One likely Clinton hire, sources say, is David Doak, a Washington consultant who most recently ran the media campaign that helped elect Democrat Gray Davis governor of California. Doak was also part of the firm that ran New York Mayor David Dinkins’ successful campaign in 1989. According to one veteran New York political consultant: “The decision has already been made. The word around New York is that she’s going with David Doak.”

Clinton’s press office did not return phone calls Friday. Neither did Harold Ickes, the former White House advisor who is now Clinton’s top political advisor on the New York race. Doak, who has publicly expressed interest in having a role in the campaign, told Salon News he has not yet been hired by Clinton. “We have not made any kind of agreement. I’ve talked to people in the campaign, if [campaign] is really the right word.”

Asked whether he expects to be hired, Doak said, “That’s totally her choice. I’ve been a friend for 25 years. I think the world of her. It’s certainly her decision, but I’ll help her any way I could.”

The Hillary for Senate bandwagon took off with a bang in February, just as her husband’s impeachment trial came to an end. The very day President Clinton was acquitted, she reportedly sat down with Ickes to begin talking about the Moynihan seat. Throngs of New York Democrats, including Moynihan, Harlem Rep. Charles Rangel, former New York Mayor Ed Koch and many others, have urged Clinton to run, envisioning a hot race against the likely Republican contender, New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani — a matchup that could rival the presidential campaign in excitement, and in campaign spending as well.

The tantalizing possibility of a Clinton 2000 campaign made the covers of Time and Newsweek on March 1, after the first lady decorously confirmed her interest in late February: “I will give careful thought to a potential candidacy in order to make a decision later this year,” she said in a prepared media statement. Since then, she’s added little to the public record on the subject.

Clinton’s silence hasn’t stopped people close to her from speculating about her alleged intentions in the media. But the messages conflict. Some friends and staff members have insisted she won’t run, that she’s tired of the glare of the spotlight and doesn’t want to endure a New York media hazing. Others tell reporters she’s enthusiastic about running a campaign of her own, after years in the shadow of her husband.

In New York, knowledgeable Democrats insist that a final decision still has not been made. But they say Clinton is better organized and more informed about New York’s fractious political world than has previously been reported. “She knows more about upstate New York already than Geraldine Ferraro knew at the end of the campaign,” said one New York source, referring to the Queens Democrat who ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate last year. “In fact, she knows more about upstate than Giuliani,” the source added.

New York Democrats say Clinton has “feelers out” to leading fund-raisers, while Washington sources say she has told her staff that she is about to hire a New York campaign staff. This week Ickes told the Associated Press that Clinton’s upcoming New York trip would include multiple stops across the state — including the Republican bastions of western New York state and suburban New York City — to give her a sense of what running a New York campaign might be like. “There’ll be more press, more people taking to her and so I think she’ll come away with a much better feel about the intensity of the situation,” Ickes said.

Clinton’s delay in making a final decision is a politically touchy issue. New York Democrats want her to make up her mind fairly quickly, to give other Democrats time to raise money if she decides not to run, in a race that could cost up to $20 million. Rep. Nita Lowey of Westchester County has declared she will run for the Democratic Senate nomination if Clinton does not. To keep her options open, but avoid hurting Lowey, Clinton and her supporters explored the possibility of establishing a campaign fund that could be used for either candidate, but they could not do that legally. So Clinton offered to come to New York to raise funds for Lowey if she does not run herself.

Sources say Clinton has been encouraged by a sharp decline in the political fortunes of her most likely Republican opponent, Giuliani, in the wake of controversy over the New York Police Department’s killing of African street vendor Amadou Diallo in February. A March 28 New York Daily News poll found the mayor’s popularity has “plunged to an all-time low” in the aftermath of the Diallo shooting, when Giuliani defended the police department and treated Diallo’s family and supporters callously. His approval rating is now only 40 percent, down a whopping 20 points from just six months ago. Seventy-three percent of those polled objected to his criticism of the police protests, which he dismissed as “silly” publicity stunts.

Even more worrisome for Giuliani, he may now face political opposition from former supporters and fellow Republicans, regardless of what Clinton decides to so. The mayor’s relations with Republican Gov. George Pataki have been strained ever since Giuliani supported incumbent Democrat Mario Cuomo over Pataki in 1994. The mayor has also angered other party faithful with his vocal support of immigration and unfettered abortion rights, and his backing of President Clinton during the recent impeachment crisis.

Now Republicans are striking back. Pataki was among the scores of critics who lashed out at the mayor’s handling of the Diallo killing. The New York Times reported recently that Pataki and Alphonse D’Amato are tacitly backing Long Island Republican Rep. Rick Lazio, whose campaign war chest was approaching a hefty $2 million by the end of last year, in a possible primary challenge to Giuliani for the Senate seat. Lazio thinks his popularity among more traditional Republican voters could lead to a primary upset.

