President Clinton’s defenders are quite right to note that the leaks dribbling out from (or about) Kenneth Starr’s investigation do not prove that Clinton has lied to the nation, lied under oath, encouraged others to lie, or obstructed justice.

Clinton’s presumption of innocence surely survives reports of Monica Lewinsky’s tape-recorded allegations that she repeatedly performed oral sex for Clinton. And it survives her reported claims that Clinton encouraged her to avoid giving truthful testimony in the Paula Jones case; get rid of Clinton gifts that had been subpoenaed by Jones’s lawyers; say that her 30-some visits to the White House over the past 21 months had been to see his secretary Betty Currie, not him; and move to New York to duck her subpoena.

After all, Lewinsky could have been lying or fantasizing when she gave her stunningly vivid accounts to her erstwhile confidante Linda Tripp (who taped more than 20 hours of their phone calls) and to eavesdropping FBI agents (during a three-hour Tripp-Lewinsky meeting on Jan. 13). Lewinsky’s own lawyer has implied that this ”responsible young woman who speaks the truth” sometimes doesn’t.

Nor is Clinton’s presumption of innocence dissolved by his loyal secretary’s reported statements to investigators. So what if Betty Currie contradicted Clinton’s own reported sworn testimony suggesting that he had not been alone with Lewinsky in the past 21 months? So what if Currie said that Clinton and Lewinsky met in or near the Oval Office repeatedly, as recently as Dec. 28?

And so what if Currie disclosed that the President called her to the White House on Sunday, Jan. 18 (her day off)–the day after his testimony–and took her through a series of leading questions about Lewinsky, some of which did not match her own recollections? Questions along the lines of: ”We were never alone together, right?”

And so what if Currie said that she collected from Lewinsky the same subpoenaed Clinton gifts (a dress, a brooch, a hatpin) that Lewinsky had allegedly been encouraged by Clinton to put beyond the reach of Jones’s lawyers?

And so what if neither the Clinton legal team nor Currie’s own lawyer–who has worked closely on other matters with Clinton counsel Robert S. Bennett–has denied any of these specific allegations?

There are explanations. They go something like this: Even if Clinton was alone in a room with Lewinsky one or two, or a dozen or two-dozen times, that doesn’t mean they had sex. Besides, the President can’t be expected to remember all of his one-on-one encounters with infatuated, sexually aggressive, 22- year-old interns.

As for Currie, her own lawyer said Clinton was only trying to refresh his recollection when he summoned her to discuss critical evidence. In any event, Currie had not yet been subpoenaed, so what’s illegal even if Clinton did seek to influence her recollection? As for the gifts (now held by Starr’s office), they were mere trifles.

And if it turns out that Currie gives testimony that makes the President look bad? Well, we’ll see whether she, too, is a liar or a fantasist, like the many others who have been slimed as such by the Clinton team. They include Lewinsky, Paula Jones, Gennifer Flowers, former Clinton business partner and benefactor James McDougal, former White House travel office chief Billy Dale, and four of Clinton’s former Arkansas state trooper- bodyguards.

Nor can Clinton’s guilt be proved just by the trail of circumstantial evidence suggesting that the Clinton team– including deputy chief of staff John D. Podesta, U.N. ambassador Bill Richardson, Clinton intimate Vernon E. Jordan and Currie– worked to line up jobs for Lewinsky; these efforts culminated in Jordan’s extraordinary help just about the time he was being told by Lewinsky (according to her tape-recorded account) that she would not file an affidavit denying sexual relations with Clinton until she got the job she wanted.

After all, as Jordan suggested so eloquently on Jan. 22, helping rich kids get jobs is a natural outgrowth of his work in the civil rights movement.

Nor can one infer guilt from Clinton’s pattern of lining up government (and other) jobs for people with possibly damaging evidence about him. So what if Clinton helped Gennifer Flowers get an Arkansas state job (for which she was grossly underqualified) around the same time she was threatening to divulge the sexual relationship that he has now reportedly admitted?

