Starr Finds His Footing on Path of Investigation

WASHINGTON — Haltingly, after nine weeks of investigation and despite opinion polls showing him to be one of the nation’s least popular figures, independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr is gaining traction.

Starr at minimum has gathered circumstantial evidence to support allegations that President Clinton twice committed perjury in sworn testimony earlier this year:

Audiotaped conversations and the testimony of several witnesses clash with Clinton’s sworn denials that he had intimate contact with Monica S. Lewinsky, a former White House intern, and Kathleen E. Willey, a former White House volunteer.

Now Starr faces a difficult and potentially fateful choice: He can present his findings of presidential perjury to Congress quickly; or, he can try to establish that Clinton also encouraged others to lie under oath about his extramarital conduct.

Lawyers familiar with the investigation said last week that Starr is following the more ambitious--and time-consuming--trail. Unless he pulls back, they said, he is not likely to conclude the investigation before summer.

Starr is already committed to battling Clinton’s lawyers--for what probably will be months--over the president’s invocation of executive privilege to block particular lines of inquiry, according to people familiar with the inquiry.

This and other maneuvering--including the Clinton administration’s refusal to grant Starr’s investigators unfettered access to Secret Service agents, plus “joint defense” arrangements between lawyers for the president and certain witnesses--have slowed, if not stymied, Starr.

To be sure, Starr has had setbacks of his own making. The summoning of peripheral witnesses, notably White House strategist Sidney Blumenthal, consumed time and diverted the focus of Starr’s prosecutors, many of whom have not taken a weekend off since early January. Moreover, a range of lawyers, including some former special prosecutors, question Starr’s original decision to investigate the president’s private sexual behavior.

Clearly, Starr has proven no match for the White House’s public relations effort. Two national polls last month found that only 11% of those surveyed had a favorable opinion of Starr.

But by now, the independent counsel’s investigation poses a threat to Clinton that has become more than a narrow contest involving differing versions of who did what to whom.

If Clinton’s lawyers and Starr’s office agree on anything, it is that the president’s popularity remains, for now, a dominating consideration. Because Starr is heading toward presenting his findings to Congress rather than to a criminal court jury, the end game is inherently political.

It would be up to members of the House of Representatives in what is an election year to decide whether the president’s alleged lying about intimate extramarital contacts measured up to the only constitutionally prescribed standard for impeachment: “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

Just last week, House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.) conferred over how an impeachment inquiry might be structured.

“A lot depends on the president’s standing in the polls,” said one lawyer who is advising Clinton. “If his numbers stay high, Congress is not going to have anything to do with impeachment--unless there is a strong case of obstruction” of justice.

Starr’s resolve in battling the White House over executive privilege signals that he is not satisfied with findings of presidential perjury, alone. He appears determined to pursue any evidence of a cover-up.

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One presidential assistant under suspicion is White House lawyer Bruce R. Lindsey, the aide who has managed personal crises for the president for a decade. Lindsey has cited executive privilege in declining to answer questions before the grand jury about certain conversations with the president.

Even if he were to win a months-long battle over executive privilege, however, Starr runs the risk that Lindsey’s answers would be of little value.

Starr faces a similar quandary over Lewinsky, whose dealings with Clinton are at the root of the investigation. If Starr chooses to file perjury or other felony charges against her, he invites months of combat that may or may not help build a witness-tampering or obstruction case against the president.

Starr’s options with Lewinsky will be shaped by the federal judge overseeing the investigation. The judge is expected to rule soon on whether Lewinsky has a binding immunity deal with the independent counsel as a result of earlier negotiations between Starr’s office and her attorney, William Ginsburg.

At least two prosecutors in the independent counsel’s office recommended earlier that Starr grant Lewinsky immunity in exchange for her pledge to testify that she engaged in oral sex with Clinton.

But Starr has balked because Lewinsky has made no commitment to provide testimony that would implicate the president or any of his advisors, including Vernon E. Jordan Jr., in a cover-up or other activity akin to obstructing justice.

It was Jordan, the Washington lobbyist and former civil rights leader, who lined up job interviews and a defense lawyer for Lewinsky in December. At that point, Lewinsky had been warned by Clinton himself that she might be called as a witness by lawyers for Paula Corbin Jones, who is pursuing a sexual-harassment lawsuit against the president.

On Jan. 17, Clinton denied under oath in a deposition conducted by Jones’ lawyers that he had ever had sexual contact with Lewinsky, who was 21 when she began her White House internship.

