In fact, independent counsel Kenneth Starr did not charge President Clinton with perjury in his September referral to Congress. Starr charged only that Clinton had lied under oath, both in his Jan. 17 Jones deposition and to the grand jury on Aug. 17, about whether he’d had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky; that he had lied about not remembering being alone with Lewinsky; and that he had lied about conversations he had with Lewinsky and Vernon Jordan about the Jones case.

The Supreme Court has ruled, says Brand, that “to prove perjury, there must be corroborated proof of the intent to lie, and the lie must be material to the case. Perjury can’t be proved if you are cute with your answers and thereby evade answering. Clinton is absolutely entitled to rely on every legal means to protect himself, because he is facing civil and criminal prosecution, plus impeachment.”

Many other legal and constitutional scholars have made the same point. Lying under oath, false statements and omissions also require intent and materiality, says Brand, “but to prove perjury requires proof that he conscientiously and purposefully lied in an unambiguous way.”

How did the president avoid committing perjury when he denied having sexual relations with Lewinsky in the Jones deposition, which was released by the House on Wednesday? By outfoxing the Jones lawyers, who failed to form questions and follow-ups that would have forced Clinton to be specific about the details of his relationship with Lewinsky. The definition of sexual relations presented to Clinton was a strange one. It clearly did not include oral sex performed on him, nor sexual intercourse, nor even kissing, and Clinton, who had never seen that definition until that moment, told the grand jury that he read it very carefully.

It said: Sexual relations occur “when the person [Clinton] knowingly engages in or causes contact with the genitalia, anus, groin, breast, inner thigh, or buttocks of any person [Lewinsky] with an intent to arouse or gratify the sexual desire of any person [Lewinsky].” Clinton testified that, under that definition, he did not have sexual relations with Lewinsky. He did not quite say, but the inference is unmistakable, that his intent was not to arouse or gratify Lewinsky. Without stating such a politically incorrect motive, he implies that he was really only interested in his own gratification.

So, what else is new? If women were running the world, maybe that would be a crime. But under current law, Clinton had a right to make evasive and misleading but factually correct statements in the Jones deposition. He exercised a vigorous defense, which is his prerogative.

Further undermining Starr’s charge is Lewinsky’s own statement to Linda Tripp on tape that what she and the president did together did not amount to sexual relations. “Sexual relations means sexual intercourse,” said Lewinsky. “We were just fooling around, Linda, just fooling around.”

But Republicans are pushing the loaded term “perjury,” knowing that it carries heavy legal weight with the citizenry, including some Clinton supporters. Much of the news media is also using the terms “perjury” and “lying under oath” interchangeably, thereby obfuscating the distinction between them. Even Starr, who obviously knows better, described the president’s testimony as “perjurious” numerous times in his Nov. 19 testimony before the committee, although — significantly — not in his referral.

So murky is the case against Clinton that the articles of impeachment charging him with perjury did not even specify which statements were perjurious. When asked by Rep. Gerald Nadler, D-N.Y., to identify the specific statements in the record, Committee Chairman Henry Hyde couldn’t do it. Instead, Hyde got shy, and resisted reading sections of the Starr Report that detailed exactly which of Lewinsky’s body parts she says Clinton touched. That touching would seem to fall within the tortured definition of sexual relations in the Jones case, unless the definition is read as Clinton says he read it.

But Hyde’s sudden attack of squeamishness was likely a cover for his real worry: about the fuzziness of the charges against Clinton. The committee’s explosive hearing Thursday revealed a level of confusion about the exact charges against Clinton, even in the Republican caucus, that should doom the impeachment move against him, but probably won’t.

If Hyde’s true motive was aversion to publicly discussing the sexual details of Clinton’s relationship with Lewinsky, he probably would have stopped the impeachment railroad before it began. Because, assuming this gets to a Senate trial, the prurient details aired there are going to make this week’s committee hearing seem like “Sesame Street.”

But lately, major news institutions such as the New York Times and NPR that had largely ignored Starr’s ties to anti-Clinton partisans and his many conflicts of interest have begun to delve into those relationships. New attention is being 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. As NPR’s Nina Totenberg recently reported, Starr also consulted directly with Jones’ lawyers about the case, a fact he neglected to tell 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 reveal 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 Webb 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.

Having been given a pass by the media for almost five years, Starr apparently felt free to lie to both Attorney General Reno in January, and to Congress in his September impeachment report, about the date he learned of Tripp’s secret tapes.

But Starr’s apparent lies are serious offenses. If Starr misrepresented those facts, former Watergate prosecutor Richard Ben-Veniste wrote in Friday’s New York Times, it is time “to consider his removal” and to “reassess his charges against the president.”

Starr’s excesses are now the subject of three different federal inquiries. Reno announced she is “reviewing” whether she was misled by Starr in January when he sought her approval to extend his investigation. Federal Judge Norma Holloway Johnson is looking into Clinton lawyers’ charge that Starr rampantly leaked grand jury material to the press. And former Justice Department official Michael Shaheen is investigating whether Starr’s chief Whitewater witness against the Clintons, David Hale, was paid off by partisans with close links to Starr himself through the American Spectator’s Arkansas Project, as revealed by Salon.

On Oct. 5, Clinton lawyer David Kendall wrote Reno for a copy of Starr’s letter requesting the expansion of his jurisdiction into the Lewinsky matter — a letter noticeably absent from Starr’s 4,000 pages of documents sent to Congress. Almost three weeks later Starr has not yet made the letter public.

