The action will resume when a press release on the stationery of the Office of Independent Counsel suddenly pops out of fax machines in newsrooms all over the state where Hillary Rodham Clinton happens to be running for the United States Senate. Quoting Robert Ray, the lawyer who replaced Kenneth Starr as independent counsel last year, that press release will contain a brief summary of the long-overdue final report on Whitewater.

The superhot release from Mr. Ray's office may or may not acknowledge that nobody has been indicted in Whitewater since 1995-but it will also almost certainly include prosecutorial statements unflattering to Mrs. Clinton, the investigative target who has turned out to be so frustratingly innocent in this matter. And those statements will make headlines, many of which are likely to be big, bold and misleading, just weeks before Election Day.

Meanwhile, in recent advertisements, the campaign of Mrs. Clinton's Republican opponent Rick Lazio obviously has been preparing for her last Whitewater moment. Their tag line, white letters on a dark screen, reads "Hillary Clinton. You Just Can't Trust Her."

If Mr. Ray stays true to form, his forthcoming press release will be similarly short on facts and long on insinuation. Indeed, the specific facts that form the basis of his conclusions will be hidden from public view for a while.

As mandated by law, the independent counsel will file a copy of his complete Whitewater report with the special court that oversees his office. But that document, the end product of an investigation dating back to early 1994, won't be publicly available until many weeks after Election Day. It will be filed under seal in a Washington D.C. courthouse. There his report will remain safe from examination by journalists and from challenge by the First Lady and her attorneys. When the court does eventually release the independent counsel's final report on Whitewater, any quibbling over its evidence and conclusions will be irrelevant to the political process in which Mr. Ray seems so determined to meddle.

This is exactly the kind of behavior that made Republicans scream back in 1992, when a previous independent counsel named Lawrence Walsh indicted a former Reagan cabinet secretary for perjury in the Iran-Contra affair on the eve of the Presidential election. Ever since, they have blamed that indictment for the defeat of President Bush and accused Mr. Walsh, a lifelong Republican, of using dirty tricks to sway the election. Mr. Walsh ably defends that controversial decision in his book Firewall , but the very least to be said for him is that he had the guts to indict someone he felt had committed a serious crime, rather than merely whine about why his most important targets got away.

By contrast, Mr. Ray already has demonstrated that if he doesn't dare indict, he will just as gladly smear. Earlier this year, he issued a press release announcing the completion of the O.I.C.'s protracted probe of the White House Travel Office matter. His press release suggested that prosecutors had reluctantly refrained from indicting Mrs. Clinton because a jury wouldn't have convicted her on the evidence at hand (which, come to think of it, sounds like a textbook definition of innocence, but never mind).

Making matters still worse, Mr. Ray appeared on television to discuss those strangely ambiguous statements about the Travel Office case. (For some reason, however, he never went on TV to discuss the F.B.I. files case, another strenuous waste of time and money by the independent counsel; it likewise established only that no crimes had been committed.)

If Mr. Ray were unexpectedly to utter the truth about Whitewater, he might say something like the following: There is no evidence that the Clintons did anything wrong in this case. They were swindled by their late partner James McDougal and lost money on the deal. The Rose Law Firm billing records turned over by the White House proved that Mrs. Clinton testified honestly about her minor legal work for McDougal, which had nothing to do with Whitewater. The testimony of the independent counsel's star witness against President Clinton has never been corroborated and is almost certainly false in its entirety.

Moreover, he might add, we've known that there was nothing to this Whitewater nonsense since no later than the spring of 1996, when the Pillsbury Report was submitted to the Resolution Trust Corporation and exonerated both Clintons. Indeed, this "scandal" has been a hoax from the very beginning-and you, dear taxpayers, have footed the entire $50 million bill.

Hope you've enjoyed the show.

Apart from its potential impact on the New York Senate race, there wasn't really much drama left in this denouement. Exactly like the F.B.I. files case, which the O.I.C. officially closed three months ago, the decision against any prosecutions in the so-called Travelgate probe has been "commonly known" for a long, long time.

Mr. Ray burdened his announcement with nine paragraphs of explanation. He complained about legal resistance by the White House, as if that might excuse the incredible delay in reporting his office's failure to uncover any crime. The truth is that Mr. Starr gave up on both these phony cases well over two years ago and should have dropped them promptly. Instead he left Mr. Ray the onerous tasks of cleaning up this partisan mess and justifying the messiness.

