BY RICHARD A. SERRANO
Los Angeles Times
WASHINGTON -- Saying he may give the White House more time to press its case, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry J. Hyde insisted Saturday that the efforts to defend President Clinton should directly address charges that he lied and obstructed justice in the Monica S. Lewinsky matter.
Mr. Hyde was responding to a last-minute request by the White House for up to four days of hearings before the panel votes on whether Mr. Clinton should be impeached. Sources said the sides may end up compromising today on a schedule of two days for the Clinton defense that allows the committee to vote on articles of impeachment by week's end.
Mr. Hyde is concerned that the White House, in its request for up to four days, is trying to delay the impeachment inquiry until next year and that the Clinton lawyers would rather call historians and constitutional experts than answer whether the president sought to conceal his relationship with Ms. Lewinsky.
In another development Saturday, some Democratic staffers on the committee admitted being upset with the White House's failure to discuss with them the current strategy for presenting a Clinton defense.
The staffers said they knew nothing beforehand of the Friday night request from the White House for three to four days of testimony. And they agreed that, as Republicans have charged, the Clinton administration may be trying to put the matter over until next year when a friendlier Congress with more Democratic members is sworn in.
The latest skirmishing between Mr. Hyde and the White House signals an even more divisive showdown in the committee as its 21 Republicans and 16 Democrats head toward an expected vote later this week on whether to send articles of impeachment to the full House floor.
While at least one article is expected to pass in the committee, the jockeying over Clinton's defense strategy could be seen as a way for the White House and the Republicans to influence the rest of the House.
The White House wants to challenge the very legitimacy of the probe; Republicans argue that Mr. Clinton's lawyers are trying to change the subject.
Jim Kennedy, a spokesman for the White House Counsel's office, on Saturday identified three of the witnesses the White House wants to call this week as former Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, Bruce A. Ackerman, a leading constitutional scholar at Yale University, and Robert Sean Wilentz, a Princeton University historian.
