Independent Counsel

WASHINGTON -- A report by the independent counsel for the House ethics committee is highly critical of Speaker Newt Gingrich for his admitted ethical lapses, recommends a heavy fine and suggests that the matter be turned over to the Justice Department for further investigation, congressional aides said last night.The committee had tentatively scheduled a public hearing today on the case but appeared to back away as Republican committee members read the report and saw its potential to be politically damaging.

The well isn't dry yet. A few crummy drops are left. This week the House Judiciary Committee agreed to allow a bipartisan legal team to review 20 boxes of evidence still unseen from the independent counsel's investigation of President Clinton.Kenneth Starr's office has characterized the remaining material as "background" and only tangentially linked to the report sent to Congress.Democrats on the Judiciary Committee called for the bipartisan group, as Republican counterparts claimed Democrats just want find evidence to embarrass Starr.

WASHINGTON -- A day after Kenneth W. Starr's 12-hour appearance before the House Judiciary Committee, his venerable ethics adviser, Sam Dash, resigned in protest yesterday, saying Starr had "unlawfully intruded on the power of impeachment" through his "aggressive" advocacy against President Clinton.The move by Dash -- who served as chief counsel to the Senate Watergate Committee -- could further dampen the Republican drive to impeach the president. Another House Republican, Rep. John Edward Porter of Illinois, announced yesterday that he would vote against impeachment and estimated that as many as 50 Republicans in the House might not support impeachment if it reached the floor.

WASHINGTON -- Kenneth W. Starr, the independent counsel investigating President Clinton, acknowledged in a magazine interview that he and his aides have given information on the Monica Lewinsky matter to reporters.But he also insisted that these leaks were neither illegal, because they did not involve testimony before a grand jury, nor a violation of Justice Department ethics barring leaks of "substantive information" about a prosecution. In the interview with the magazine Brill's Content, Starr defended his actions as necessary "to engender confidence in the work of this office."

WASHINGTON -- With the Justice Department facing another imminent deadline on the appointment of an independent counsel, the White House said yesterday that it would soon release many more video and audiotapes of President Clinton at Democratic Party events that would show no evidence of criminal wrongdoing.White House officials said that up to 100 hours of tapes, covering about 100 events, would be made public tomorrow or Wednesday and that they would contain little that was new or revealing.

WASHINGTON - The Whitewater independent counsel concluded yesterday that an investigation that consumed six years and $52 million had found insufficient evidence to charge President Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton with any criminal wrongdoing. The anticlimactic conclusion to the inquiry into a 12-year-old Arkansas land deal removed a black cloud that had hung over the president almost from the moment he took office. It comes just four months before his term ends - though for the first lady, who is in the midst of a Senate campaign, the report may be far more consequential.

WASHINGTON -- Attorney General Janet Reno concluded yesterday that there was insufficient evidence to seek theappointment of an independent counsel to investigate Vice President Al Gore's fund-raising role in the 1996 re-election campaign.It was the second time she has investigated and cleared the vice president in connection with campaign solicitations he made from the White House.The decision, while assailed by Republicans, swept away a potentially ominous cloud of criminal inquiry that had hung over Gore's presidential ambitions.

IT WAS BACK in 1978 that a 31-year-old Arkansas attorney general and his wife were offered an investment that was too good to be true, and wasn't. For nothing down they got a half-interest in a land speculation deal called Whitewater, which failed. Their partner, James McDougal, borrowed his stake from a thrift he owned, which went belly up at a cost to taxpayers of $73 million. For such matters, some people in Arkansas never accepted Bill Clinton's election as governor. U.S. voters heard about this in 1992 and elected him president anyway.

WASHINGTON -- The usually harmonious federal court that selects independent prosecutors got into a public spat yesterday over when to stop the investigation of President Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton.The dispute ended with a 2-1 vote allowing independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr's inquiry to continue.While the ruling left the investigation where it was -- with Starr having no pending cases but reportedly still not finished -- it produced a sharp exchange among the three judges on the panel of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

The General Assembly's presiding officers have tapped a former federal prosecutor and Republican lawmaker to lead the legislature's investigation of possible violations of state ethics laws by Sen. Larry Young.Former U.S. Attorney Jervis S. Finney, who supervised the prosecution of former Maryland Gov. Marvin Mandel in the 1970s, will serve as independent counsel to the legislature's ethics committee in the Young inquiry, Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller and House Speaker Casper R. Taylor Jr. announced yesterday.