At a cost of roughly $1 million per paragraph, give or take a million, the O.I.C.'s Travel Office press release is surely one of the most expensive exercises in the history of bureaucratic prose. A more complete version will be made available, at a somewhat lower cost per word, to the Special Division, the judicial panel that oversees independent counsels; and several months from now, if the Special Division sees fit to release it, the taxpayers may have a chance to peruse that document.

But why wait for such details and facts? Details tend to clutter a good story, and facts, as another President once said, are stupid things.

Besides, the O.I.C. press release seemed to invite the headline that appeared the following day in the New York Post , accompanied by a suitably unflattering picture of Mrs. Clinton: "Good Liar."

The wording of Mr. Ray's statement- "insufficient to prove to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt"-seemed to encourage the instant tabloid reversal of her exoneration, and elsewhere raised questions about the apparent insinuation of guilt that accompanied the formal acknowledgment of innocence.

On the evening of June 23, some of those questions were put directly to Mr. Ray-who had embarked on a television blitz of dubious propriety-by Margaret Warner, the co-anchor of the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer . Scrupulously but bluntly, she pressed the independent counsel for a fuller accounting, and his responses seemed to simultaneously undermine and bolster the belligerent journalistic interpretations of his official statement.

As he told Ms. Warner, "we did review [Mrs. Clinton's] testimony, and we reviewed it thoroughly after an extensive investigation. We determined that no jury, based upon the evidence that we would be able to present, would convict [her]. Once having made that judgment, it was appropriate … to remove the lingering cloud that an investigation creates."

He then proceeded to re-create that cloud by insisting that Mrs. Clinton had played a substantial role in dismissing the Travel Office employees through conversations with various members of the White House staff, although he found that she had spoken only once on the subject with David Watkins, the presidential assistant who actually carried out the firings. "We can have [a] discussion about whether that was a direct or indirect role," he added.

"But remember," Mr. Ray continued, "that's just the beginning of the process. That was what caused an investigation.…My job was a very limited one. And that was simply to determine based upon the testimony and the statements that she made with regard to that role, whether or not that testimony was knowingly false. And we emphatically found that the answer to that question was no. " [Emphasis added.]

Moments later, however, he returned again to the innuendo-laden locution of "beyond a reasonable doubt," leaving Ms. Warner slightly puzzled. "Are you trying to imply something without actually saying it?" she asked.

"What I'm trying to say is that a prosecutor makes a judgment about evidence … whether or not that would be sufficient to persuade a jury to convict," he replied. "Once I've made that judgment, there are no further judgments for a prosecutor to make. I'm not in the business as a prosecutor of deciding whether or not someone is exonerated in that sense."

No indeed, he isn't in that business at all. In fact, Mr. Ray seems to believe that he is in the business of influencing an election by ensuring that exoneration, as normally understood, is impossible. And he is perfectly willing to leave further judgments to the national media, where complexity gets short shrift and the presumption of innocence doesn't even get lip service.

Even the editorialists at The New York Times , who strained to excuse the excesses of the Starr investigation, think that Mr. Ray's proposed adventure is a bit much. Richard Posner, the ultraconservative legal eminence from the University of Chicago and no friend of the President, has written that the prospect of a Clinton indictment next January is far-fetched.

Winning a felony conviction of Mr. Clinton might lie beyond the reach of the most persistent prosecutor. Would he be charged with perjury? He certainly lied, but the independent counsel would have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the President's prevarications were actually material to the Paula Jones case.

Would Mr. Clinton be charged with obstruction of justice? Given what we already know about the grand jury testimony of Ms. Lewinsky and others, an obstruction count would be equally hard to prove. Had the independent counsel really believed that Vernon Jordan or Betty Currie were lying about the Lewinsky scandal, he could have indicted them two years ago and tried to induce them to testify against the President. Evidently there was insufficient evidence to support any such theory, no matter how fervently Mr. Starr may have believed it.

That leaves the Kathleen Willey affair, in which Mr. Starr and his deputies attempted to show that someone associated with the Clinton White House had tried to intimidate her from testifying about the alleged Presidential grope. But Linda Tripp, Mr. Starr's other star witness, severely undermined Ms. Willey's credibility when she swore that Ms. Willey had desired a romantic involvement with the President.