Understanding Tripp’s role in setting the perjury trap for Clinton is critical. It was Tripp who suggested to Lewinsky that she enlist Jordan to help her with her job search, and it was Tripp who told Lewinsky not to sign an affidavit in the Jones case before Jordan got her a job. Starr then seized on this to justify his widening probe, telling Reno that he needed to investigate Jordan’s alleged pattern of obstruction of justice in helping both Webb Hubbell and Lewinsky with job searches.

In late October, long before Lewinsky was named a potential witness in the Jones case in December, Tripp urged Lewinsky: “There’s no reason why he [Jordan] couldn’t help a friend anywhere. It’s not like the Webb Hubbell thing.” This is remarkably savvy of Tripp, to spot the potential link between Lewinsky and Hubbell that Starr later found so useful. But it could also suggest that Tripp and Starr had direct or indirect communication long before Starr admits he learned about the tapes, on Jan. 12, 1998.

Certainly Tripp, as a disgruntled former White House employee, was known to Starr as a potential anti-Clinton mole. Even before the Lewinsky scandal, Tripp had become one of the chief thorns in the side of the Clinton White House. She was the only White House employee to testify she saw Hillary Clinton aide Maggie Williams remove papers from Foster’s office — implying there were Whitewater-related secrets the Clintons were trying to hide. And she was also the source for the story by Newsweek magazine reporter Michael Isikoff that Clinton had made advances on Kathleen Willey. (Isikoff, who has been criticized for his cozy relationship with the Starr camp, didn’t report that Tripp also believed Willey was actively seeking attention from Clinton.)

In 1996 conservative journalist Tony Snow introduced his well-placed friend Tripp to another of his friends, Nixon dirty trickster and book agent Lucianne Goldberg, to help Tripp sell her tell-all book about Clinton. Goldberg found Tripp a ghostwriter who penned a draft about the Clinton White House, which Tripp now claims, unbelievably, was too negative.

It was Goldberg who had ties to the get-Clinton network, many of whose orchestrators are now familiar faces on the TV talk circuit. Goldberg had personal ties, for instance, to Richard W. Porter, Kenneth Starr’s law partner at the Chicago-based law firm Kirkland & Ellis. Porter was a senior aide in Bush’s White House, and later Dan Quayle’s counsel and director of “opposition research” for Quayle. Porter had also worked with Starr on the amicus brief that Starr agreed to write, on behalf of Paula Jones, for the Richard Mellon Scaife-funded Independent Women’s Forum. Porter finished the brief when Starr left to become Whitewater prosecutor. Goldberg says she told Porter about Tripp’s tapes of Lewinsky and asked for a contact with Starr. As reported by the New York Times, Porter’s friend, Philadelphia lawyer Jerome M. Marcus, took over Porter’s role in putting Tripp in touch with Starr, because such collusion within a law firm could raise questions about a possible conflict of interest. Goldberg has frankly called Marcus “a cutout” to obscure Porter’s role in forging the Tripp-Starr connection.

While Starr claims he first heard Tripp’s tapes on Jan. 12, they were making the rounds of Clinton foes much earlier. On the Oct. 20 broadcast of “Geraldo,” Lucianne Goldberg’s son and partner, Jonah, said he had heard some of Tripp’s tapes in September 1997 — even earlier than the Oct. 3 date Tripp has testified she began taping Lewinsky. Jonah Goldberg also said that he personally delivered copies that he and his mother made of two of Tripp’s tapes to Starr deputy Robert Bittmann and had earlier “handed the originals to Starr investigator Coy Copeland in New York.”

Also on “Geraldo,” anti-Clinton activist Ann Coulter revealed that she had heard one of the Lewinsky tapes at least two weeks before Starr has acknowledged knowing about them. And on Jan. 18, as the Lewinsky scandal was breaking, William Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard, told ABC’s “This Week” that he’d heard about the Lewinsky affair from a friend who had heard Tripp’s tapes, too.

Starr’s connections to the Jones lawsuit might also have been closer than has so far been reported. Even after he became independent counsel, there is evidence suggesting that Starr and the Jones legal camp continued to act in concert. Following the Supreme Court decision to greenlight the Jones trial in May 1997, Starr’s investigators were widely reported to be questioning Arkansans about possible Clinton sexual misadventures — which at that point seemed far afield of the Whitewater real estate deal Starr was authorized to investigate.

Then in October, Jones hired a new legal team, with help from Ann Coulter and John Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute, which helped underwrite Jones’ battle and hired new attorneys for her. Then came the mysterious “anonymous” phone call to Rutherford’s office from someone who suggested that Jones’ lawyers should look into the relationship between Clinton and a White House intern named Monica Lewinsky. Goldberg says she believes the caller was Tripp. The Los Angeles Times has revealed that Tripp was put in touch with Jones’ lawyers by Goldberg at least by Nov. 21, not Jan. 16, 1998, as had been alleged.

It was in the closing months of 1997 that the links between Starr, Jones and Tripp began to come together. As she began to talk with Jones’ attorneys, Tripp began worrying about whether her tapes, which were becoming more known to an ever-growing circle of people, put her in legal jeopardy. Tripp testified to the grand jury that her first lawyer told her that secret taping was illegal in Maryland, but she still taped Lewinsky twice after that warning. Goldberg later consulted conservative Washington attorney Theodore Olson, a longtime friend and political ally of Starr, for advice about Tripp’s legal vulnerability.

On Jan. 9, Tripp met with lawyer James Moody, a friend of Ann Coulter’s with ties to the Scaife-funded Landmark Legal Fund, which had also advised Paula Jones. Moody advised Tripp to take the tapes to Starr, who could immunize her from prosecution, instead of to the Jones lawyers. But Tripp managed to work with both Starr and the Jones team.

