Starr's Fellow Traveler

Even in the fang-baring world of Bill Clinton's most dedicated pursuers, Larry Klayman is in a class by himself. In just four years as head of Judicial Watch, the nonprofit group he founded and operates, Klayman has filed 18 legal actions against the Clinton Administration. Once a relatively obscure trade lawyer, he now goes after anyone he thinks might know something, anything about the skulduggeries he feels sure the White House is behind. Making the most of the rules of pretrial discovery, Klayman has subpoenaed such past and present Clinton insiders as George Stephanopoulos and Paul Begala--as well as such bewildered small fry as Begala's assistant--subjecting them to protracted depositions at which his questions are, to say the least, wide-ranging. (He demanded that one recent target disclose the name of his cats.) In his free time Klayman is also suing his mother, claiming she owes him $40,000 for nursing care he provided for his late grandmother.

His conspiracy spinning, together with his self-aggrandizing blast faxes to reporters--"Klayman looks to no one, other than God, for guidance and direction," a recent fax proclaimed--has won him his share of attention in Washington, some of it puzzled, some mocking. In the online magazine Slate, Jacob Weisberg declares that "Klayman is off his rocker." But at least one of Klayman's early lines of pursuit has been picked up by independent counsel Kenneth Starr, a man who has faced, and faced down, more than a few complaints about his own investigative techniques. Last week Harold Ickes, the former White House deputy chief of staff, was brought before Starr's grand jury to answer questions about how information from the supposedly confidential Pentagon personnel file of Linda Tripp, Starr's chief witness, found its way into the press.

It was Klayman who led Starr to Ickes. (Ickes, in fact, is the man whose cats Klayman wanted to know about.) In March New Yorker writer Jane Mayer reported that in 1969, at age 19, Tripp was arrested and charged with grand larceny, charges that were later reduced. Mayer also noted that Tripp had not disclosed the arrest on her Pentagon security-clearance form, information that Mayer got from Pentagon public affairs chief Kenneth Bacon. Starr got to thinking about Ickes because of news accounts of a contentious six-hour deposition that Ickes underwent as part of a Judicial Watch lawsuit. In reply to one of Klayman's many questions, Ickes said he and Bacon had once briefly talked about Tripp over a Chinese take-out dinner.

What Starr wants to know is whether anybody deliberately set out to compromise Tripp, his chief witness. Bacon and his deputy, Clifford Bernath--who were also deposed by Klayman, their depositions later subpoenaed by Starr--insist that the release of information about Tripp's application, which violated the federal Privacy Act, was an innocent mistake, not an order from the White House. Klayman is pleased but nonchalant about shepherding at least one target into Starr's line of fire. "Our goal," he says, "is not to help any investigation other than our own."