Yet Mr. Ray may not be discouraged by such factual obstacles. It must be tempting to make history as the first prosecutor to indict a former President; and if most Americans would not approve, there is still a small and very powerful minority who would applaud loudly. Conservatives who once tried to justify the pardon afforded Richard Nixon-a man whose crimes in office make Mr. Clinton's peccadilloes seem vanishingly insignificant-now admonish us that "no one is above the law."

Based on Mr. Ray's previous service, he may indeed become the perfect champion of that unreconciled faction. Prior to taking over from Mr. Starr, he served as chief deputy to Donald Smaltz, the independent counsel who spent years and millions in the bumbling, intensely politicized and ultimately unsuccessful prosecution of former Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy. While Mr. Espy was found innocent of accepting an illegal gratuity from Tyson Foods, the giant Arkansas poultry processor, others caught up in that probe didn't fare as well.

One of those unfortunates was Archie Schaffer. As a Tyson official, Mr. Schaffer invited Mr. Espy to two events in early 1993: an inaugural party and a birthday party for company chairman Don Tyson. On that basis, Mr. Ray charged Mr. Schaffer with violating the Meat Inspection Act, a statute whose true purpose is obvious from its title-that is, to punish butchers who try to bribe federal inspectors.

Mr. Ray won a conviction of Mr. Schaffer, which was overtuned on appeal by the trial judge. Among other problems, the judge noted that the Meat Inspection Act doesn't cover the poultry industry. He ruled that "no rational trier of fact" could find that Mr. Schaffer had tried to influence Mr. Espy's official actions.

Two months after Mr. Schaffer's conviction was overturned in September 1998, the former Agriculture Secretary was acquitted on all counts. That repudiation by the jury, however, didn't dissuade Mr. Ray from seeking to punish Mr. Schaffer on the flimsiest grounds. He sought and won reinstatement of the conviction, even though the aims of the investigation had been permanently thwarted.

Just weeks ago, Mr. Ray once more demonstrated that he is ruled by a vengeful impulse, well beyond any necessity to uphold the law. He personally appeared in a federal courtroom in Virginia to oppose Julie Hiatt Steele's plea for reimbursement of the enormous costs of Mr. Starr's failed perjury prosecution of her. Under Federal law she is entitled to such assistance, but Mr. Ray thinks the destitute single mother should be denied it. The prosecution of Ms. Steele was a low point for the Starr office, but Mr. Ray appears doggedly intent upon "vindication" there, too. Such poor judgment is a bad omen for the heavy decisions that still await him.

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.

That is, until Nov. 8, when Mr. Spitzer, after getting a phone call from The Observer , decided not to give the money after all. "There was the intention to donate, however, he has not written a check and does not intend to do so now," said Mr. Spitzer's spokesman, Darren Dopp. "He is sensitive to the appearance of conflict, and we truly do not want to do anything to detract from the nonpartisan tone we've tried to establish in this office."

The "appearance of conflict" is a reference to Mr. Spitzer's investigation of the New York Police Department's controversial "stop-and-frisk" policy-a potentially troublesome issue for Mrs. Clinton's likely Republican opponent next year, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. The Mayor's supporters already have criticized Mr. Spitzer's probe as politically motivated. It was undertaken in the wake of the police shooting of an unarmed African immigrant, Amadou Diallo, earlier this year. The shooting crystalized complaints of police brutality under Mr. Giuliani's tough-on-crime administration.

If Mr. Giuliani's allies are trying to tarnish an investigation before a single finding has been issued, they learned the technique from the best of them: James Carville, the Clinton campaign strategist who led the successful charge against independent counsel Kenneth Starr. And now Mr. Carville is making it his business to go after Mr. Starr's successor, Robert Ray, by pointing out his ties to-you guessed it-Mr. Giuliani. The Mayor, it turns out, personally offered Mr. Ray a job as a Federal prosecutor in 1989, when Mr. Giuliani was a U.S. attorney. Mr. Giuliani resigned before Mr. Ray started in the office.

While the two unannounced candidates circle each other as they prepare for what promises to be a memorable political confrontation, insiders in both camps are worried about the potential impact of the respective investigations. Either Mr. Ray or Mr. Spitzer, or perhaps both, could foil all the careful campaign calculations with a damning document released next year. "In an election that's so closely contested, [the probes] are a major factor," conceded one Democrat who has advised Mrs. Clinton. "You're looking at a race that's pretty evenly matched, so it could be tilted one way or another by who knows what. These investigations could be that who-knows-what."

In a post-Kenneth Starr political world, discrediting the prosecutor on your tail turns out to be just another campaign strategy. Consultants and spinmeisters make sure that the public has some reason to doubt an investigation's findings, no matter how legitimate they may be.

