Clinton Aides Optimistic on Whitewater

WASHINGTON —  Although chafing over the length of independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr’s two-year Whitewater investigation, President Clinton’s advisors said Tuesday that they believe Starr ultimately will conclude there are insufficient grounds for alleging criminal wrongdoing by either the president or his wife.

Commenting on a statement by Starr that his inquiry has reached a “critical juncture” and that he is proceeding expeditiously, a Clinton advisor suggested that the counsel is “looking to produce a bullet-proof report that shows it was a credible investigation.”

The optimistic White House predictions come at a time when the huge kettle of allegations and suspicions known as Whitewater has returned to a boil after several weeks of relative calm. During the early fall, it was widely assumed in Washington that Starr would not seek indictments or issue a public report before the election for fear of appearing to be partisan.

But with the election over, conservative critics of Clinton have unleashed a flood of speculation that Hillary Rodham Clinton faces indictment and that Clinton is on the verge of issuing pardons to keep potential witnesses from testifying.

Starr, while consistently declining to comment on the outcome of his many-pronged inquiry, provoked more speculation by discussing the investigation in a speech Monday to the Economic Club of Detroit.

He declared that his investigation was making “very substantial progress on all fronts” and is moving along “very, very quickly.”

Starr said that it would be improper for him to answer what a club member called “the burning question” of whether the president or first lady would eventually face criminal allegations.

It was in response to Starr’s comments and the feverish speculation now gripping Washington that Clinton advisors offered guarded optimism that there would be no criminal allegations against the Clintons, only a detailed public report of the independent counsel’s investigation.

Even if those predictions prove true, indictments against lower-level officials or others close to Clinton remain possible. And renewed focus on Whitewater, even if it did not involve charges against either of the Clintons, could cast a pall over the president’s second term and make it more difficult for him to maintain an atmosphere of cooperation with the Republican-controlled Congress.

Starr continues to issue subpoenas for documents in the inquiry, which over the last two years has expanded to include not only the original Whitewater real estate venture involving the Clintons but the suicide of Deputy White House Counsel Vincent Foster, the firing of White House travel office workers, the disappearance and reappearance of documents under subpoena, White House procurement of hundreds of FBI files and the truthfulness of testimony by the Clintons and several of their friends and White House aides.

While there has been little talk that the president might face criminal allegations, many Republican critics, conservative columnists and even some Democrats who support the Clintons have suggested that Starr will seek an indictment of the first lady.

Arkansas Democratic Sens. David Pryor and Dale Bumpers have attacked Starr’s investigation as partisan and said that they expect him to seek an indictment of Mrs. Clinton.

The president has publicly accused Starr of being out to “get” him. And in his Detroit speech, Starr, a Republican who served as solicitor general in the Bush administration, noted that as indictments and convictions have mounted in his investigation, there have been “increasing accusations of a partisan agenda.”

“As history teaches us--and as lawyers on my staff who have investigated and prosecuted official malfeasance will tell you--attacks and accusations are routine in public integrity cases,” Starr said. “As to this investigation, the charge is utterly wrong.”