Starr Targets Criticism Of Investigation Attorney For Subpoenaed White House Aide Says Counsel Is ‘Out Of Control’

Independent counsel Kenneth Starr signaled Tuesday that he will prosecute White House officials if he believes they have spread false information about his staff - escalating to frenetic proportions his confrontation with President Clinton and his aides.

In an extraordinary day of rhetorical combat, Starr summoned to a federal court Sidney Blumenthal, a senior Clinton aide who has helped map the White House’s political assaults on Starr.

Starr took the additional step of subpoenaing any notes or records of Blumenthal’s that deal with news media contacts - prompting reactions of outrage from the White House and elsewhere.

“It’s us today and probably you tomorrow,” presidential spokesman Mike McCurry told reporters.

The developments show a willingness by Starr to take a particularly confrontational tack with his White House adversaries and to absorb fiercely critical reviews in the process.

Said Steven R. Shapiro, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union: “The independent counsel is a government official, and the conduct of his office is fair game for public comment and criticism. … What Ken Starr perceives as suspicious behavior, the framers of the Constitution saw in a very different light. They called it free speech.”

By seeking to investigate what White House aides might be telling the media about his staff, Starr has expanded further the scope of his investigation of allegations that Clinton had an affair with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky and encouraged her and others to lie about it.

“What is it that says if you criticize Ken Starr, you’re creating an obstruction of justice?” asked former Clinton campaign consultant James Carville, a longtime critic of the Whitewater independent counsel. “I don’t understand why Sid Blumenthal is being subjected to this kind of harassment for talking to reporters.”

The chief federal judge overseeing aspects of Starr’s investigation ruled that prosecutors are entitled to question Blumenthal and to obtain relevant notes and other materials that he compiled after joining the White House staff last August. According to his attorney, Blumenthal is now scheduled to testify before the grand jury Thursday.

“We view it as an assault on the First Amendment,” said Blumenthal’s lawyer, Jo Marsh. “I think this is obviously intended to … intimidate the press.

“Our conclusion after today is (that) Ken Starr is out of control. He has total disregard for the rights of private citizens and for anyone else other than his staff.”

Starr’s subpoenaing of Blumenthal also amounted to a show of support for two prosecutors in his office, Bruce Udolf and Michael W. Emmick, whose personal and professional conduct has been the subject of innuendo and attack.

Udolf, known for his aggressive pursuit of public corruption cases in Miami, in the 1980s was fined $50,000 by a judge in Georgia because he kept a suspect in jail for four days without either a bail hearing or access to an attorney. Emmick, who until last July held a senior position in the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles, was once accused by a federal judge of bringing an indictment out of vengeance.

Without naming Emmick or Udolf, Starr sought to explain his office’s subpoenaing of Blumenthal.

“This office has received repeated press inquiries indicating that misinformation is being spread about personnel involved in this investigation,” Starr said in a statement. “We are using traditional and appropriate techniques to find out who is responsible and whether their actions are intended to intimidate prosecutors and investigators, impede the work of the grand jury, or otherwise obstruct justice.”

Federal law makes it a crime for someone “by any threatening letter or communication” to “influence, intimidate or impede” a member of a grand jury, a prosecutor or certain other officials.

The war of words over the subpoenaing of Blumenthal overshadowed the appearance at the courthouse of Terry Lenzner, whose privateinvestigation firm has assisted the defense of the president and first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton throughout Starr’s 3-year investigation of the Whitewater controversy.

More recently, Lenzner’s firm also has worked in tandem with the lawyers who are defending Clinton against the sexual-harassment lawsuit brought by Paula Corbin Jones, a former Arkansas government worker.

In a joint statement, lawyers representing the Clintons said that the services of Lenzner’s investigative firm have contributed to a proper, “vigorous defense.”

“There is public information available, which, of course, it is our duty as counsel to research and gather,” the Clintons’ lawyers said, adding: “But we have not investigated, and are not investigating, the personal lives of … prosecutors, investigators, or members of the press.”

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