Thus Team Giuliani already has criticized the investigations of two Federal prosecutors who are also looking into the Police Department, Mary Jo White, the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan, and Loretta Lynch, the U.S. Attorney in Brooklyn, because both women got their jobs from Janet Reno, who in turn got her job from Hillary's husband.

Of course, Mr. Giuliani made his name as a U.S. attorney. He was a Ronald Reagan appointee who brought down the city's corrupt Democratic machine, paving the way for his own ascendancy to the mayoralty. But that didn't prevent Colleen Roche, Mr. Giuliani's former press secretary, from going after all the prosecutors in one fell swoop last spring.

"The timing of this is very curious," said Ms. Roche upon learning of Ms. White's investigation into the Police Department's frisking policy, which has been criticized for targeting minorities. "Janet Reno makes this announcement on the same day that Hillary expresses an interest in [the police shooting of] Amadou Diallo … We just hope that all of the Clinton Administration officials and Democratic Attorney General Spitzer don't bump into each other as they rush to conduct their investigations."

A Political Goon?

That sort of language seems almost mild when compared to Mr. Carville's, who called Mr. Ray "an incompetent political goon" for his unsuccessful prosecution of Mr. Clinton's former Secretary of Agriculture, Mike Espy, for allegedly accepting $35,000 in illegal gratuities.

"In a country of 280 million people, they couldn't find anyone not connected to Rudy Giuliani?" Mr. Carville said when Mr. Ray succeeded Mr. Starr. Among the issues Mr. Ray will grapple with is the investigation of Mrs. Clinton's role in firing the White House Travel Office staff six years ago. "This whole thing is just a political deal to try to help Giuliani," Mr. Carville said. "This thing stinks, and I'm going to start a fumigation program."

"I was right about Ken Starr, and I hope that I'm wrong about Robert Ray, but I suspect I'm not," Mr. Carville continued in an interview with The Observer .

In public at least, supporters of each candidate brush off the potential impact of the probes. "The office of the independent counsel is such a discredited office, it's hard to give weight to anything it does," said attorney Victor Kovner, a major friend of Mrs. Clinton.

"I don't think anything surrounding the Diallo case or anything that relates to police brutality will hurt Giuliani," said Republican consultant Joseph Mercurio. "The rhetoric and the agitation [over the Diallo shooting] was as intense a political outcry as we've seen in this town in years, but once the public got some distance, Giuliani's poll numbers went up."

But there's good reason for concern. In 1993, the campaign of former Mayor David Dinkins was sunk, many analysts believe, by a scathing state probe of the Dinkins administration's conduct during the Crown Heights riot of 1991. The investigation's findings were released just months before the election, possibly tipping the balance in Mr. Giuliani's favor. And many of the people close to that campaign, chief among them White House adviser Harold Ickes, are now working for Mrs. Clinton.

Mr. Giuliani clearly understands the power of a well-timed investigation. As the 1997 mayoral election approached, he refused to allow State Comptroller H. Carl McCall to audit the city's crime statistics as well as figures showing the number of people on welfare who had found jobs and data on the cleanliness of city's streets. Though the Mayor eventually lost in court, he succeeded in delaying Mr. McCall's audits, and his charge that Mr. McCall was engaged in partisan politics found its way to the editorial page of The New York Times .

Law enforcement officials and career bureaucrats tend to groan when politicians attribute political motives to investigations. Asked about Mr. Carville's virulent charges against Mr. Ray, one of the investigators looking into the Police Department's conduct complained that such rhetoric "just taints us all." But in an interview with The Observer , Mr. Carville was characteristically adamant on the subject, particularly with regard to Mr. Spitzer. The Attorney General is an active Democrat who met with the First Lady in the White House "to encourage her to run," as a spokesman put it, just two weeks before he announced his probe of Mr. Giuliani's Police Department. For that reason, among the various investigators looking into the department's behavior, he is the most vulnerable to the charge of partisan politics. That's why Mrs. Clinton won't be getting a $2,000 check from the Attorney General after all.

But Mr. Carville wasn't about to equate Mr. Spitzer with his new nemesis, Mr. Ray. "Mr. Spitzer wasn't appointed by a three-judge panel," Mr. Carville insisted. "I don't get the comparison here. [Mr. Spitzer] is accountable to the voters. Mr. Ray isn't accountable to anybody. It's about as weak as rainwater."