Giuliani’s appeal as a candidate in a general election matchup is based largely on his strong crossover appeal in the city of New York, which is overwhelmingly Democratic. But bipartisan support is useless in a closed party primary, and Lazio, also a moderate Republican, is considered a stronger candidate in the New York suburbs, which typically turn out more Republican voters.

But Clinton’s poll numbers have dropped, too, since she began toying publicly with her candidacy. According to the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, Clinton enjoyed an 11-point lead over Giuliani in a head-to-head match in January, with the support of 52 percent of those polled. By March 26, Clinton’s margin had dwindled to a little more than 2 points, with only 48 percent of those polled. Other polls indicated a similar tightening of the race over the same period.

New York pollsters say the slippage is natural. “Certainly everything’s looking much more competitive as the [election] draws closer,” says Lee Miringoff of the Marist Institute. Early polls showing Clinton doing well in upstate New York, a Republican stronghold, have given way to more typical upstate Republican support for Guiliani, downstate Democratic support for Clinton. But the polls, which survey registered voters, can’t measure a potential surge in the polls that a Clinton-Giuliani race would likely inspire. “People have raised the possibility that she will energize the Democratic base — minorities and urban voters — which doesn’t like Giuliani,” Miringoff says.

Some political tea-leaf readers saw signs this week that Clinton had decided not to run, when she said she would not attend a New York State Democratic Party dinner scheduled for April 29. But New York Democrats cautioned against reading too much into that decision. “She had never been confirmed at the dinner, she was only invited,” one official said. “And I think she could not attend that dinner as merely the first lady. It would have been like a coronation, a political coming out, and she wasn’t ready for that.”

As Salon has revealed, Starr pursued his initial investigation into Whitewater with the key assistance of David Hale, a tainted witness who stands accused of taking money and legal help from anti-Clinton activists at the Arkansas Project, a secret $2.4 million project to undermine Clinton financed by Starr’s former patron, Richard Mellon Scaife. When Starr’s Whitewater inquiry went nowhere, he latched onto Paula Jones’ civil suit, and then when that failed, he wired Linda Tripp and finally snared Clinton on adultery. The ties between Starr, Tripp and Jones — which have not been satisfactorily explained — helped the independent counsel create a perjury trap for the president in his Jones deposition that would lead to the impeachment crisis.

To enable committee members to use their five minutes well, Salon has prepared a list of questions that Starr should be asked.

1) What was the nature of your contacts with the Paula Jones legal team prior to your appointment as independent counsel?

2) Did you know that your partner at Kirkland and Ellis, Richard W. Porter, was assisting the Paula Jones legal team?

3) When did your office first learn of allegations of payments to David Hale by conservative political activists?

4) Was your office aware of attempts by David Hale to suborn perjury from his brother Milas regarding Whitewater?

5) Did you ever discuss with your friend and former Justice Department colleague Theodore Olson the Arkansas Project and/or David Hale?

6) What steps did your office take to maintain the independence of special investigator Michael Shaheen to investigate David Hale?

7) Did you or your office ever inform the attorney general, or the three-judge panel that appointed you, of the ties between you or your law firm and the Paula Jones legal team?

How and when did you learn of the existence of Linda Tripp’s tapes?

9) Why has your office refused to disclose the salaries and other compensation paid to you and your prosecutors?

10) What steps are you taking to accommodate the special master investigating potentially illegal leaks by your office to the media?

11) In a letter to Steven Brill, editor of Brill’s Content, you denied your prosecutors ever suggested Monica Lewinsky wear a wire and secretly record conversations with Vernon Jordan and the president. But Lewinsky testified to the grand jury that your office indeed made that demand. Who is telling the truth?

12) Having now served as independent counsel, would you favor reauthorization of the independent counsel statute? And would you like to see changes to the statute?

- – - – - – - – - -

Here is a fact sheet of what every American citizen should know about Kenneth Starr and his probe.

1) After successful lobbying by staunch conservatives such as North Carolina Sen. Lauch Faircloth, a three-judge panel dominated by Republicans replaced moderate Whitewater prosecutor Robert Fiske with Kenneth Starr in August 1994. Starr, former chief of staff to Reagan Attorney General William French Smith and a member of an ambitious circle of activist conservative attorneys, accepted the job despite the fact that he had opposed the independent counsel law when he was a Reagan official and helped prepare a brief arguing it was unconstitutional, vesting too much power in one unaccountable person.

