STARR'S EVIDENCE BACK IN FOREFRONT; CLINTON LEGAL TEAM PLANS BOLDER DEFENSE.

Byline: Jill Abramson The New York Times

The Senate's agreement on how to conduct the initial phase of President Clinton's impeachment trial sent House prosecutors and the president's lawyers diving this weekend back into the voluminous evidence collected by Kenneth Starr, the independent counsel.

In the 7,000 pages of grand jury testimony and boxes of supplementary evidence, Rep. Henry Hyde, the leader of the House prosecution team, sees a clear and convincing picture of perjury and obstruction of justice so grave that Clinton should be removed from office.

From that same pile of evidence, Clinton's legal team is putting together a more aggressive defense than the one it presented unsuccessfully to the House - one it now says should lead to the president's acquittal. The White House agreed to accept the record of testimony amassed by the independent counsel, although Clinton's lawyers profoundly disagree with Starr and Hyde about what the evidence shows.

His lawyers will argue that instead of proving that Clinton lied or obstructed justice, the evidence shows only that he tried to conceal the embarrassing details of an improper relationship with Monica Lewinsky, according to interviews and legal documents they have prepared for the Senate trial. Though the president's actions and behavior were ``reprehensible,'' White House counsel Charles Ruff has said, they were not unlawful.

The Senate's Republicans and Democrats spent this week sparring over whether to call witnesses, virtually all of whom have already testified under oath before Starr's grand jury. On Friday they agreed to defer until late January a decision on whether to summon witnesses - and if so, which ones.

That decision will dramatically affect the length and tenor of the trial. And perhaps more important, both the president's prosecutors and his defenders can point to many of the same witnesses and testimony as buttressing their respective cases.

The impeachment proceedings in the House involved legal jousting over the constitutional standards for high crimes and misdemeanors. Although those arguments will be heard again in the Senate, the House prosecutors and White House lawyers are preparing to lock horns directly on the factual details of the case. In those details, each side sees a starkly different picture.

For example, the prosecution team wants to call Betty Currie, Clinton's secretary, and Vernon Jordan, a Washington lawyer and presidential confidant, to question them, respectively, about gifts and job assistance Lewinsky received from Clinton.

Gifts, job search

Central to the impeachment article charging the president with obstruction of justice are accusations that Clinton schemed with Lewinsky to hide gifts sought in the Paula Jones lawsuit against the president, and that efforts by Jordan to help Lewinsky find a job were intended to buy her silence in the Jones case.

But the testimony of Currie and Jordan before the grand jury also forms the cornerstone of Clinton's defense against obstruction. Currie testified that it was Lewinsky who asked her to retrieve the gifts, and Jordan said there was no quid pro quo between his help in finding Lewinsky a job and her affidavit in the Jones case denying a sexual relationship with the president.

The testimony of Lewinsky also cuts both ways. She testified that Clinton engaged in sexual activity with her that fell within the narrow definition of sexual relations in the Jones case.

That pits her word against the president's denial before the grand jury Aug. 17 that he had lied in his civil deposition in the Jones case. In the deposition, he said he had not engaged in sexual relations with Lewinsky. His insistence that his testimony in the Jones case was not perjurious is another charge outlined in the impeachment article.

But Lewinsky also testified that no one asked her to lie and that she was not offered help finding a job to secure her silence in the Jones case. That testimony undercuts the heart of the obstruction-of-justice case against Clinton.

Subjective views

Whether or not witnesses are called, the prosecution and the defense will highlight selected portions of the testimony of crucial figures like Lewinsky, Currie and Jordan for their own purposes.

That is all the more certain given that much of the case against Clinton is circumstantial and turns on subjective views of his intentions and interactions with Lewinsky, Currie, Jordan, other White House aides and his lawyers.

Perhaps the most difficult charges for Clinton to rebut are contained in the article of impeachment charging him with lying before the grand jury about the nature and details of his relationship with Lewinsky, who testified in detail about 11 sexual encounters with the president. That testimony is perhaps the most problematic evidence confronting his lawyers.

Because Clinton told the grand jury he did not have sexual relations with Lewinsky as defined in the Jones case, the evidence on this point boils down to his word against hers.

The president's legal team must decide whether to try to undermine Lewinsky's credibility with other evidence. Among that evidence is the testimony of witnesses and friends of hers who said Lewinsky told them things that may have been untrue, like the Secret Service taking Clinton to her apartment.

Of course, if Clinton's lawyers paint Lewinsky as a liar, their ability to use her testimony to support other aspects of their case, particularly on obstruction of justice, could be hindered.

The prosecution team will try to broaden its perjury case by charging that Clinton lied about other details, like when his relationship with Lewinsky began, the frequency of their meetings and the number of times they had sexually explicit telephone conversations.

`Inappropriate'

The president's legal team will emphasize that he admitted to an ``inappropriate, intimate'' relationship with Lewinsky before the grand jury. They will argue that differences between his and Lewinsky's descriptions of the number and specific details of their sexual encounters are not significant enough to support a perjury charge.

Additionally, Clinton has testified that he thought the sexual activity in which he engaged with Lewinsky fell outside the definition of sexual relations in the Jones case. However, this argument has provoked criticisms that the president and his lawyers are engaged in tortured legal hairsplitting.

The perjury article of impeachment also charges Clinton with lying when he told the grand jury he did not lie in the Jones case and with letting his lawyer in the Jones case, Robert S. Bennett, falsely deny that the president and Lewinsky were sexually involved. It also accuses him of lying to his aides about his dealings with Lewinsky. The charges involving Bennett and the aides are repackaged in the second article of impeachment involving obstruction of justice as well.

Clinton's legal team thinks these allegations are more easily rebutted. They will argue that he thought he was being technically truthful, even if he was misleading, during the Jones deposition. Hardly intending to lie to his aides in order to influence their future testimony, his defenders will explain, Clinton was trying to conceal from his friends and family an improper relationship about which he was deeply embarrassed.

CAPTION(S):

Box

BOX: CHARGES AND DENIALS

The articles of impeachment voted by the House made 11 specific charges agsinst President Clinton, against which his lawyers have raised specific defenses.

Source: The New York Times

From the report of the House Judiciary Committee. Submission by counsel for President Clinton to the House Judiciary Committee and summary of arguments against the articles of impeachment prepared by the president's legal team.