PRESIDENT'S DEFENSE CHALLENGES CHARGES.

Byline: Steven Thomma and Aaron Epstein Knight Ridder Newspapers

Opening the defense for President Clinton on Tuesday, lawyer Charles Ruff said Clinton is innocent of a ``witch's brew'' of charges against him but that even if he were guilty, he should be allowed to finish his term.

He gave a point-by-point rebuttal of the accusations, in one case noting that presidential pal Vernon Jordan could hardly have been conspiring with Clinton on a key date because Jordan was aboard a plane to the Netherlands at the time.

And he gave a broad constitutional argument that the charges, even if true, would not warrant removing Clinton from office because they did not affect the government.

``William Jefferson Clinton is not guilty of the charges that have been preferred against him. He did not commit perjury, he did not obstruct justice. He must not be removed from office,'' Ruff said.

Speaking for more than two hours in a gravely monotone, Ruff gave an overview of the defense he and other lawyers will lay out over the next two days.

At the end of its presentation - to be made by White House lawyers and one former member of the Senate - the Clinton team will urge the Senate to vote to end the nation's second presidential impeachment trial without letting it continue either to a second phase with witnesses or to a vote on conviction or acquittal.

``We will have demonstrated beyond any doubt that there is no basis on which the Senate can or should convict the president of any of the charges brought against him,'' Ruff said from the wheelchair he has used since losing his ability to walk to a polio-like disease as a young man.

He also urged the Senate not to lengthen the trial by allowing witnesses, as House prosecutors, or managers, have requested.

``You have before you all that you need to reach this conclusion: There was no basis for the House to impeach, and there is (not) now and never will be any basis for the Senate to convict,'' Ruff said.

Ruff drew compliments from both sides of the aisle.

Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, said Ruff ``seemed to have some documentary evidence that would seem to indicate that they have good grounds to challenge some facts.'' Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., added: ``He gave us food for thought.''

Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., said Ruff did an excellent job and that his quiet presentation ``made his presentation even more profound.''

One of the House prosecutors, Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., also credited Ruff's presentation, but dismissed his defense as weak.

``I think he put the president's behavior in the best spin possible,'' he said, but added: ``The facts and the law are against him. We showed that last week, and we will continue to show that.''

Spoke two hours

Though he was allowed eight hours on the first day of defense arguments, Ruff spoke only about two hours, ending in midafternoon as the Senate prepared to hear from the main character in the impeachment drama, Clinton himself.

While Clinton has signaled he will not testify in his own defense, he did speak to the senators who will judge him when he appeared before a joint session of the Senate and House on Tuesday night for his annual State of the Union address.

He did not mention the impeachment trial, but did praise the state of the country as sound and prosperous. Ruff had urged senators to heed the speech as evidence that neither the government nor the country was endangered by any of Clinton's actions.

Ruff, who served as a special prosecutor in the Watergate case, started by attacking the two articles of impeachment passed by the House last month.

He said the House Judiciary Committee did a sloppy job putting together the charges, lumping accusations together in a way that made it difficult to defend against them. They sent the Senate a ``witch's brew of charges considered, charges considered and abandoned, and charges never considered at all,'' Ruff said.

``What you have before you is the product of nothing more than a rush to judgment,'' Ruff said.

In the first presidential impeachment trial since 1868, Clinton is accused of trying to obstruct justice by concealing his extramarital relationship with former aide Monica Lewinsky from the lawyers for Paula Jones, who was suing him for sexual harassment, and for committing perjury when he denied his earlier actions to a federal grand jury.

``We will defend the president on the facts and on the law and on the constitutional principles that must guide your deliberations,'' Ruff said. ``Some have suggested that we fear to do so. We do not.''

Going through the main accusations one at a time, Ruff argued why each was false. Among them:

Witness tampering with Lewinsky. Clinton and Jordan are accused of accelerating a job search to help Lewinsky after they discovered she might be subpoenaed in the Jones case. House prosecutors say the search got high priority Dec. 11, 1997, the day Judge Susan Webber Wright ruled that Jones was entitled to information about government employees with whom the president had had sexual relations. But Ruff said Jordan could not have known about Webber's decision that day because he was ``actually on a plane for Amsterdam by the time the judge issued her order.''

Witness tampering with Betty Currie. Clinton is accused of pressuring his secretary to agree with a false version of his relationship with Lewinsky.

Ruff said Clinton and Currie both denied any pressure, and Currie was not on a witness list at the time.

Encouraging Lewinsky to lie. Clinton is accused of encouraging Lewinsky to submit a false affidavit to the Jones lawyers and to lie if she were ever questioned.

Ruff noted that ``Lewinsky herself has repeatedly and forcefully denied that anyone ever asked her to lie. There's no way to get around that flat denial.''

Even if Clinton did commit any or all of those crimes, Ruff said, they are not the kind of crimes envisioned by the framers of the Constitution when they called for impeaching a president for treason, bribery or other ``high crimes and misdemeanors.''

``Before casting a vote of guilty or not guilty,'' he told the Senate, ``you must decide not only whether the president committed the acts with which he is charged, but whether those acts so seriously undermine the integrity of our governmental structure that he must be removed from office.''

To buttress his argument, Ruff used the words of Republicans who argued in the past that a president would have to endanger the government to warrant being removed from office.

Notably, he quoted 10 House Republicans who took a joint position during the proposed impeachment of President Nixon in 1974: ``The framers of the United States Constitution intended that the president should be removable by the legislative branch only for serious misconduct dangerous to the system of government established by the Constitution.''

Among the 10: Trent Lott of Mississippi, now the Senate majority leader.

CAPTION(S):

box

Photo: (color) Ruff