If the White House can navigate these choppy waters, it may get some eventual relief. The U.S. Court of Appeals has just issued a sealed ruling that permits Judge Norma Holloway Johnson to go ahead and investigate allegations that Ken Starr improperly leaked grand jury information to the press. Johnson's obsessive desire for secrecy notwithstanding, that could throw some heat back on the independent counsel. Should Starr be skewered for talking too much, in other words, it would be a boost for the Clinton strategy of not talking at all.
No Presidential Penance on TV
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WASHINGTON: There will be no heartfelt confession beamed to every television in the land. That was the signal emanating strongly from the White House late Monday, as aides made a concerted effort to quash the near-universal clamor for President Clinton to address the nation on the subject of Monica Lewinsky. Anonymous senior staffers started popping up all over the media, insisting there was no mea culpa in the works -- before or after his August 17 deposition. "Nobody is sitting around here going through his deposition (from the Paula Jones case) and saying, 'We can shave here, and we can switch stories there,'" one told the AP. Despite some polls showing the President's approval rating has taken a small hit over the last week, there was not a hint of any deviation from what one aide told TIME was standard Clinton procedure: "He goes in, testifies and issues a brief one-sentence statement. That's the way we've done it in the past."