WASHINGTON (AP) - President Clinton's lawyers once searched for an innocent alternative to Monica Lewinsky's sensational story. Now six months after their client admitted to an affair, they get their first chance to question the former White House intern.
Presidential advisers say the lawyers probably will handle the deposition Monday gingerly, hoping to coax her to repeat statements that are helpful to the president without challenging her credibility.
Along the way, they might also explore her treatment by prosecutors who were pressing hard for her cooperation, a subject that was ignored before the grand jury, according to advisers familiar with the White House's emerging strategy for Monday's videotaped deposition.
These advisers, inside and outside the White House, cautioned on Friday that final decisions would not come until later this weekend.
They stressed the goal was to use their side's four hours of questioning of Ms. Lewinsky to embolden the 44 Senate Democrats who have already voted to dismiss the case and who hold the ability to acquit Clinton at the impeachment trial.
House prosecutors are expected to zero in on details of the relationship in an effort to show the president's efforts to find Ms. Lewinsky a job were inextricably connected to her filing a false affidavit denying their affair and that the hiding of gifts he had given her was part of a scheme by Clinton to obstruct justice.
In stark contrast, the White House legal team is likely to work the margins of Ms. Lewinsky's account, accentuating her most favorable past testimony. Chief among those statements was her assertion last August: "No one ever asked me to lie and I was never promised a job for my silence."
One adviser, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the goal would be to show that any cover stories Ms. Lewinsky and the president developed were aimed at hiding their relationship from the beginning "like any two embarrassed adults" and were not constructed later to obstruct justice.
The president's defenders have also discussed posing some questions about the threat of prosecution she and her parents were under as Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr's office tried to compel her cooperation.
"Ms. Lewinsky was never asked by Mr. Starr's assistants in the grand jury about the kinds of coercive threats which were made against her and her family," said former Watergate prosecutor Richard Ben-Veniste, an outside adviser to the White House. "And since she will be under oath, she will be obliged to answer questions of that nature."
Ben-Veniste said Clinton's lawyers could use their questions to point out that when FBI agents and Starr's prosecutors confronted Ms. Lewinsky in a hotel on Jan. 16, 1998, and threatened her with perjury in the Paula Jones case, her lawyers had not yet filed with the court clerk the affidavit denying a sexual relationship with Clinton.
"It was absurd but I'm sure very real to her at the time," Ben-Veniste said.
Two lawyers who have played a role in the president's defense at the trial, Deputy White House Counsel Cheryl Mills and private attorney Nicole Seligman, are preparing for the Lewinsky interview although it is unclear who will actually pose the questions for Clinton's side.
The president's supporters, mindful that Ms. Lewinsky would risk her protection from prosecution if she altered her account substantially, are taking pains to portray her in public as truthful and consistent.
It is a marked difference from a year ago when presidential lawyers sought out inconsistencies in her story, hoping to discover an innocent explanation for her 37 visits to the White House after she was no longer employed there. Other presidential supporters were dismissing her as a "stalker."
"I don't see her as a hostile witness at all," said former presidential special counsel Lanny Davis, who continues to advise the White House. "On 23 occasions, she was questioned by Ken Starr's staff, anxious to bulldoze her, and I admire the fact that she has stuck to the truth throughout."
But while both Ms. Lewinsky and Clinton now admit to an affair, they disagree on aspects of their relationship that are key to the House prosecutors' obstruction and perjury cases.
For instance, they differ about the timing of their sexual intimacy. She says it began in November 1995 when she was still an intern; he says it began in early 1996, after she was a full-time employee.
White House lawyers are likely to avoid that sensitive issue in the deposition, and instead contend in their closing arguments that any conflicts are just innocent differences in recall, advisers said.