WHITE HOUSE APPEALS TO HIGH COURT.

Byline: Linda Greenhouse The New York Times

In an appeal filed with the Supreme Court on Monday, the White House asked the court to overturn what it called the ``extraordinary'' and ``indefensible'' ruling by a federal appeals court that notes taken by White House lawyers in meetings with Hillary Rodham Clinton were not protected by the lawyer-client privilege and had to be surrendered to Kenneth Starr, the independent counsel.

The brief was filed by a team of outside lawyers brought in by the Justice Department last year to fight what had been a secret battle until the appeals court's opinion was unsealed 10 days ago. That opinion upheld the validity of a grand jury subpoena seeking material that in the private sector would clearly be protected against forced disclosure.

But the appeals court ruled that at least in the context of a federal grand jury investigation there is no lawyer-client privilege for conversations between government lawyers and public officials.

The independent counsel, who has been investigating the tangled Whitewater affair for nearly three years, will oppose the White House appeal in a brief to be filed this month. The accelerated timetable was devised by the two sides to enable the court to announce before its summer recess whether it would hear the case when the new term begins next fall.

Beyond the obvious implications for the first lady - a ``central figure'' in the investigation, according to a motion Starr filed last summer in Federal District Court in Little Rock as part of his effort to obtain the lawyers' notes - this case raises far-reaching questions about the role of government lawyers.

Are they in effect ``independent auditors,'' as the appeals court suggested, whose duty is to the government itself or do they have the same ethical duties and confidential relationships as other lawyers when they advise individual clients?

The White House brief framed that point in broad terms, describing the issue as ``whether the federal government is entitled to the protections for its lawyers' activities enjoyed by all other organizations.''

Asserting that the decision put at risk the ability of officials throughout the government to obtain ``the candid and informed legal assistance necessary to the performance of their functions,'' the White House brief made its points in muscular language that foreshadowed a rhetorical battle equal to the high legal stakes if the court takes the case.

``No previous independent counsel has had the audacity or imagination to launch such a direct attack upon the seemingly well-established rights of government clients to unfettered assistance of counsel,'' the brief said.

The three senior lawyers who wrote the brief - Andrew Frey, Kenneth Geller, and Lawrence Robbins, all partners in the Chicago-based law firm of Mayer, Brown & Platt - are all veterans of the solicitor general's office.

The Mayer, Brown team was hired by the Justice Department - at what for high-powered Washington lawyers is the minuscule rate of $54 an hour - to represent the Office of the President to avoid any potential conflict of interest between the Office of the Independent Counsel and the attorney general, who under the Ethics in Government Act can theoretically remove Starr from office.

In the lower courts the case bore the routine name of ``In re: Grand Jury Subpoena,'' its name in the Supreme court underscores its unusual nature, ``Office of the President v. Office of Independent Counsel.''

The 2-to-1 decision of the 8th U.S. Cicuit Court of Appeals which sits in St. Louis and has jurisdiction over federal courts in Arkansas, where the grand jury is sitting, said that ''to allow any part of the federal government to use its in-house attorneys as a shield against the production of information relevant to a federal criminal investigation would represent a gross misuse of public assets.''