2) At the time of his appointment as Whitewater independent counsel, Starr, a $1 million-a-year Washington attorney with the high-powered firm of Kirkland & Ellis, was advising the Paula Jones camp on her sexual harassment suit against Clinton and offered to write a friend-of-the-court brief on her behalf. He was also representing the tobacco industry, an ardent foe of the Clinton administration. Later, Iran-contra prosecutor Lawrence Walsh would comment that, considering Starr’s conflicts of interest, he should have felt obligated to turn down the job of investigating Clinton.

3) Starr proceeded to build his Whitewater case against Clinton largely around the testimony of confessed felon David Hale, a corrupt municipal judge and businessman who claimed then-Gov. Clinton had pressured him into making an illegal $300,000 loan to Jim and Susan McDougal, Clinton’s partners in the failed Whitewater real estate deal. Starr’s Whitewater investigators unearthed a formidable amount of evidence casting doubt on Hale’s testimony against Clinton, including the fact that Hale had falsely invoked Clinton’s name on a separate occasion to win a $50,000 kickback from an Alabama health company seeking an Arkansas state contract. But Starr chose to overlook this inconvenient episode in Hale’s past, as well as the fact that his star witness had turned his courthouse into a personal ATM when he served as a municipal judge, taking kickbacks from a private collection agency he had installed to gather fines. A Salon investigation has also revealed that David Hale attempted to get his respected brother Milas, a judge, to falsely corroborate his allegations about Clinton’s role in the Whitewater affair.

4) William Watt, another former municipal judge implicated in the Whitewater scheme, was used by Starr to corroborate Hale’s testimony during the trial of the McDougals and Gov. Jim Guy Tucker. But Watt would later tell Salon that Starr’s investigators ignored exculpatory information he provided them about Clinton and tried to pressure him into telling a more incriminating story about Clinton: “I was told they didn’t like the truth the way that I told it. I had my truth and they had their truth and I was told that they liked their truth better.” Watt also told Salon that he regarded Hale as someone who would “lie and manipulate people. He was a pathological liar.”

5) David Hale, while cooperating with Starr as his chief Whitewater witness from 1994 to 1996, would sometimes stay rent-free at a fishing resort in Hot Springs, Ark., owned by anti-Clinton activist Parker Dozhier, who passed on secret cash payments to Hale. This charge was made to Salon by Dozhier’s former live-in girlfriend, Caryn Mann, and her teenage son, both of whom have repeated their testimony before a federal grand jury. According to Mann, the money came from conservative attorney Stephen Boynton and David Henderson, vice president of the foundation that owns the conservative American Spectator magazine. Boynton and Henderson oversaw the Arkansas Project, an anti-Clinton muckraking campaign lavishly funded by right-wing billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, who funneled his contributions through the Spectator.

6) “We’re convinced that none of our people had any knowledge of any such [Arkansas Project] payments [to Hale],” asserted Starr’s chief Arkansas deputy, W. Hickman Ewing Jr. But the first meeting of the Arkansas Project took place in the Washington law offices of Theodore Olson, a friend, political ally and former colleague of Starr’s, whose relationship dated back to their days as young activist conservatives in the Reagan Justice Department. Olson and Starr were also both beneficiaries of Richard Mellon Scaife’s politically inspired generosity. Starr was scheduled to take a Scaife-funded deanship at Pepperdine University until controversy about his connections to Scaife forced him to resign the post. Olson has served on the board and as the attorney of the Scaife-funded American Spectator as well as on the advisory boards of four other right-wing institutions funded by Scaife. Referring to Olson’s oversight role on the Arkansas Project, one source told Salon, “Olson is somebody who Scaife would trust to see that nothing went wrong and that his money would not be wasted.”

Like Starr, Olson worked on the Paula Jones case. Last year, when Jones challenged Clinton’s claim of immunity from civil suits while in office, Olson, together with Robert Bork, held a moot court to prepare Jones’ lawyers for their successful argument before the Supreme Court.

7) Olson — who, along with his wife, Barbara, is often called upon by the press to defend their friend Starr — also represented David Hale when he was called to testify before the Senate Whitewater Committee. Later, Hale lied under oath about how he came to retain Olson while testifying at the trial of Tucker and the McDougals. Two sources told Salon that by lying Hale was trying to conceal his connection to the Arkansas Project. It was the project’s Stephen Boynton and David Henderson who put Hale in touch with Olson. (Olson’s Arkansas Project connection is never mentioned when the New York Times and other media outlets call on him for comment about Starr’s investigation of the president.)

