‘No One Is Above the Law,’ Starr Reminds Bar Group

WASHINGTON —  Independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr, locked in an executive-privilege battle with President Clinton, on Friday invoked the words of a Watergate special prosecutor who won a similar struggle with then-President Nixon: “No one--absolutely no one--is above the law.”

In a “law day” speech to the San Antonio Bar Assn., Starr recalled former special prosecutor Leon Jaworski’s comment and noted that, exactly 24 years earlier, Nixon’s lawyers had said they would invoke executive privilege to fight a subpoena for White House tapes.

In its eventual ruling compelling Nixon to surrender the tapes, the Supreme Court rejected the argument that presidential aides will be less candid if they think their conversations “will be called for in the context of a criminal prosecution,” Starr noted.

The Clinton administration is using a similar argument to protect conversations that longtime Clinton aide Bruce Lindsey and former journalist-turned-political-advisor Sidney Blumenthal had with Clinton. Lindsey and Blumenthal have declined to answer some questions from the federal grand jury investigating possible perjury and obstruction of justice growing out of Clinton’s contacts with former White House intern Monica S. Lewinsky.

Details of the argument, however, have been withheld from the public by Chief U.S. District Judge Norma Holloway Johnson, who is expected to rule on the matter.

Although executive privilege was his subject, Starr maintained in his speech that he would do his “best to steer clear of the controversy” concerning the matter with Clinton.

His remarks, however, seemed to apply to the current struggle.

“A grand jury’s job is not complete until it has, to the best of its ability, run down every lead and heard from every witness,” Starr said. “As the Supreme Court said in U.S. vs. Nixon [the 1974 Watergate tapes case], ‘the public . . . has a right to every man’s evidence, except for those persons protected by a constitutional, common-law or statutory privilege.’ ”

”. . . These exceptions to the demand for every man’s evidence are not lightly created nor expansively construed, for they are in derogation of the search for truth,” the Supreme Court said.

While acknowledging that presidents need confidential advice, Starr noted that the justices also said in the Nixon case that courts need evidence.

Nixon had argued that in enforcing a subpoena for the tapes, the courts would encroach impermissibly on the executive branch. But Starr noted that in their 8-0 ruling, the justices said that by withholding relevant evidence, the president would encroach impermissibly on the judicial branch.

Starr again cited the court’s word: “The impediment that an absolute, unqualified privilege would place in the way of the primary constitutional duty of the judicial branch to do justice in criminal prosecutions would plainly conflict with the function of the courts under Article 3” of the Constitution.