STARR WINS FIRST ROUND ON PRIVILEGE.

Byline: Angie Cannon and Aaron Epstein Knight Ridder Newspapers

Sidestepping comparisons to Watergate, President Clinton and his lawyers changed their legal strategy Monday and abandoned their executive-privilege fight with Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr.

The decision opens the way for grand jury testimony by White House communications aide Sidney Blumenthal in Starr's investigation of sex and perjury allegations involving Clinton and former White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

But White House lawyers will continue to invoke attorney-client privilege to shield another aide, Bruce Lindsey, from answering questions before the same grand jury. Lindsey is a longtime Clinton friend and White House lawyer.

The White House maneuver was designed to counter Starr's unusual request last week to have the Supreme Court settle a dispute over executive privilege quickly by bypassing the federal appeals court.

The White House had tried to keep Lindsey and Blumenthal from answering certain questions about the Lewinsky case on the grounds that both men were covered by executive privilege, a special advantage that in certain instances protects the privacy of the president's discussions with his advisers.

But Chief U.S. District Judge Norma Holloway Johnson ruled last month that the privilege Lindsey and Blumenthal enjoyed was superseded by Starr's search for information in his investigation. By not appealing that ruling, the White House avoided obvious parallels with Watergate and President Richard Nixon's attempt to use executive privilege 24 years ago to block release of the Watergate tapes that eventually drove him out of office.

The legal moves came on a busy Monday full of developments in the case.

The Justice Department agreed to appeal a federal judge's decision that Starr can question three Secret Service agents about what they may have seen or heard while on the job protecting the president. The Secret Service has opposed having agents testify.

Starr himself commanded the spotlight Monday, suggesting in a speech in Charlotte, N.C., that Clinton and his lawyers were misguided if they invoked attorney-client privilege about his discussions with Lindsey on the Lewinsky matter. Starr said the courts already have decided that government lawyers don't have such a privilege in criminal cases involving public officials.

In a clear reference to Clinton's attempts to shield his aides from testimony and the Justice Department's fight to keep Secret Service agents out of the grand jury room, Starr said: ``Litigants often try to concoct new privileges by contending that their relationship is just as important as the attorney-client relationship or the spousal relationship.''

Starr also said lawyers ``have a duty not to use their skills to impede the search for truth.''

White House Counsel Charles Ruff said Monday that dropping the executive privilege claim was not to avoid unflattering comparisons to Watergate.

``If we were worried about these echoes, we wouldn't even have started it,'' Ruff said.

Starr, however, continued seeking expedited review by the Supreme Court of the attorney-client protection Clinton is seeking for Lindsey.

In legal papers, Starr's request faced opposition from White House attorneys, saying such an extraordinary review by the court has occurred only in cases of overwhelming national emergency. The issue is one on which ``no court of appeals has spoken,'' the legal papers say.

``This is not the steel seizure. . . . This is not U.S. vs. Nixon,'' Ruff said, referring to President Truman's seizure of the nation's steel mills in 1952 and the famous Watergate case.

Instead, White House attorneys said the federal appeals court should decide the case and could be held by the end of July. Then either side could decide whether to appeal to the Supreme Court.

But if the Supreme Court agrees to hear the case quickly, White House attorneys suggested that opening briefs be completed in the next four weeks, with remaining briefing completed in eight weeks. The White House suggested the case be set for argument at the court's convenience, not June 29 as Starr had requested.

``This schedule . . . would not impose an undue burden on a grand jury investigation that is currently only 4 months old,'' wrote W. Neil Eggleston, a private lawyer hired by the White House to handle privilege issues.