So what if both the President and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton approved of efforts by Jordan and several Administration officials to funnel lucrative business to Webster L. Hubbell when the financially strapped embezzler and Clinton buddy was being stalked by Starr as a target and a prospective witness against both Clintons?

So what if Trooper Danny Lee Ferguson–one of the former trooper-bodyguards who have spoken of having fetched women (including Paula Jones) for Clinton–told the Los Angeles Times in 1993 of a series of telephone conversations with the President, including three in one day, in which Clinton inquired what the troopers were telling reporters, while at the same time offering Ferguson and Trooper Roger Perry a choice of federal jobs?

And so what if Ferguson and Perry told the same newspaper that yet another former Clinton trooper-bodyguard–who had already been rewarded with a federal job and who was in touch with the President about their contacts with reporters–had warned them that any troopers who made damaging statements publicly would see their reputations ”totally destroyed”?

All irrelevant, immaterial and prejudicial, as Perry Mason’s lugubrious courtroom adversary used to say.

There is, however, another species of evidence that may– even in the eyes of many Clinton supporters–tip the scales of plausibility quite dramatically against the President. And that is the response of the President himself, and of his wife and their aides and lawyers to all of these allegations.

Most innocent people are fortified by the belief that the truth is on their side. Most act as if the truth is on their side. And most–especially those powerful and articulate enough to fight back against any unscrupulous adversaries–are eager to make their case publicly and bring the evidence about their conduct to light, rather than suppress it or change the subject.

Was the President acting as if the truth was on his side when, in his first public response to the Lewinsky allegations (a Jan. 21 interview with public television’s Jim Lehrer), he would say only that ”there is no improper relationship”?

(Only after the loopholes in this nondenial-denial had been made glaringly conspicuous did Clinton shift to the position that there was no sexual relationship.)

Is Clinton acting as if the truth is on his side when he and his lawyers and aides refuse to answer any of the specific questions about Lewinsky that Clinton himself once termed ”very legitimate”? Or to make public White House visitors’ logs and phone records pertaining to Lewinsky?

In his Feb. 6 press conference, Clinton explained his silence by claiming to be ”honoring the rules of the investigation.” But there are no such ”rules.” As the White House has now admitted, no law or court order limits the President’s freedom to explain his dealings with Lewinsky or with Betty Currie.

Are top Clinton aides acting as if the truth is on his side when they intimate that they don’t know and don’t ask what went on between the President and Lewinsky?

Was Clinton aide Paul E. Begala acting as if the truth was on his side when (on Feb. 8) he suggested that any leaking from Starr’s office would be ”a much more serious crime, frankly, than signing a false affidavit by a 24-year-old kid in a civil lawsuit”? (That would be Lewinsky’s affidavit denying sexual relations with Clinton.)

Was Hillary Rodham Clinton acting as if the truth was on her side when–echoing the late Sen. Joseph McCarthy–she smeared Starr and others who doubt Clinton’s word as members of ”a vast right-wing conspiracy”?

And what about the chilling Feb. 8 exchange between former Clinton spokesman and buddy George R. Stephanopoulos and Sam Donaldson on ABC’s This Week: Donaldson: ”If he has nothing to hide, why is he hiding?”

Stephanopoulos: ”I agree with that. And there’s a different, long-term strategy . . . White House allies are starting to whisper about . . . (going) to Congress and say(ing), ‘Don’t you investigate this, because if you do, we’re going to open up everybody’s closets.’ ”

Donaldson: ” . . . Are you suggesting . . . that what they’re beginning to say is that if you investigate this too much, we’ll put all your dirty linen right on the table? Every Member of the Senate? Every member of the press corps?”

Stephanopoulos: ”Absolutely. The President said he would never resign, and I think some around him are willing to take everybody down with him.”

Richard Nixon lives. Chuck Colson, too.