Trials Begin For Clinton Lawyer Lindsey Pulled Into Whitewater Limelight

In the vanity-steeped circles of White House power, no one has craved obscurity more intently than Bruce Lindsey, the lean and loyal lawyer who is President Clinton’s closest political ally and deputy White House counsel.

From the Oval Office to the executive card table aboard Air Force One, Lindsey has been privy to the president’s every mood, whim and stratagem, shadowing him daily but rarely surfacing to tell of it.

It was all the more uncharacteristic of Lindsey, then, to suddenly rush from the West Wing inner sanctum on Wednesday and intercept reporters on the White House driveway as the latest Whitewater development engulfed the administration.

There the buttoned-down Clinton factotum offered an impassioned defense of his own reputation in the face of allegations that he conspired in 1990 to illegally conceal cash withdrawals by Clinton’s last campaign for governor of Arkansas.

“I have done nothing wrong,” Lindsey declared as colleagues in the White House observed what an unusual moment it was for this 48-year-old survivor of the original Arkansas brain trust to finally come forward with a passion.

If nothing else, Lindsey, the 1992 presidential campaign director and a confidant of Clinton for almost three decades, set a tone of resolute combat for the White House as it heads into the re-election campaign increasingly dogged by the Whitewater inquiry.

Lindsey, as the 1990 Arkansas campaign treasurer, has not been formally charged with anything but has been designated an “unindicted co-conspirator” in the trial of two Arkansas bankers who handled the campaign’s money.

Words of strong support have been offered by the president, whose days at Lindsey’s side go all the way back to their political youth as proteges in the Senate office of J. William Fulbright of Arkansas.

The two men bonded even more deeply through the fire of the 1992 presidential campaign, when Lindsey drew some tough assignments in defending Clinton from accusations of philandering and in trying to deflect the earliest press inquiries into the Arkansas land and political dealings that came to be known as Whitewater.

A stickler in attending to detail, Lindsey even cautioned flight attendants on the campaign plane against talking to the press about Clinton’s friendly asides, one flight attendant said.

But for all his classic devotion to damage control on Clinton’s behalf, Lindsey became a factor in the damage, and will likely be an even more public figure as the trial, which started on Thursday, proceeds toward the November election.

“He’s Clinton’s cut man,” one campaign worker said, attempting a boxing analogy that seems outdated as Lindsey himself is drawn deeper into the Whitewater arena.

He was designated a potential target last year after the Whitewater independent counsel broadened the inquiry into the Arkansas years.

He was eventually spared under the statute of limitations. But administration officials contend that an effort will be made to use the bankers’ trial as leverage to indict Lindsey under a different law in time to influence the November election.