Tripp called Starr’s office on Jan. 12 and agreed to wear a wire to an already scheduled lunch with Lewinsky the next day. (Given the new revelations that Tripp had been in touch with Starr’s office at least a week earlier, it’s hard to believe he didn’t have a hand in scheduling the lunch in the first place.) The cooperation paid off: Tripp wound up an immunized witness in three of Starr’s ongoing investigations, which may also have the effect of immunizing her against prosecution in Maryland’s investigation of her illegal taping of Lewinsky. Starr also managed to keep Tripp from being formally deposed in the Jones case, which prevented Clinton’s lawyers from having a chance to question the woman who would be central to the impeachment crisis he now faces.

Finally, that busy weekend before Clinton’s deposition in the Jones case, Tripp was meeting with both Starr and the Jones lawyers. In fact, the Sunday night before the president’s deposition, Tripp met first with Starr, and then one of his deputies drove her to meet with Jones lawyer Wesley Holmes. The next day, with Tripp’s help, Jones’ lawyers would ask Clinton their fateful 95 questions about Monica Lewinsky — some of which were suggested by Tripp — that would lay the perjury trap Starr would use to make his case for impeachment. Significantly, the Los Angeles Times has reported, Starr did not instruct Tripp to keep her work for him secret, contrary to Justice Department rules.

Although the media is getting more aggressive about tracking the Starr-Tripp-Jones connections, some leading reporters are still giving Starr the benefit of the doubt. In a recent Washington Post story, for instance, Susan Schmidt — another reporter accused of being the credulous recipient of Starr leaks — wrote that Tripp met with a Jones lawyer on Jan. 16, “unbeknownst to Starr.” Since Starr’s own deputy drove Tripp home for that meeting, it strains credulity to insist that Starr himself didn’t know about it.

Maybe the best proof of collusion between Starr, Tripp and the Jones lawyers is the fact that Starr’s deputies already knew about her false affidavit in the Jones case when they questioned Lewinsky Jan. 16 — which, according to the Starr report, was a full day before Judge Susan Webber Wright received it. Both Ben-Veniste and Lars-Erik Nelson, writing in the New York Review of Books, have seized on this inconsistency. How could Starr have gotten the affidavit, which he used to threaten Lewinsky with a perjury charge, without help from the Jones legal team?

Given all the evidence, it’s impossible to believe Starr’s friends Porter and Olson, as well as the Jones lawyers and strategists, knew about the Tripp tapes for months without telling Starr. As Ben-Veniste asked in the Times, “Why would these lawyers have kept this information from Mr. Starr?”

Despite their artful plotting, Tripp, Starr and Clinton’s right-wing enemies were unsuccessful in accomplishing what they wanted most: getting Lewinsky to say Vernon Jordan told her to lie, or got her a job as a quid pro quo for her discretion. Starr’s report fails to point to any obstruction of justice by Jordan or any evidence that he urged Lewinsky to lie.

In her final statement to the grand jury, Lewinsky testified under oath that “Nobody ever told me to lie. And nobody ever offered me a job in exchange for my silence.” Despite his awesome attention to detail, that’s one statement that Kenneth Starr somehow left out of his 445-page report to Congress. That — and the full story of his relationship with Linda Tripp.

The source added that “there was never any discussion between them that amounted to obstruction of justice. Very early on, and not in response to Starr’s investigation, they took steps — as anyone would — to keep their relationship secret.” The source described the further questions put to Clinton by Starr and prosecutors as “quite disgusting,” and said Clinton refused to answer them. Published reports have disclosed that Clinton became so angry at the questioning that at one point, he and his lawyers withdrew from the room where the inquiry took place and did not return for an hour.

After wresting a confession from Clinton about his affair, Starr’s strategy now seems to further humiliate the president by exposing each and every lurid detail of the sexual relationship. This legal gambit would indeed have been damaging against a president like Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan — what American would have liked being forced to contemplate their passionate writhings? The public does not excuse Clinton’s dalliance with Lewinsky, but they seem far more able to put it into the context of his entire presidency, and recognize at the same time that raging hormones belong to the young. Washington had become accustomed to its aged presidents.

The last virile commander in chief was, of course, Jack Kennedy, inaugurated at 43, whose lifetime of sexual “contacts” numbered in the hundreds, according to historian Michael Beschloss. JFK was followed by Lyndon Johnson, whose extramarital adventures are said to have occurred before he became president at 55; Richard Nixon, 56, and Gerald Ford, 61 — neither of whom generated a hint of sexual intrigue, for obvious reasons; Jimmy Carter, who at 52 said he had lust only in his heart; Reagan, 69, whose own illicit affairs occurred earlier, during his Hollywood career; and George Bush, inaugurated at 64, who was rumored to have engaged in a discreet, long-term affair with a former aide while he was Reagan’s vice president, but managed to keep it out of the press.

Clinton’s aged 1996 opponent, Bob Dole, had an affair years earlier, during his first marriage, a story a Washington Post reporter nailed down before the election, with the woman in question going on the record. But executive editor Leonard Downie spiked the story. There was widespread speculation at the Post that Downie’s own 1996 affair, with a friend of his wife, was responsible for the Post blackout of the Dole affair. (Downie has since divorced and married the friend.)

At the elite dinner parties in Washington these days, there are not many people defending Clinton. “The Zeitgeist is to be against him, especially at the New York Times and the Washington Post,” says one social insider. “Anyone who says anything positive about Clinton or negative against Starr and the press is strongly and hostilely challenged.”

