One staple of Washington life is the phony scandal: a conflagration of bogus accusations and intimations of criminality and sleaze, fanned to an inferno by the media and partisan enemies of the accused, only to finally fade away for lack of evidence.

It’s a bipartisan phenomenon. The classic of the genre was "Iraqgate," aka the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL) scandal. Not to be confused with Iran-Contra (a real scandal), Iraqgate was whipped up in 1992 by Democratic congressional investigators, sloppy journalists, and a partisan federal judge. It erupted into thousands of newspaper articles and a gaggle of network television specials, turning President Bush’s greatest triumph-his victory over Saddam Hussein in the 1991 Persian Gulf War-into a political liability. The basic story was that Bush had secretly and illegally helped Iraq arm itself and then orchestrated a criminal cover-up with his top Justice Department appointees. And the most prominent accuser was vice presidential nominee Al Gore. He charged the President with presiding over "a bigger cover-up than Watergate ever was," to hide a "decision by George Bush to arm Saddam Hussein."

These charges were false. All of them. (See my "Mediagate," in The American Lawyer, November 1994.) So perhaps it’s poetic justice that Gore is now the target of what appears to be a largely phony scandal being fanned by the falsely accused President’s son, George W. Bush, and the media. This one centers on Gore’s April 29, 1996, visit to the now-famous Hsi Lai Buddhist temple in Los Angeles. "It’s amazing that Vice President Gore is talking about campaign funding [reform]," Bush said on March 5, in one of many such jabs, "when he’s the person who went to a Buddhist temple to raise money from people who made a vow of poverty."

Gore himself has said that the temple visit was a "mistake" because he had known that it was a "political event" attended by "finance people." But the charge that Gore knowingly went there "to raise money" in any illegal or improper sense-let alone to shake down monks and nuns-has now been persuasively refuted. So have the claims that he has been deceptive or disingenuous in his explanations.

These are Roger Parloff’s conclusions in "Temple in a Teapot," a cogently contrarian 7,000-word exploration of the matter in the May issue of The American Lawyer. "Gore’s obviously not the straightest shooter to ever venture into public life," he writes, "but the evidence is now overwhelming that the temple event wasn’t supposed to be a fund-raiser. Moreover, Gore’s descriptions of it have been honest and accurate-even consistent…. Not one shred of evidence indicates that Gore knew that anything illegal was happening at the temple…. A skeptical look at the key charges that have been leveled against Gore … reveals that they all hinge on fuzzy thinking, malevolent assumptions, and the intransigent refusal to credit exonerating evidence."

Those inclined to suspect a partisan agenda may point to the fact that Parloff gave $250 to the Clinton-Gore campaign in 1995, as Parloff (a former colleague) told me. But nobody called him a Democratic partisan when his June 1992 article, "Maybe the Jury Was Right," defended the famous Simi Valley, Calif., jury’s acquittals of the four cops who beat Rodney King. (The jury hung on one count.) That piece won a National Magazine Award.

The strength of Parloff’s latest article is not some big revelation. It is a meticulous review of the law and evidence already in the public record, amassed by congressional investigators, FBI agents, and prosecutors from subpoenaed documents and more than 20 key witnesses. Although some scraps of documentary evidence seem damning when taken out of context, and although the witnesses’ credibility can be questioned because they are loyal to Gore, this hardly warrants an irrebuttable presumption of guilt.

The essence of Parloff’s analysis (available at americanlawyer.com) is this:

• There is no evidence contradicting Gore’s original statement to a reporter in October 1996 that the temple event was "not billed as a fund-raiser" (to him) but rather as a "community outreach event." This campaign jargon seems less like a Clintonian word game in its context than when truncated in media accounts. (I retract my suggestion to the contrary in my Feb. 5 column.)

• Although various Gore staffers sometimes referred to the temple event as a fund-raiser, top Gore aides say that "fund-raiser" is a term designating an affair for which tickets have been sold. Tickets were not sold for the temple event.

• The initial plan was for Gore to go to two unrelated events in the Los Angeles area that day. The first was a luncheon fund-raiser at the Harbor Village Restaurant in Monterey Park, for which the planned charge was $1,000 to $5,000 per ticket. This was to be followed by a "community outreach event" at the Hsi Lai Temple in Hacienda Heights, according to documents and testimony including that of John Huang, the Democratic National Committee fund-raiser who helped arrange the temple event. (Huang, who recklessly blinded himself in 1996 to questions about the origins of the donations he solicited from Asian-Americans, pleaded guilty in August to unrelated fund-raising crimes from 1992-94.)

• Similarly, Gore fund-raiser Maria Hsia told the Vice President in a March 23, 1996, letter that there would be "a fund-raising lunch event" and that "after the lunch, we will attend a rally at Hsi Lai Temple where you will have the opportunity to meet representatives from the Asian-American community."

• Aides have testified that they initially told Gore the temple visit was a community outreach event and never told him otherwise. Gore’s briefing materials corroborate their account to some extent.

• The temple compound, which is claimed to be the largest Buddhist monastery in the Western Hemisphere and serves as a community center for local Chinese-Americans, was a suitable locale-at least by the ethical standards that prevail in politics today-as are the Jewish community centers and black churches that sometimes host such visits.

• When schedulers told Huang that Gore would not have time for two separate events that morning, Huang canceled the Harbor Village Restaurant fund-raiser. He told DNC Finance Director Richard Sullivan that he had invited some DNC donors who had already bought tickets for the restaurant fund-raiser to the Hsi Lai event, and that he would solicit money from others afterward, but not at the temple itself.

• Although Gore knew the temple visit was a DNC event, it had none of the trappings of a formal fund-raiser: No tickets were sold, no campaign materials were displayed, no table was set up to solicit or accept money, and Gore made no mention of fund raising in his speech about religious tolerance and brotherhood.

• There is no inconsistency between Gore’s October 1996 "community outreach event" statement and a Gore spokesperson’s acknowledgment three months later that he had known it to be "finance-related." DNC "community outreach events" are almost always finance-related in the sense that past contributors are invited and attendees are solicited afterward.

• Gore’s visit would have been legal (albeit unseemly) even if he had known that donations were to be sought at the temple, although the temple itself would have risked losing its tax-exempt status.

• There is no evidence that Gore knew that Hsia had solicited $55,000 from the temple after his visit and had collected it in the form of 11 $5,000 checks written by monastics, who were reimbursed with temple funds. (Hsia thus participated in the federal crime of making a contribution in someone else’s name.) Nor does it seem logical that Hsia or anyone else would have told Gore about her illegal actions and such details as the monks’ and nuns’ checks.

• And by the way, reports Parloff, "the Hsi Lai monastics do not take vows of poverty."

Parloff also makes a strong case that neither Gore’s probably legal-albeit sleazy (in my view if not in Parloff’s)-fund-raising phone calls from his White House office, nor his much-scrutinized claims to investigators that he had thought he was soliciting "soft money," nor Janet Reno’s much-criticized refusals to seek an independent counsel to investigate Gore, nor the much-publicized dissension inside the Justice Department, would lead any responsible prosecutor to believe that Gore had committed a crime or had lied about what he knew and when he knew it. (See also my Oct. 3, 1998, column, "Why Al Gore Is Not in Big Trouble.")

Gore has his faults, including a habit of distorting the truth, sometimes to the point of outright falsehood, as detailed in my Feb. 5 column. But the suggestions that he has been dishonest about the Buddhist temple and his fund-raising phone calls seem like a bum rap.