The finger-pointing between President Clinton’s lawyers and Kenneth W. Starr’s office over leaks raises intriguing possibilities. One is that someone in Starr’s office has committed a crime by leaking grand-jury secrets. Another is that someone in the Clinton camp has orchestrated a fraud by leaking things out the back door while trotting Clinton’s lawyers out the front door to falsely (if unwittingly) blame the leaks on Starr.

We may never know the truth, because reporters won’t reveal their sources. But one thing is clear: Of the more than 50 leaks that Clinton counsel David Kendall has attributed to Starr’s office, the vast majority did not, contrary to Kendall’s implication, involve grand-jury materials at all. Those ”leaks,” therefore, were not illegal, even if they came from Starr’s office.

Kendall’s PR offensive against Starr also seems flawed by his failure to produce any persuasive evidence that Starr’s office is guilty of any illegal leaks. Indeed, Starr’s prosecutors plausibly retort that most or all of the grand-jury leaks probably came from the Clinton camp, witnesses’ lawyers, or the Justice Department.

The most recent example is Kendall’s May 6 letter accusing Starr’s office of leaking ”sealed grand-jury documents”–a reference to Judge Norma Holloway Johnson’s sealed ruling rejecting Clinton’s claims of executive privilege.

This leak did violate a court order (a profoundly unwise one, given the public importance of the executive privilege decision). And Kendall did have a basis–initially–for his complaint: Fox News had explicitly identified Starr’s office as the source of its May 5 report.

But that attribution was a mistake, Fox said later. And some specific (if inconclusive) evidence suggests that this leak may in fact have come from the Clinton camp. Jackie Bennett, a deputy to Starr, claims that David Shuster of Fox News told him that his source was the White House–and that Shuster had so informed Kendall, on the evening of May 6.

Kendall scoffed at this, in a May 14 letter responding to questions I posed in a May 12 letter. (The Clinton team gave both letters to The Washington Post.) Stressing that Fox had declined to identify Shuster’s source or to rule out Starr’s office, Kendall added: ”Mr. Shuster would not tell me the source . . . , and he certainly did not say that someone connected with the White House was the source.”

I read this to Shuster. His response: ”Contrary to Mr. Kendall’s statement, this was not a vague or ambiguous conversation that I had with Mr. Kendall, and he was well aware of what I said.” Shuster declined to tell me his source. But he added that he has ”the greatest respect for Mr. Bennett,” and said, ”I made it very clear to David Kendall that it would not be in his best interest to ask Fox to reveal sources. I pointed out several examples when Kendall had leaked stuff to Fox.”

Bennett also said that before the initial news reports on May 5, Starr’s office had received about a half-dozen calls from reporters who said the White House had leaked word of the decision to them.

Suspicions of leaking by the Clinton camp have been fueled by the fact that Clinton has been the clear beneficiary of some of the leaks. This also fits the Clinton camp’s modus operandi–documented in Howard Kurtz’s recent book, Spin Cycle: Inside the Clinton Propaganda Machine–of blunting anticipated bad news by making enough of it public, complete with pro-Clinton spin, to steal critics’ thunder.

Consider the leak of Clinton’s sealed Jan. 17 deposition in the Paula Jones lawsuit, to The Washington Post’s Peter Baker, whose 4,000-word summary ran March 5.

That same day, Kendall and his co-counsel, Robert Bennett and Mickey Kantor, charged that this ”reprehensible and unethical” leak was ”obviously (done) by antagonists of the President.” But that was not a bit obvious. Here’s why: It was well-known to those following the Jones case that the most damaging portions of Clinton’s deposition were due to be made public–legally–as an attachment to Jones’s March 13 brief opposing Clinton’s motion for summary judgment.

The foreseeable effect of the March 5 Baker article was to upstage the Jones team and to obscure how damaging the deposition was to Clinton. Much of the most telling testimony was omitted from or deeply buried in The Post’s article, which contained no verbatim quotes. The article thus failed to highlight the stark contradictions between Clinton’s account and those of several other witnesses.

