As the impeachment pot simmers, the possibility that Vice President Al Gore could also find himself facing criminal charges has some Republicans salivating and some Democrats in a cold sweat.

But the legal clouds hanging over Gore–in the form of two 90-day ”preliminary investigations” now being conducted by the Justice Department–do not, on close inspection, seem all that dark. Despite some ominous suggestions that ”this time, his legal problems may be much more serious,” as The Washington Post put it on Aug. 30, Gore’s real risk of facing indictment or impeachment actually seems quite small.

It is possible that Gore will be assigned his very own independent counsel in late November to look into the narrow question of whether he lied last Nov. 12 to Justice Department officials investigating his dialing-for-dollars from the White House. Such a lie would be a serious federal crime even though Gore was not under oath. But analysis of the known facts suggests that there is no clear proof that he lied. Unless some emerges, any competent independent counsel would quickly decide not to prosecute.

Gore is also one of several subjects of a far broader investigation, into whether President Clinton and the entire top echelon of the Clinton-Gore campaign–and, for that matter, the Dole-Kemp campaign too–systematically schemed to violate various campaign finance laws. Attorney General Janet Reno is under mounting pressure to seek an independent counsel on that front by mid-December. But even if a counsel is appointed, the process seems unlikely to lead to criminal charges against either Clinton or Gore. Nor should it.

Here’s the basis for these conclusions:

The current probe into whether Gore lied to investigators grew out of an almost comical chain of events, starting with his March 3, 1997, press conference. That was when Gore acknowledged that in late 1995 and 1996 he had made phone calls ”from my White House office in which I asked people to contribute to our re-election campaign,” while insisting repeatedly that there was ”no controlling legal authority” that made his conduct illegal.

But the Pendleton Civil Service Act of 1883 (as amended) makes it ”unlawful for any person to solicit or receive any (campaign) contribution in any room or building occupied in the discharge of official duties” by any ”officers or employees of the United States.”

Reno’s initial rationale for finding no crime was that Gore had solicited only ”soft” money (for use in party-building activities), and thus could not have violated Section 607 of the U.S. Criminal Code, which applies only to solicitations of ”hard” money (for use in electing candidates). That negligee of a rationale proved embarrassingly gossamer in September 1997, when Reno learned from The Washington Post something that her hapless Public Integrity Section had missed: More than $ 100,000 of the Gore-solicited funds had been channeled into hard-money accounts, under a Democratic National Committee practice of splitting large gifts between hard and soft accounts.

The Post’s revelation spawned a 90-day preliminary investigation last fall into what Gore knew, and when, about what kind of money he had been soliciting in late 1995 and 1996.

Reno ultimately rested her Dec. 2 decision not to seek an independent counsel in part on a conclusion that she should have reached months before: Even if Gore had knowingly solicited hard money in calls from the White House, prosecution was ruled out by ”established Department of Justice policy,” under which nobody had ever been indicted merely for being in a government office while making fund-raising phone calls. Indeed, as Reno noted, it is far from clear whether Section 607 was intended to bar fund- raising phone calls from government offices at all.

While Reno was vacillating over the meaning of the law, her gumshoes were fanning out to interview more than 250 witnesses as to whether Gore had thought the money he was raising for the DNC’s ”media campaign” was hard or soft or some of both.

In his Nov. 12 interview, Gore told investigators some things that, while prompting skeptical eyes to roll, helped convince Reno that he had intended only to solicit soft money: Gore said he had been unaware in 1995 and 1996 of the DNC’s practice of splitting large donations between hard- and soft- money accounts; he had not then read any of the memos sent to him by Harold M. Ickes, which had conspicuously advised Clinton and Gore of the need to raise a mix of hard and soft money for the ”DNC media funds”; and he had understood the media campaign to be funded entirely by soft money.

That last statement is the crux of Gore’s current problem. It came under scrutiny after a document popped up this summer (18 months after it was subpoenaed) bearing notes taken by David M. Strauss, Gore’s former deputy chief of staff, at a Nov. 21, 1995, meeting attended by Gore and campaign bigshots. The notes suggest that the media fund was ”65% soft/35% hard”; they also appear to define soft money as ”corporate or anything over $20K from an individual.”

The issue now is whether Gore heard and understood the same thing Strauss heard at the Nov. 21 meeting. If so, it would suggest that Gore lied in saying two years later that he had understood the media campaign to be all soft money.

But Gore would have had to be not only dishonest but also more than a little bit stupid, to have lied on that point. The reason is that it’s a bit hard to discern a rational motive for him to tell such a lie: Gore and everybody else involved knew by the time of his Justice Department interview that the DNC media campaign had in fact included hard money; his claim that he had not known this in 1995 and 1996 was not logically required by his more important claim (corroborated by many of the 45 or so people he solicited) that he had thought that he would be raising only soft money; and he would still have had a solid defense even if he had admitted dialing for hard money.

One oddity of the independent counsel statute is that it arguably requires Reno to seek an independent counsel to decide whether to prosecute Gore unless she can find by ”clear and convincing evidence” that he was not lying in his Nov. 12 interview. But even if a counsel is appointed, the bottom line is that–barring the emergence of witnesses who credibly say that Gore clearly understood that he was raising hard money–no careful prosecutor would indict Gore, because any suspicion that he lied does not rise to the level of proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

Gore might still be vulnerable to accusations that–along with Clinton, Ickes, Dick Morris and other top officials of the Clinton-Gore campaign and the DNC–he took part in a scheme to commit multi-million-dollar violations of the campaign finance laws.

The essence of the theory now being explored by the Justice Department is that while pledging not to raise private money for the 1996 presidential campaign–in order to qualify for many millions in federal money–Clinton and others (including Gore) used the DNC as a totally controlled cash conduit to finance unprecedentedly costly television advertising campaigns promoting the Clinton-Gore ticket; they thereby smashed the post- Watergate ceilings on spending by publicly funded presidential campaigns, while also flouting (among other laws) the ban on using corporate and labor union money in federal election campaigns.

If Reno finds yet again that none of this conduct was criminal, it would have the effect of completely gutting all of the acts of Congress restricting the getting and spending of money by presidential campaigns.

On the other hand, if an independent counsel is named, he or she would (or at least should) be deterred by two weighty concerns from prosecuting Clinton, Gore, or other individuals: the difficulty of proving that their actions–which were approved as legal by campaign lawyers–were ”knowing and willful” crimes; and the difficulty of branding as criminal conspirators the entire top echelons of both the Democratic and Republican campaigns. From Gore’s perspective, this may be a matter of safety in numbers.

The most sensible outcome might be indictments not of any individuals but of the 1996 presidential campaign organizations as corporate entities, along with the DNC and the Republican National Committee. The criminal penalties could run to many millions of dollars. That would put real teeth into the campaign- spending laws, and would serve notice that anyone involved in similar violations in the future would risk prosecution as an individual.

Such an outcome would also leave Gore a tad tarnished politically, perhaps, but unindicted and unimpeached. In this White House, that counts as a win.