He became the first chief executive ever assessed such a penalty.

In a strong opinion, Wright said that Clinton had given “false, misleading and evasive answers that were designed to obstruct the judicial process.” Citing Wright’s opinion, an Arkansas Supreme Court ethics panel recommended in May that the president be disbarred. A hearing is pending.