In addition, the damaging evidence that did find its way into The Post’s article was immediately overshadowed by a furious barrage of Clinton-camp charges against Starr and claims that Baker’s information might not be accurate.

Then, on March 13, when the Clinton deposition (or much of it) was made public as part of Jones’s court filing, the transcript was all but ignored, as old news.

The bottom line: If the Jones or the Starr team leaked Clinton’s deposition, it was an act of singular stupidity. If the Clinton camp leaked the deposition, it was quite clever. And the Clinton camp is nothing if not clever. Clever enough, perhaps, to see another potential benefit from a leak: to provide a road map for any witnesses who might want to support Clinton in their own future testimony.

It was an earlier leak, of Betty Currie’s disclosures to Starr’s investigators–published by The New York Times on Feb. 6–that prompted Kendall’s most detailed leak-bashing letter, a 15-pager that he released with a flourish at a Feb. 6 press conference. It accused Starr’s office of ”appalling disregard for the legal and ethical requirements of grand-jury and investigative confidentiality.” Kendall proceeded to quote some 53 news stories that he implied were based on illegal grand-jury leaks. But only six (at most) of those 53 divulged the kind of information covered by the grand-jury secrecy rules.

There is little or no evidence that any of these six stories (two of which have proved erroneous) was leaked by Starr’s staff. They could have come from witnesses, their lawyers, or the Clinton team; unlike prosecutors, they are not bound by grand-jury secrecy rules.

The other 47 stories on Kendall’s Feb. 6 list of ”leaks”–including 10 or so that cited Starr’s office as a source of information–contained no grand-jury secrets at all. Most of the statements attributed to Starr’s office were responses to accusations of prosecutorial misconduct–especially regarding their alleged mistreatment of Monica Lewinsky– discussions of the widely quoted Linda Tripp-Lewinsky tapes, analyses of legal issues, comments about investigative procedures and the like. No law–nor any Justice Department rule–bars prosecutors from discussing such matters with reporters.

Kendall’s lead example, a Feb. 4 NBC News report, contained comments attributed to ”sources in Starr’s office” about the (quite public) breakdown of immunity negotiations with Lewinsky’s ever-loquacious lawyer, William Ginsburg, and about evidence given to prosecutors by Tripp. It was unwise, and arguably a technical violation of Justice Department policy, for prosecutors to discuss such matters with reporters (if they did). But it was not illegal.

Kendall’s Feb. 6 letter also stressed that day’s New York Times report that Currie had ”told investigators” that Clinton had called her into the office on Sunday, Jan. 18–the day after his deposition; that he had ”led her through an account of his relationship” with Lewinsky; and that he had told Currie ”that he had never been alone with Ms. Lewinsky and that he had resisted her sexual advances.” This, The Times reported, was ”contrary to Currie’s own recollection that Clinton and Lewinsky were sometimes alone.” The Times did not purport to divulge any of Currie’s Jan. 27 grand-jury testimony, which came in the wake of detailed discussions between Currie, her lawyer, and investigators.

Kendall’s Feb. 6 letter called the Currie article ”a flagrant leak from (Starr’s) staff.” But the information was attributed by The Times only to ”lawyers familiar with her account.” Currie’s lawyer (who has denied being the source) was recommended by–and has reportedly shared information with–one or more of Clinton’s lawyers; they may have shared information with others. So the c ircle of possible leakers could be large.

Jackie Bennett claims that nobody in Starr’s office (as best he can determine) leaked anything about Currie to The Times. He and Starr did meet with two Times reporters, at their request, on Feb. 4. According to Bennett, the reporters laid out their story, but Bennett and Starr provided neither confirmation nor any other information, either on or off the record.

I faxed David Kendall a letter on May 19, seeking an interview about any discussions he (or others on the President’s team) has had with reporters about the matters he has accused Starr’s office of leaking. As of this writing, I’ve received no response.