While Hale was cooperating with Starr’s Whitewater case, the independent counsel aggressively protected the man he called “a model witness,” despite all evidence that Hale was anything but. Starr and his deputies tried to stop an insurance fraud case brought against Hale by Arkansas prosecutors, who charged that Starr’s office tried to intimidate them into dropping the case. The trial, which Starr succeeded in delaying but not stopping, will now begin in March. It will certainly cast a further cloud on Starr’s “model witness,” for Hale is charged with bilking poor black clients in rural Arkansas out of their funeral payments.

9) Some of Starr’s deputies were alarmed by the independent counsel’s unquestioning embrace of Hale. They shook their heads in dismay when Starr argued in court for a reduced sentence for “Judge Hale,” as he called him, telling the court, “I have witnessed his contrition. I believe, your honor, that he is genuinely remorseful of his criminal past. I have been impressed with his humble spirit.” Taking issue with Starr, one Whitewater investigator told Salon, “With someone like Hale, you can never let down your guard. You should never get to a point where you begin to trust him.”

10) Starr deputy Hickman Ewing met quietly several times during the course of his Whitewater investigation with Rex Armistead, a private eye hired by the Arkansas Project to dig up dirt on Clinton. Armistead’s investigation focused on allegations that then-Gov. Clinton had protected a cocaine-smuggling ring operating out of the Mena airport in rural Arkansas. The drug charges were examined and rejected by three separate federal investigations.

One Whitewater investigator expressed concern about Ewing’s meetings with the private eye, because of the controversial connection between Starr and Scaife and because not all the meetings were recorded in official files: “This was either the worst case of judgment or something worse.”

11) At a critical juncture in Paula Jones’ long-running legal battle with the president, the Arkansas Project’s Stephen Boynton, David Henderson and Parker Dozhier intervened to find her experienced litigators, just before the statute of limitations on her lawsuit ran out. The suit was successfully revived — and it in turn would later revive Kenneth Starr’s flagging pursuit of the president.

Another connection between the Jones case and the Arkansas Project surfaced when Salon reported that William Lehrfeld, a conservative attorney who has worked for Scaife and who served as legal counsel for the project, contributed $50,000 to Jones’ legal fund from a little-known foundation he ran.

12) In early 1997, Starr’s Whitewater case against Clinton had reached such a dead end that he made an effort to flee his job for the sunny Pepperdine campus in Malibu, Calif. When his attempted escape provoked howls from his political and media supporters, Starr returned grimly to his Whitewater post. But his fortunes would dramatically reverse later in the year when the Jones lawsuit was green-lighted by the Supreme Court — with help from Starr’s friend Olson — and Jones’ lawyers subpoenaed Clinton and a then-obscure former White House intern named Monica Lewinsky.

13) Finally, in recent months, new attention has been given to the previously reported fact that Starr had close ties to the Paula Jones case even while he was seeking to replace Robert Fiske as Whitewater independent counsel in August 1994. Before his appointment, Starr had publicly spoken out against presidential immunity from Jones’ suit and had even prepared an amicus brief for Jones. Starr also consulted directly with Jones’ lawyers about the case, a fact he may not have told Attorney General Janet Reno when he sought approval to extend his probe into the fetid waters of Jones-Lewinsky-Tripp.

Perhaps most important, new documents have revealed that Starr knew much earlier than he told Reno about Linda Tripp’s Monica Lewinsky tapes; and that Tripp herself, not Lewinsky or Clinton, suggested to Lewinsky that she ask Vernon Jordan to help her find a job in exchange for her silence about her affair with the president.

By ensnaring Jordan in the Lewinsky matter, Tripp built the bridge that Starr walked across to move from the Reno-authorized Whitewater probe — where he was investigating whether Jordan helped Clinton pal Webster Hubbell get a job in exchange for his silence about the Whitewater deal — into the unrelated, but much more enticing matter of the Lewinsky affair. The shadowy ties between Starr, Tripp and Jones and their right-wing friends allowed the independent counsel’s office to create the perjury trap for Clinton in his Jones deposition that would result in the current impeachment crisis.

And so the Clinton-Starr drama came full circle. By returning to the Paula Jones civil case that he had counseled before his appointment as Whitewater prosecutor, Kenneth Starr was finally able to get his man. Like Roger Chillingworth, the vengeful moralist who relentlessly pursued the adulterous Hester Prynne and her lover, the Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale, in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter,” Starr branded Clinton with the scarlet “I” — for impeachment.

But this month’s election showed that most Americans have resisted the hysterical anti-Clinton sermonizing. They understand that Starr’s enterprise was a political inquisition from its very birth, and that his marriage of limitless prosecutorial force and political vengeance is a much more dangerous specter than President Clinton’s libido. It’s this sense of decency and balance that will, we hope, save the country from being torn apart over a matter that should never have been dragged into the public arena.