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Also in January, Lewinsky signed an affidavit swearing that she “never had a sexual relationship” with Clinton. About the same time, Jordan personally accompanied her to New York and lined up a job offer for her from Revlon, on whose board Jordan sits. Revlon withdrew the offer on Jan. 21, the day that Starr’s expanded investigation of Clinton’s dealings with Lewinsky was disclosed.

Jordan’s role is of special interest to Starr in an obstruction-of-justice case, in part because Jordan once before came to the aid of a Clinton associate.

In the spring of 1994, Jordan arranged a financial deal with Revlon for Webster L. Hubbell, a Clinton friend then under scrutiny from Starr’s predecessor. Hubbell, the former associate attorney general, former law partner of First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton and presidential golfing partner, pleaded guilty to fraud and tax-evasion charges in December 1994.

But after pledging to cooperate, Hubbell failed to provide prosecutors with information advancing Starr’s investigation of the Clintons’ involvement in the Whitewater controversy. Nor did Hubbell shed light on how Mrs. Clinton’s law firm billing records from Arkansas, under subpoena for two years, turned up in January 1996 in the Clintons’ living quarters at the White House.

Starr is continuing to investigate whether Hubbell’s income from Revlon and other deals--also arranged with the help of presidential advisors--was intended to keep the former Justice Department official from telling what he knew. The independent counsel is close to filing new tax or fraud charges against Hubbell, according to lawyers.

As for Willey, Clinton said in his Jan. 17 deposition that he did nothing more than embrace and kiss her on the forehead. Clinton’s sworn denial of sexual contact is contradicted by her recent grand jury testimony and by statements that Willey allegedly made immediately after the Nov. 29, 1993, encounter to Linda Tripp, then on the White House staff.

Tripp last summer discussed the incident several times with Lindsey, the president’s chief crisis manager, sources confirmed. The Lindsey-Tripp contacts were first reported by Time magazine. A White House spokesman on Friday declined to comment on Lindsey’s behalf.

Still, the exact details of the physical contact between Willey and the president--and whether it was unwelcome--remain in dispute.

There is more evidence to challenge the president’s testimony about his relationship with Lewinsky. Starr has brought no fewer than three of Lewinsky’s friends before the grand jury; they are believed to have testified that Lewinsky told them she was having intimate relations with Clinton.

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Moreover, Starr has the audiotaped conversations in which Lewinsky describes in detail both her sexual contacts with the president and advice that she received from Jordan about how to deal with lawyers representing Jones. The conversations were recorded by the FBI and, earlier, by Tripp, who worked with Lewinsky after both women were transferred to jobs at the Pentagon.

Ginsburg, Lewinsky’s lead lawyer, said last week that he still did not know what to expect from Starr--whether an immunity deal would be negotiated or his client would be prosecuted.

In addition to perjury, Lewinsky could conceivably be prosecuted for encouraging Tripp to testify falsely about Willey’s encounter with Clinton. Tripp has told investigators that, as Jones’ lawyers sought to question her, Lewinsky presented her with suggestive “talking points.”

According to lawyers involved in the investigation, Starr’s staff suspects that the talking points came from Lewinsky’s personal computer. However, it is not known whether Lewinsky wrote the material herself or was merely serving as a conduit for Clinton or someone else.

Starr also remains interested in whether Clinton had any hand in retrieving several gifts that he gave to Lewinsky at a time when Jones’ lawyers were asking whether the former intern had received such items from the president.

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This highlights the importance of testimony already provided to the grand jury by Betty W. Currie, the president’s personal secretary, who handled exchanges of messages and gifts between Lewinsky and Clinton. Currie also authorized some of Lewinsky’s three dozen visits to the White House after she began working at the Pentagon in April 1996.

According to one lawyer familiar with aspects of the investigation, Currie has testified that for all but six occasions, she did not recall seeing Lewinsky during those visits.

Lawrence H. Wechsler, Currie’s attorney, has shared information about his client’s recollections with lawyers representing the president as part of a cooperative, joint-defense arrangement. Wechsler did not return phone calls seeking comment.

One lawyer advising Clinton said the president can survive the investigation, provided Starr is unable to marshal strong evidence of a cover-up.

“The serious issue here is obstruction of justice,” said the advisor. “Without that, [Starr] is nowhere--unless Monica comes forward with a blowtorch.”

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Times staff writers Ronald J. Ostrow and Robert L. Jackson contributed to this story.