Within these circles, few people identify with Clinton’s vitality and promiscuity. By the time Clinton and his youthful crew arrived, official Washington had become a town of 60- to 80-year-old ex-appointees and advisors to the elderly Reagan and Bush administrations, no longer much interested in sex, especially pre-Viagra.

These Washington insiders have forgotten how sexual the pursuit of political power actually is. Most presidential campaigns bristle with erotic electricity, largely due to the immense power the candidate is seeking. As Henry Kissinger famously declared, “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” Washington luminaries — from senators to TV reporters — attract legions of groupies, some very aggressive, some vulnerable, some both.

Campaigns and Washington service involve long separations of married couples, and there are often brief affairs between staff members, between flight attendants and the Secret Service, between members of the press, all of whom are sharing an intense experience away from home and hearth. Coming together on a political quest, hitting the road for months and living on expense accounts in different hotel rooms every night is an explosively erotic mix. The endless and enormous temptations presented to candidates, particularly, are unimaginable to most people. It is the rare still-potent man who doesn’t succumb, and, as psychologist Joyce Brothers has pointed out, the physical energy and testosterone levels of those who seek high office far exceed the average person’s — with the possible exceptions of Richard Nixon and Bob Dole, who appear to have been fueled primarily by resentment.

The candidate’s psychology is that he has worked exhaustively, night and day, for many years to get to the pinnacle, and now he is still working night and day, fighting the Congress, fighting the press, fighting even some in his own party, locked for political reasons in what is perhaps a loving but no longer passionate marriage, and he says to himself, “What about the inner me? Where is my reward? I’m not getting any. I want sexual love!” This is the way it is.

Churchill said about being a public figure, “There is one’s public life, one’s private life and then there is one’s secret life.” But Clinton’s political enemies seethe with sanctimony, insisting against all signs to the contrary that leaders must have no personal contradictions, that their inner lives must always correspond to family and religious strictures.

Age is not Clinton’s only problem inside the Beltway. There is also creed. In an unusual article in the National Journal, media writer William Powers remarks upon the particularly harsh judgments being levied on Clinton by a coterie of liberal-to-moderate Democratic journalists and pundits who are also Catholics. The most judgmental in their commentary, says Powers, are the Irish Catholics among them. (Powers identifies himself an Irish Catholic.) The harshest is Chris Matthews, host of CNBC’s “Hardball,” who has been termed by Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales as “the screaming meanie.” Close behind in the vitriol count are New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd and Michael Kelly, editor of the National Journal and columnist for the Washington Post. Somewhat more measured is NBC’s ubiquitous Tim Russert, and more pained than censorious are Post columnists Mary McGrory and Mark Shields. Among the chorus of Catholic former Clinton staffers who have been piling on are Dee Dee Myers and Leon Panetta.

In comments to Powers, several members of this “whole gang of us” — as Matthews termed the group, many of whom are close friends — talked about the moral absolutism of their Catholic backgrounds. But what about the other Catholic tradition that emphasizes “original sin and fallen human nature?” Powers was asked by liberal Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne, a Catholic who usually supports Clinton, “Does he [Kelly] believe in the forgiveness of sins?”

In Time’s special issue last week, Myers (who is married to New York Times reporter Todd Purdum, who has been writing about Whitewater), writes of her disappointment with Clinton’s Lewinsky speech — because he wasn’t contrite or apologetic enough to suit her, because he shifted responsibility to Paula Jones and Ken Starr and because he hadn’t done right by those who gave him “their votes, their hopes, their labor and their love.”

One institution left reeling from a multitude of media and congressional allegations is the once-venerable Rose Law Firm, where Hillary Rodham Clinton used to practice law. Three of her partners, Vincent Foster, William Kennedy III and Webster Hubbell, joined the Clintons in Washington after their 1992 victory, but only Kennedy, who was Foster’s associate White House counsel, escaped back to Little Rock — and the firm — with comparatively minimal damage.

The Rose firm itself was accused of having a conflict of interest between its (and Hillary Clinton’s) representation of Jim McDougal’s Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan and the firm’s later representation of the U.S. government against Madison’s auditor. It was also accused, falsely, of having “shredded” Madison and Whitewater documents — a story that led the national news shows when broken in 1994 by the conservative Washington Times newspaper.

The Rose firm was again falsely implicated when Hillary Clinton’s infamous “missing” billing records turned up in the White House in January 1996, two years after they were subpoenaed.

And while an independent investigation into all the Rose charges eventually determined there was virtually no substance to them, the firm — the oldest west of the Mississippi River, established in 1820 — has been seriously, and permanently, damaged.

One charge frequently leveled by Clinton detractors is that the White House is continually putting roadblocks in the way of Starr’s investigation. At the top of this list are the missing Rose firm billing records of Hillary Clinton’s 60 hours of work over 15 months for McDougal, which had been removed from firm files in order to answer New York Times reporter Jeff Gerth’s questions in March 1992, during the presidential campaign.

Ignored by the media and Clinton critics is the fact that when they did surface, the records substantiated Hillary Clinton’s public and sworn statements.

Sworn testimony given in deposition by both President Clinton’s personal lawyer, David Kendall, and White House Special Counsel Jane Sherburne, who were the first to question White House secretary Carolyn Huber after she located the records, tells a largely unreported story.

Sherburne, who was hired in January 1995 from the Washington law firm Wilmer Cutler & Pickering to manage the response to all Whitewater investigations, says that Huber was at first “very unsure about when or where she had found the records in the book room,” a catch-all storage room in the family quarters of the White House. When Huber later testified, her story had become “precise,” says Sherburne. She surmises that Huber, a former Rose Law Firm secretary, “had packed them up in the governor’s mansion in Little Rock before the Clintons moved to Washington.”

