LEGAL TENDER

(4 of 4)

In the meantime, Clinton appeared to be laying the groundwork for a disclosure of his own when he said he could not remember whether he too had solicited campaign money at the White House. The President seemed eager to avoid a trap of his own making, telling reporters he could not flatly rule out ever saying "while I was talking to them [supporters], 'Well, we need your help' or 'I hope you'll help us.'" But after the press conference, a White House aide told TIME that Clinton has been overheard asking donors in receiving lines and at informal gatherings for "support" and another longtime associate said Clinton had pitched for funds over the phone.

So after a week in which nearly everyone repented but no one confessed, things seemed to be returning to normal. A new independent counsel was, for the moment, a distant prospect. Janet Reno was content to let her own task force of 25 lawyers and FBI agents look into whether foreign money was funneled illegally into either party's coffers last year. "When the independent-counsel statute is triggered," Reno said once more, "I will take appropriate action." Even Kenneth Starr, the once and future Pepperdine law-school dean, was back in Little Rock, Arkansas, working an old angle: trying to discover how Indonesia's Lippo Group and seven other enterprises friendly to Clinton put his good pal, Webb Hubbell, on the payroll for a total of more than $400,000 after he resigned from the Justice Department in 1994. Starr wants to know if the White House or its agents urged Lippo and others with links to the Administration to hire Hubbell so he wouldn't cooperate with Starr's investigation into Whitewater.

Making that charge stick would be difficult. Starr would have to show that any White House-organized work for Hubbell was intended not simply to help an old friend but also to buy his silence. Obstruction of justice is hard to prove. But it is one of those things that are both wrong and illegal.

--With reporting by Karen Tumulty and Michael Weisskopf/Washington