Worse yet, Mr. Bakaly was referred to the Justice Department for prosecution by Mr. Starr himself, almost as if sacrificing his flack would absolve the prosecutor and his other deputies of doing a lot of leaking themselves. But if Mr. Bakaly is forced to testify on his own behalf when his public trial takes place this week in Washington, he may yet reveal who really leaked and lied.

That is an extremely touchy topic not only for the O.I.C., but also for the national media that so hungrily sought and eagerly repeated leaked material, much of it false or dubious, from Mr. Starr and his operatives.

Although the O.I.C. has been plausibly accused of numerous inappropriate and perhaps illegal leaks before, during and after the Monica Lewinsky investigation, the occasion for Mr. Bakaly's problem was a single article in The New York Times by Don Van Natta Jr., which appeared on Jan. 31, 1999.

The front-page story revealed that Mr. Starr was considering the constitutional question of whether to seek a grand jury indictment of the President, in addition to the impeachment referral that had accompanied the Starr Report to Congress several months earlier. Coming in the midst of the Senate's impeachment proceedings, the leak to The Times was yet another example of the politicized conduct that had ultimately forced the resignation of Mr. Starr's ethics counselor, Sam Dash.

Responding to an outraged complaint from Clinton attorney David Kendall, Mr. Starr accused the White House of seeking to "distract" his investigation with false accusations of leaking-but he also ordered an internal probe of how Mr. Van Natta got his story. Several weeks later, Mr. Bakaly was forced to resign and the O.I.C. referred the matter for possible further action by the Justice Department.

Eventually, the U.S. District Court of Appeals in Washington ruled that this leak didn't violate grand jury secrecy rules. But nevertheless, based on information from Mr. Bakaly's former colleagues, the Justice Department determined that he had lied about the incident in a sworn declaration. So rather ironically, the former Starr spokesman is accused of a "coverup," despite a judicial finding that there was no underlying crime.

According to Mr. Bakaly, the guilt lies with attorneys for the O.I.C. In pretrial briefs submitted the other day, he alleged that O.I.C. lawyers had altered his sworn statements and omitted relevant information because they didn't want to provide ammunition to Mr. Kendall, who had already instigated a wide-ranging investigation by the court of leaks concerning the Lewinsky case.

What Mr. Bakaly reportedly also acknowledged, however, is that he did divulge information, including internal documents, to Mr. Van Natta. That admission raises vexing issues for the newspaper of record, as Michael Kinsley pointed out in Slate , because The Times appears to have knowingly published a blatant falsehood. After alluding to sources in the O.I.C., Mr. Van Natta wrote that "Charles G. Bakaly 3d, the spokesman for Mr. Starr, declined to discuss the matter. 'We will not discuss the plans of this office or the plans of the grand jury in any way, shape or form,' he said."

The Times continued this charade in an indignant July 8 editorial that denounced the Bakaly prosecution as an "after-the-fact witch hunt." Rather weirdly, that editorial also mentions that "Mr. Bakaly … said at the time and has since maintained that he was not a source of the [Jan. 31, 1999] article." But now we all know that is untrue-unless, perhaps, it depends on what the meaning of "source" is.

As The Times points out, anti-leaking investigations are usually intended to conceal important information from the public. The paper did nothing wrong by publishing the facts in Mr. Van Natta's story. Full culpability for a politically timed and unethical disclosure lies with the O.I.C.-and, according to The Times ' own account, not with poor Charlie Bakaly alone.

But there are broader issues here for journalists as well as prosecutors. Should a newspaper publish grand jury leaks, knowing that the prosecutor who divulged them has committed a crime and violated the rights of the defendant? And does the obligation to protect an official source include the publication of statements that reporters and editors may know to be false?

Important facts about the conduct of the O.I.C. have long been concealed from the public, and the press-for both good reasons and bad-has been part of that coverup.

There will be no criminal prosecutions of anyone involved in this unfortunate fiasco, including Craig Livingstone and Anthony Marceca, the two former White House employees directly responsible. Obviously, there will be no indictments of any of the wholly innocent persons supposedly implicated in this matter, such as Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Considering the level of hysteria generated by enemies of the Administration when the F.B.I. files issue first arose four years ago, this impending exoneration ought to prompt some retractions and apologies. But instead we now see the old phony story replaced by the new phony story. Kenneth Starr is gone and Filegate is dead, but we hear whispers that Mr. Starr's replacement, Robert Ray, may still indict Bill Clinton after he leaves office.

To expect a sense of honor and decency from the Office of Independent Counsel and its epigones in the media is, of course, to be disappointed. Dozens of conscientious lawyers and investigators have worked for the O.I.C., but there has always been an excess of partisan zeal at the top. The so-called Filegate case provides an example of that misplaced zeal from beginning to end.

The ultimate outcome of this case was predicted here long ago, a forecast that required neither special brilliance nor inside information, but only a cursory examination of the evidence. The list of 900 names showed that the White House's embarrassed explanation of the matter-in updating clearances, they had wrongly obtained an outdated list of White House staff-was not just plausible but probable: It included scarcely anyone of political notoriety and many obscure employees, such as gardeners and secretarial aides. That their privacy had been breached was truly awful, as the President said when he apologized publicly for the errors committed by his aides. Yet their stupid, careless behavior in no way resembled the felonious conspiracy of which they were so swiftly accused.

The accusers were the usual right-wing suspects, from William Safire of The New York Times all the way down to the tabloid gumshoes of the New York Post . Even Nat Hentoff of The Village Voice was willingly duped by this fraud. They told us that Filegate was equal to Watergate or worse, and that the perpetrators would be traced all the way into the Oval Office and the White House residence. It was all a nefarious plot cooked up by the First Lady, who allegedly had hired Mr. Livingstone for the express purpose of smearing and intimidating the Administration's opponents.

But the smearing was done to the Clintons, not by them. And that smearing was made possible in large measure by the Office of Independent Counsel, which delayed as long as possible in confirming the obvious.

As early as the fall of 1997, Byron York reported in The American Spectator -a publication with excellent sources in the O.I.C.-that prosecutors had found no crimes whatsoever in Filegate. But the O.I.C. did nothing to confirm that finding until a year later, when Mr. Starr testified before the House Judiciary Committee and rather reluctantly admitted there would be no indictments in that case, the White House Travel Office affair, or the Whitewater matter that first provoked all of his useless and expensive activity.

Why has the O.I.C. permitted this closed case to drag on for an additional two years? Justice delayed is justice denied for the innocent as well as for the guilty, and all the more so when political motives pervert the process. It will be interesting to read how the new proprietors of the O.I.C. try to excuse the misconduct of their predecessors. They can only hope that the Republicans retain control of Congress in November, because Representative Jerrold Nadler, the ranking Democrat on the relevant Judiciary subcommittee, has vowed to hold hearings on this disgrace if his party regains the majority.

Does Mr. Ray plan to assist his Republican allies by issuing additional reports that suggest guilt where none can be proved? So he seemed to imply in his recent interview with Mr. Safire. When he vowed to "explain our judgments so the country can evaluate them." According to the Times columnist, although Mr. Ray "expressed his determination not to issue condemnations of wrongdoing he does not bring to trial," he also intends to "lay out the sometimes ugly facts" to the judicial panel that oversees his office. Just how Mr. Ray will reconcile those contradictory goals remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, here are two more predictions. Few if any of the pundits who got Filegate wrong will acknowledge their gross error-and there will be no prosecution of Mr. Clinton, as President or private citizen.