All the Clintons’ boxes were stored elsewhere, says Sherburne, and then brought, a few at a time, to the book room, where Huber unpacked them and determined what should be done with the contents.

“But in the rush to clear out the book room in 1995 to make office space for the people who were going to help Mrs. Clinton write her book, ["It Takes a Village"], Carolyn probably threw the billing records she had unpacked into a box along with the old shoes and empty hangers that were also in the box, and moved it to her office to deal with later.”

So much for the “mystery.”

In Starr’s search for records, Sherburne also had the distasteful task of complying with Starr’s threat to search the Clintons’ living quarters for a mysterious box described to her as having the name “Foster” on it.

“They wouldn’t give me a clue as to what size it was supposed to be,” Sherburne said. She was told that FBI agents would do the search. “‘Are you out of your minds?’ she says she told them. “FBI agents searching the president’s private living quarters?” After negotiations, Starr’s staff told her they would trust her to do it, accompanied by the White House head usher. Sherburne asked another lawyer to join her also.

Hillary Clinton’s reaction to the search? “‘Just get in here and do it,’” says Sherburne. “Her attitude by then was, ‘It’s another indignity I have to endure, and I’m not going to waste any energy getting upset about it.” There have been reports that the search included the Clintons’ underwear and lingerie drawers — Chelsea’s too. “The whole thing was so offensive to me that I don’t want to confirm or deny that,” says Sherburne, but Salon’s interview with Sherburne left no doubt that she had indeed searched the Clintons’ underwear drawers, and every other nook and cranny of the family’s living quarters. “It took several hours. It was thorough,” she says. “And it did not turn up a box with Vincent Foster’s name on it.”

The constant stream of charges against Hillary Clinton and her partners besmirched the reputation of the Rose firm, which until then had been the premier firm in Arkansas. Rose’s reputation “was tarnished — for the most part wrongly and unfairly and in ways that can never be undone,” writes reporter Terry Carter in the July issue of the American Bar Association Journal. “The Rose Law Firm got a bum rap” and came under relentless scrutiny that “probably few could survive.” His article chronicles Rose’s descent into the maelstrom and its efforts to recover from the charges and slurs hurled at it.

Carter blames “an unholy alliance of congressional members and staff, special interest groups and the news media,” but except for Webster Hubbell’s conviction for overbilling — which the firm itself, not Starr — uncovered, “sensational allegations of wrongdoing at the firm have proved untrue, and that has gone unreported.”

The firm was left to pick up the pieces and move ahead, without what had been the expected return of Foster, whom, Carter says, many Rose attorneys regarded “as the soul of the firm.” Nine Rose lawyers have left to form their own firm, taking its most lucrative practice in securities with them.

Leading Rose today is Ronald M. Clark, who as the firm’s point man during the years of investigations was badgered by the press and by the Republicans on the Senate Whitewater Committee, particularly Chairman Alfonse D’Amato, R-N.Y. When the FDIC reported in spring 1994 that the Rose firm had no serious conflicts of interest in the Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan work, “D’Amato was furious,” according to Carter, and he ordered a re-investigation.

Under the more compliant Resolution Trust Corporation, the re-investigation was turned over to the Washington office of Pillsbury Madison & Sutro, and the RTC specifically designated Jay Stephens as the lead attorney. Stephens, President George Bush’s appointee to the office of U.S. attorney in the District of Columbia, had just been fired by President Clinton, as had all 90 U.S. attorneys, which is customary when the opposing party wins the White House.

In addition, Stephens had publicly and personally criticized President Clinton and had considered challenging for Democratic Virginia Sen. Chuck Robb’s seat in 1994 (as had Starr). Clintonites and Democrats complained loudly about Stephens’ partisanship, and Pillsbury later put the investigation into the hands of two other Pillsbury attorneys.

Pillsbury vastly widened the investigation to include all of Rose’s work on 38 savings and loans for the RTC and FDIC in the S&L “bailout” of the late 1980s and early ’90s. Like hundreds of law firms nationwide, Hubbell and Foster at Rose sought and received some of the massive amount of legal work the government was contracting out.

Then, in a stunning reversal of government policy, many of these same firms were later themselves aggressively audited and sued. But Pillsbury reported in 1995 that it still hadn’t found “substantial problems with Rose’s work.” Indeed, in 1994, Ira Parker, the RTC’s associate general counsel, told this Salon reporter, “I chose the Rose Law Firm to do the work because they were the best firm in Arkansas.”

But D’Amato also found that exoneration unacceptable, and ordered Pillsbury back to work, the edict being “to find wrongdoing,” says Carter. Pillsbury, he says, then found a few “impermissible conflicts” that were inevitable “in a small state with only so many lawyers capable of handling big matters.” The RTC demanded a return of $300,000, and Rose finally settled (as have many law firms to avoid lengthy and even more costly litigation with the government and its bottomless pockets) for $210,000.

Ron Clark observed: “They didn’t find one thing wrong with Foster’s bills.” And Pillsbury’s final 1996 report noted, regarding Rose’s work for Madison Guaranty: “It simply would not be persuasive to argue that, for $21,000 [in legal fees over several years], McDougal corrupted the Rose Law Firm and convinced half a dozen lawyers, most of whom he did not know, to join him in a scheme to violate the law … The conspiracy theory is hopelessly flawed.”

Jay Stephens refused to review and sign off on his firm’s report, despite having billed the government $68,000 for what he called his “minimal” work. Republicans had labeled Hillary Clinton’s work for Madison “substantial,” when, in fact, she had realized only about $300 from her work for Madison and McDougal.