The ironic thing is, if past is prologue, any charges against Mrs. Clinton could actually drive up her popularity. Even Mr. Giuliani's aides say an indictment of the First Lady could hurt the Mayor next year because many voters may conclude that she is a victim of a partisan prosecutor. On that point, anyway, Mr. Carville seems to agree. Any negative findings about Mrs. Clinton, he said, "probably will [help], but they're stupid enough to keep trying."

So the fumigation process continues.

To complete his appointed tasks as independent counsel, including a report on his five-year investigation of the President, Mr. Starr has installed an associate who has worked in his office for only the past five months. And that newcomer may suffer from a disabling conflict of interest, as Mr. Starr must have been well aware when he recommended his successor's appointment. In this clumsy departure, there is a depressingly familiar sense of déjà vu .

Precisely what is left to be done by the Office of Independent Counsel-months after the impeachment fiasco and Mr. Starr's admission that there is no Whitewater case against the Clintons-seems rather murky. The independent counsel statute (whose termination Mr. Starr's fumbling tenure insured) does require a written report.

But according to the usual sources, two matters remain open for the newly sworn independent counsel, Robert W. Ray: the firings of the White House Travel Office employees, and the alleged intimidation of Kathleen Willey, a witness in the Paula Jones case.

It is remarkable that the Travel Office case is still open, more than six years after the events in question took place. The dismissal of those seven White House employees was investigated by the Justice Department and at least one Congressional committee before Mr. Starr took over. After an exhaustive inquiry, his prosecutors reportedly concluded long ago that no crimes had been committed and no indictments would be sought for what was, in essence, an ugly bureaucratic embarrassment.

There is, however, one possible if not particularly legitimate reason for keeping this moldy case alive: the role allegedly played in the Travel Office firings by Hillary Rodham Clinton. Conflicting testimony as to whether she gave the order to dismiss the employees has been in the public record for years; the differences are no closer to being resolved now that memories are dimmer. Will some present or former member of the White House staff suddenly be indicted to induce an accusation against her?

Even if there were real reasons to continue pursuing the Travel Office case, Mr. Ray is a poor choice to handle it. His first important job as a prosecutor was given to him by Rudolph Giuliani in January 1989, just weeks before the then-U.S. Attorney resigned to run his first race for Mayor. Was a prosecutor who owes that sort of debt to Mrs. Clinton's potential political rival really the only lawyer qualified to take over from Mr. Starr? Perhaps Mr. Ray was selected for that very reason-as Mr. Starr and the judicial panel that oversees his office have unfortunately given the public ample reason to suspect.

As for the Willey case, it too gives off a bad smell. She has claimed that various individuals connected to the White House tried to induce her to change her testimony about the President's alleged "groping" of her in his office. Yet the only provable crime related to her accusations occurred as a result of a leak from Mr. Starr's office last May.

That was when Ms. Willey, with the evident connivance of the independent counsel, appeared on CNBC's Hardball show to talk about the case. Under pointed questioning by host Chris Matthews, she named Cody Shearer, a longtime Clinton friend, as a target of the Starr investigation. Supposedly, Mr. Shearer was the mysterious "jogger" who accosted and threatened her outside her house before she gave a deposition in the Jones case. After Mr. Shearer offered incontrovertible proof that he was in California at the time of that alleged incident, Mr. Matthews correctly apologized.

But in the meantime, the public accusation against Mr. Shearer-repeated on radio by Rush Limbaugh-had already instigated a bizarre and dangerous incident. Apparently inflamed by Ms. Willey's vague charges, a mentally ill man (who happens to be a brother of Patrick Buchanan) appeared at Mr. Shearer's Washington home with a gun and threatened him and his housemates.

That near-tragedy was the direct result of Mr. Starr's partisan abuse of his authority. The independent counsel's decision to permit Ms. Willey to discuss his investigation on television-a privilege that wasn't granted to other Starr witnesses like Monica Lewinsky-was one of the most grossly unprofessional acts ever committed by a Federal prosecutor. Moreover, Ms. Willey herself is hardly a credible witness anymore, after her public humiliation on the witness stand during Mr. Starr's vengeful trial of Julie Hiatt Steele.

No matter how sincere or zealous Mr. Ray may be, he has been stuck with two politically tainted cases and a conflict of his own. And Mr. Starr has departed the independent counsel's office in the same way he arrived there, under a shadow of partisan politics and legal chicanery.