The Pillsbury report also addressed the widely reported canard that the Rose Law Firm had “shredded” Madison Guaranty and Whitewater-related documents. Pillsbury said that any discarding of those documents was done “in a seemingly innocent context of routine purging of files.”

It turned out that a college student who had worked as a courier for Rose had leaked the shredding story to the Washington Times. He later advertised in the American Spectator that he had samples of shredded Whitewater paper to sell, although the actual documents shredded had nothing to do with Whitewater, says Carter.

Today, determined to rebound, Rose has instituted a tighter management system under Clark and changed its compensation system. “How many firms in America could withstand what we withstood and survive?” Clark asked in his interview with Carter. Not counting the hours spent on complying with congressional demands, Rose’s legal bills exceeded $1 million.

After several grillings before the Senate Whitewater Committee, D’Amato offered a left-handed apology to Clark and the Rose firm, perhaps inspired by the senator’s own approval ratings, which had dropped below 30 percent. D’Amato acknowledged that “witnesses such as Clark may find themselves in positions which are unfair,” and that he believed Clark “attempted to answer the questions to the absolute best” of his recollection, had not “withheld anything” and “answered in all candor … We have a duty to try to set that record straight and indicate that.”

That exchange, however, was not reported in any publication — not the New York Times, the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette nor the Washington Times, which broke the discredited shredding story.

But then, the Whitewater story has always been much more a media story than an actual criminal case, anyway. The Whitewater story is actually a breakdown in American journalism of historic proportions, as some of the country’s leading media outlets failed to understand — and accurately report — the complexities of a political witch hunt.

A few weeks later, on May 5, as if to dramatize Oppel’s concern, word came out of Arkansas: there would be no indictment of Hillary Rodham Clinton. (Whitewater charges against the president himself had long since disappeared.) Independent counsel Kenneth Starr’s move to close down his long-running Whitewater grand jury in Arkansas was a pivotal moment. After six years of media allegations against Hillary Clinton, largely spearheaded by the New York Times and Washington Post, and after four and a half years of independent counsel investigations, including rumblings and rumors of imminent indictments, in the end the charges of wrongdoing against the Clintons had evaporated. All this sound and fury signified nothing.

Just days before the Arkansas grand jury closed down, however, Starr and his prosecutors grilled Hillary Clinton — for the sixth time — in the White House, reigniting headlines suggesting she had committed crimes 13 years ago in her 60 hours of legal representation on behalf of James McDougal’s Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan and his real estate business. The four-and-a-half-hour interrogation kept media speculation alive, once again led by the New York Times and Washington Post, that Starr’s grand jury was preparing to indict the first lady.

But then, nothing. Just as there had been no charges during the 1996 presidential race, when another whisper campaign implied that Hillary Clinton was about to be put on trial. In bidding farewell to his Arkansas grand jury in May, Starr kept the sword hanging over her head, declaring the end of his investigation was “not in sight.” Starr’s spokesman, Charles Bakaly, added that the Arkansas probe could be moved to the independent counsel’s Washington grand jury, or even that another grand jury could be impaneled in Arkansas.

At this point, a more skeptical press might have begun to question Starr’s case against the Clintons. But instead the Washington press corps, with the Times and Post again setting the pace, turned immediately back to the Monica Lewinsky beat. Starr’s vanishing Whitewater investigation was largely overlooked.

Despite the impression left lingering by the nation’s leading newspapers, a close scrutiny of the record fails to show that Hillary Clinton is guilty of any Whitewater crimes. In spite of the strenuous efforts of the independent counsel’s lengthy, multimillion-dollar investigation, there still has not been any evidence presented to show that the first lady broke the law, or even did anything unethical.

Take the infamous missing billing records of Hillary Clinton’s work for Madison Guaranty. When the records finally turned up in the White House in 1996, after having been subpoenaed two years earlier, charges of “obstruction of justice” filled the airwaves and the halls of the Republican Congress. New York Times columnist William Safire called the first lady a “congenital liar.” Drowned out in the hubbub was the fact that the records actually substantiated in great detail what Hillary Clinton had repeatedly testified to, publicly and under oath.

A deeper examination of Hillary Clinton’s work on behalf of McDougal’s S&L, while she was a partner in the Rose Law Firm of Little Rock, corroborates her testimony that she is innocent of any wrongdoing. Clinton first represented Madison Guaranty in April 1985, when McDougal was seeking both to improve his S&L’s capital position and to invest further in the booming commercial real estate market. To raise money, McDougal wanted to sell $600,000 in uninsured preferred stock. The legal question that McDougal hired the Rose Law Firm to determine was a straightforward one: Did Arkansas state law allow a state-chartered S&L to sell preferred stock? Federal law permitted it and Reagan-era regulators were urging it on S&Ls nationwide, with the laissez faire idea that they could “grow” out of their troubles caused by government-imposed high interest rates of the late l970s and early 1980s. But McDougal needed assurance that such an offering would be legal under state law before he could proceed.

A young associate for the Rose firm, Rick Massey, procured the Madison account and did most of the work on it. Republican charges — echoed in the media — that Hillary Clinton procured the account are unsubstantiated. Clinton was made the billing partner on the account and the Rose firm asked her to exact a $2,000 monthly retainer from McDougal, because in a previous representation he had failed to pay part of his bill. After Massey researched the preferred stock question, a letter arguing that it was legal and appropriate for Madison to sell such stock was mailed, under Hillary Clinton’s signature, to Arkansas bank regulator Beverly Bassett Schaffer. Clinton also phoned Schaffer to say the letter with the law firm’s view was on its way. The response that came back from Schaffer was in agreement: Yes, Arkansas law, as well as federal law, permitted the sale of preferred stock in state-chartered thrifts. Schaffer didn’t approve the stock issue, because Madison would have to meet stringent net worth requirements before that could occur, but she did agree that such an offering would be legal.

Massey did further work for Madison under Hillary Clinton’s aegis to determine whether the stock and other securities could be sold out of the S&L itself. That, too, Schaffer’s office determined, was legal, but after months of correspondence between the Rose Law Firm and the state regulators, in December 1985 Madison finally acknowledged that it had not met the capital requirements that Schaffer had imposed. Accordingly, Madison never filed a formal application.

There was clearly no hint of impropriety involved in determining these matters for Madison, and Hillary Clinton’s actions were in no way related to the later takeover of Madison by federal regulators in 1989. And there is no contradiction between Clinton’s and Schaffer’s recollections of the matter, despite media reports to the contrary. ABC News’ Jackie Judd, for example, reported that Schaffer’s 1996 testimony “undermined” Clinton’s.

There also is no evidence of any coddling of McDougal’s S&L by Gov. Clinton-appointed state
regulator Schaffer, which Republicans have charged. Indeed, in July 1986, federal regulators — supported by Schaffer — ordered the Madison board to remove McDougal from control of the institution. The following year, after the 1986 federal tax law caused a huge nationwide drop in commercial real estate values, Schaffer sent registered letters recommending that federal regulators — who were the only ones empowered to do so — take over Madison. Two years later, in 1989, federal regulators finally put Madison out of business, prompting McDougal to complain, as have hundreds of others who were once in community banking, “The federal government came in and took my business away from me.”

In late 1985 and early ’86, before Madison fell afoul of federal regulators, the Rose firm performed some additional work for McDougal, with Hillary Clinton again acting as the Rose firm’s billing partner and another young associate, Richard Donovan, taking the lead. Donovan researched whether McDougal could build a brewery on the 1,050-acre International Development Corporation property that he and entrepreneur Seth Ward had bought and divided between them in October 1985. It turned out that he could not.

Donovan also researched whether the IDC property’s water and sewer system could sell water to another real estate development outside its property lines. That, it turned out, was legally permissible.

This brings us to a central issue in the official investigations of the Clintons. Starr and congressional investigators have focused much attention on a $1,000 option agreement involving the IDC property, which Hillary Clinton devoted two hours to working on in May 1986. Under the agreement, McDougal optioned a 22.5-acre parcel of Seth Ward’s 650-acre share of the IDC property. McDougal believed that the 22.5 acre parcel, known as “Holman Acres,” would ultimately be very valuable because on-and-off ramps were slated to be built on the property as part of a proposed “ring road” around Little Rock. But Senate Whitewater Committee testimony showed that this obscure $1,000 option agreement was never exercised.

Option agreements are ordinary, everyday transactions in the real estate industry, according to real estate experts. “Anyone can go to a stationery store and buy an option form, or download one off your computer,” says Baltimore real estate developer Richard Rymland. But this particular option has excited enormous interest from reporters, who accepted Republican charges that Ward acted as a “straw buyer” for McDougal when he bought 650 acres of the 1,050-acre IDC property. (McDougal bought the other 400 acres.) Adding to the media excitement over the purchase is the fact that Ward is Webster Hubbell’s father-in-law. Hubbell, President Clinton’s former associate attorney general, was convicted of mail fraud and tax evasion in connection with the overbilling of clients when he was a law partner at the Rose firm.

A $3.8 million investigation assigned by the federal government to the blue-chip San Francisco law firm Pillsbury Madison & Sutro, however, exonerated Hillary Clinton of any knowledge of alleged wrongdoing by McDougal or Ward in the transaction. The 1995 Pillsbury report further stated, “The theories that tie this option to wrongdoing … are strained at best.” Translation: It appears that there was nothing at all improper about the option agreement, let alone anything involving Hillary Clinton.

By March 1986, most of Ward’s share of the IDC property had been subdivided into smaller parcels and resold to Madison insiders and other McDougal cronies in transactions completely financed by the S&L. All but one of them, according to Pillsbury Madison & Sutro, “appeared to be suspect.” The Pillsbury report added, “There is no evidence, however, that the Rose Law Firm had anything to do with these sales.” Rose’s billing records do not refer to any work done on them. Nonetheless, reports in the New York Times, Washington Post and other media outlets erroneously linked Hillary Clinton to the IDC transactions through her two hours of work on the completely unconnected option agreement two months later.

The news media have also gotten very confused about Hillary Clinton’s testimony that she did not do any work for McDougal’s Castle Grande development. Castle Grand Estates was the name McDougal gave a portion of the IDC property set aside for residential development. But since federal regulators came to refer to the entire IDC transaction by the shorthand “Castle Grande,” many in the press falsely concluded that the first lady must have been involved in this residential deal. Here again, however, the documents support her testimony that she worked only on the commercial part of the IDC property, and not the residential area, which included Castle Grande Estates.

Additional Whitewater accusations made repeatedly against President and Mrs. Clinton are based on the false presumption — repeated by the Times, the Post and the New Yorker — that the fraudulent $300,000 SBA loan that the McDougals received from David Hale’s Capital Management Services, for which the McDougals were convicted, aided the Clintons financially as co-owners of the Whitewater tract. On March 9, both the Post and the Times repeated their erroneous conclusions about the loan proceeds paying Whitewater expenses. On April 8, Washington Post reporter Susan Schmidt wrote that “a portion of the ($300,000) loan proceeds benefited Whitewater Development Corp. owned jointly by the Clintons and the McDougals.” When Jim McDougal died this spring, the papers repeated the error, as they did again in May, when the Arkansas grand jury closed down.

Gilbert Cranberg, former editor of the Des Moines Register’s editorial pages, conducted a detailed analysis of the story for Harvard’s Nieman Foundation and concluded that reporters for the Post, the Times and the New Yorker, as well as Times columnist William Safire, had wrongly reported that $50,000 of the admittedly felonious $300,000 loan made by Clinton’s chief accuser, David Hale, went to prop up Whitewater.

In his report, Cranberg, who is currently George H. Gallup Professor at the University of Iowa’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication, meticulously followed the loan’s money trail and found that the reporting was done “carelessly, or incompletely, or just plain falsely.”

Cranberg points out, for example, that the New York Times edited the Associated Press story it ran about the verdict in the McDougals’ trial in a way that significantly altered the story’s meaning. The original AP story reported that prosecutors rested their case “without showing how [President] Clinton benefited” from the loan. Further, said the AP article, an FBI agent’s testimony “made no direct link between the loan” and President Clinton.” But the New York Times edited the AP piece to say that testimony was presented “that money from an allegedly fraudulent loan went to benefit the Whitewater development … (and) that nearly $50,000 from a $300,000 loan was used to cover Whitewater expenses.” The Washington Post article about the verdict similarly stated, “About $50,000 of the $300,000 loan went into a Whitewater account.” And Safire wrote, “A large chunk was used to buy property for Whitewater Development.”

The Times and the Post erred, according to Cranberg, by overlooking the fact that the “nearly $50,000″ was actually two separate chunks of money: one totaling $24,455, the other $25,000. The first chunk did not come from the $300,000 loan. The second chunk did not benefit Whitewater. The first chunk, Cranberg noted, came from an entirely different loan that had been deposited in the Whitewater account in April 1985, one year before the Hale loan. James McDougal repaid $40,000 of the bank loan in January 1986, several months before the Hale loan, more than covering that first chunk.

To say that the second portion benefited Whitewater is even more of a stretch, observed Cranberg. That $25,000 was never deposited in the Whitewater account, but in the McDougals’ personal account, and was used as a down payment for development land McDougal briefly put under the Whitewater Corporation’s name. Indeed, McDougal left Whitewater liable for the $470,000 mortgage on that land when he transferred the asset to another entity without informing the Clintons.

Most important, as noted by the Pillsbury Madison & Sutro report, the Clintons’ signatures “do not appear on the relevant documents. McDougal’s letters to them do not mention the transaction. The transaction did not benefit Whitewater or the Clintons; in fact, it left Whitewater with a large mortgage but no corresponding asset, and eventually it led to litigation and the entry of a judgment against Whitewater.”

At James McDougal’s 1996 trial, brought by the independent counsel, prosecutor Ray Jahn’s closing argument made much of the defendant’s deception of the Clintons in connection with this very matter. McDougal had testified that he placed the newly purchased property in the name of Whitewater only because, Jahn reminded jurors, he “believed he had spoken to the president and believed that the president and the first lady had abandoned their interest in Whitewater Development Corporation. Mr. McDougal testified that in March of 1986, he thought the Clintons had withdrawn from Whitewater Development Corporation. Quote, ‘It was my understanding that they had assigned their stock to Susan and me.’ End quote.”

Jahn argued that McDougal had misrepresented these facts in a futile attempt to fool the jury. He reminded the jury that President Clinton had testified that “toward the end of year 1986 … Mr. McDougal called him and said, quote, ‘I’d like for you to sign your (Whitewater) stock over to me and — so we can use it for — I think for tax purposes or something.’ Mr. Clinton then went on to say that he discussed it with his wife, and that in the end, ‘We decided not to do it.’”

Amply supported by the documentary evidence, Jahn argued that McDougal had deceived the Clintons and abused their trust. But hardly anybody in the national press appears to have been paying attention. As Cranberg noted, Michael Kelly erroneously wrote in the New Yorker, “It has now been proved in a court of law that nearly $50,000 obtained by defrauding the United States government went into a company that was co-owned by Bill and Hillary Clinton.” In an Oct. 2, 1997, New York Times story, reporter Todd Purdum wrote that $50,000 “of the loan later wound up paying for expenses related to” Whitewater. Purdum later told Cranberg he “simply repeated what he found in clips.” Cranberg also noted that Peter Boyer’s “Frontline” documentary “Once Upon a Time in Arkansas” erroneously reported that $25,000 of the loan went to cover the Whitewater debt.

In a speech to the Economic Club of Detroit just before the 1996 election, Starr repeated the misinformation about the $300,000 loan from Hale to the McDougals, saying the money “ended up on the account of Whitewater Development.” Of all people, Starr surely knew better, knew that McDougal only briefly kept the loan in the Whitewater account before he transferred the asset out, leaving a large mortgage debt for the Whitewater Corp. and, of course, for the unsuspecting Clintons as well. But the nation’s leading journalists did not leap to correct him, since they were laboring under the same misimpressions.

“Whatever you think of President Clinton, no president has ever been subjected to such intense press scrutiny of things that are alleged to have happened before he became president,” remarks longtime PBS, Wall Street Journal and NBC journalist Paul Duke. All that press scrutiny, however, has failed to convey accurately the Clintons’ roles in the long-ago Arkansas financial and legal transactions known as Whitewater. The failure by the press — particularly by the New York Times and Washington Post — to grasp the complexities of the Whitewater story and accurately report it has led to the vilification of President and Mrs. Clinton and to one of the most bitterly divisive political controversies in the nation’s history.