Amid ever-more-disingenuous diversions by President Clinton’s apologists–ranging from Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle to the front page of The New York Times–the last hope for bringing the Senate trial to a tolerably honest, tolerably bipartisan conclusion has come into focus.

The hope is that the Senate Republican leadership will insist, with the help of at least a few honest Democrats, upon something close to the tough ”findings of fact” that have been circulating lately among Senators.

One draft approved by the leadership would have the Senate find that ”the House managers have established to the satisfaction of the Senate” that the President 1) ”willfully provided false and misleading testimony” to the grand jury under oath, and 2) ”wrongfully engaged in conduct to delay the discovery, and cover up the existence, of evidence and to alter testimony related to a federal civil rights lawsuit and a United States grand jury investigation.”

How could any honest Senator vote against such findings? Their factual accuracy has been established by overwhelming evidence. They stop short of convicting (or acquitting) the President of any crime–a mark of considerable restraint, considering the weight of the evidence against Clinton. They would allow Senators to vote their consciences, first on the evidence, then on the ultimate issue of whether it warrants removal. They would appropriately clarify the real meaning of the apparently preordained vote to leave the popular President in office.

As Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., said on Jan. 31 on ABC’s This Week: ”Several of us have said (that the President) was false and misleading, he acted to cover up, some have said he lied under oath, and if that’s what the findings say, then I for one would be hard-pressed to vote against it.”

And, as Lieberman also noted, nothing in the Constitution prohibits a finding of fact. This is the view of the Senate’s legal counsel, and apparently of Chief Justice William Rehnquist. Few, if any, serious constitutional experts dispute this, except warriors on the fringes of conservatism (such as Robert Bork) and liberalism (such as Anthony Lewis), and an internally incoherent philippic in the Feb. 3 Washington Post by Sen. Robert Byrd, D- W.Va.

But the White House is savaging the idea of ”findings” with a ferocity borne of its desperate desire for an unqualified acquittal, required to set the stage for dishonest Clinton claims of vindication. And Democrats such as the deftly disingenuous Daschle and the more nakedly partisan Sen. Robert Torricelli of New Jersey are whipping wavering colleagues to parrot the White House party line.

The Democratic assault is deeply cynical. Daschle, for example, has circulated ”talking points” attacking the ”findings of fact” idea as putting Clinton ”at further legal risk.” False: Any findings of fact would clearly be inadmissible in any future criminal prosecution under the federal evidence and procedure rules.

Meanwhile, volunteers-for-Clinton in the media are busily helping the Democrats concoct phony diversions. The New York Times comes most urgently to mind here. From its discovery of minuscule ”vast right-wing conspiracies”–misleadingly linked to demon Starr–to its pro-Clinton slanting in dozens of impeachment articles, the nation’s pre-eminent newspaper has exhibited a stunning degree of bias, and even worse.

For example, on Sunday, Jan. 31, The Times chose to lead the paper with a nonstory story by Don Van Natta Jr. claiming that Starr ”has concluded that he has the constitutional authority to seek a grand jury indictment of President Clinton before he leaves the White House in January 2001, several associates of Mr. Starr said this week.”

This story–which contained no previously unpublished information of much consequence, and which bristled with false innuendoes–was widely hailed as the product of a Starr-approved leak. The article did not exactly say that, of course. It did not even say whether the ”associates” were in Starr’s office. But the thrust of it was to hint that Starr had allowed the leak of a recent Starr decision.

Both insinuations, happily seized upon by the President’s lawyers and supporters, are almost certainly false. Starr told me, through his spokesman Charles G. Bakaly III, that he has never authorized anybody to disclose to Van Natta or any other reporter his thinking either on the constitutional issue or on when, if ever, Clinton should be indicted. Why believe him? Because Starr would have to be an idiot to authorize a leak that would make him look terrible, undercut the Republican prosecution in the Senate, and give immediate aid and comfort to Clinton. He would also be an idiot to indict the President.

Moreover, it wasn’t remotely news that Starr has not ruled out an indictment while Clinton is in office: Bakaly had said so quite publicly last summer. Nor was it news that Starr thought the Constitution would not bar such a prosecution: Newsweek magazine’s Aug. 31 issue reported that Starr had concluded ”that a president can be tried on criminal charges (though not imprisoned) while in office.”

Overplayed and overhyped, this non-news story nevertheless had the predictable results: a new round of televised Starr bashing, and a new grandstand play by Clinton counsel demanding investigation into new supposed grand jury leaks.

The Times did its part to keep the pot boiling with a Feb. 2 editorial headlined ”Ken Starr’s Meddling” that denounced what it characterized as an ”apparent effort from the office of Kenneth Starr . . . to spark a debate over criminal prosecution of the President” in the midst of the Senate trial. But it was not Starr who made the effort to divert the Senate trial from the real issues. It was The New York Times that did so–and then blamed Starr.

Still, it is mildly heartening to note that the diversionary tactics do not seem to be entirely working. Serious Senators have not been swayed from pursuing findings of fact. They are right to do so.

The Constitution clearly gives the Senate virtually complete discretion on how to run impeachment trials, as the Supreme Court ruled in 1993. And although without clear precedent in impeachment trials, preliminary findings of fact are a familiar practice in both criminal and civil trials. They are standard when trial judges write opinions, and are sometimes put to votes by jurors as well. In this trial, the Senators are both judges and jurors.

Anyway, a vote on findings of fact would surely not be the first proposed departure from precedent in the Clinton trial. The Senate has already entertained a motion by Byrd to dismiss the impeachment with no verdict, and with no consideration of whether Clinton has committed any crimes. It has already entertained an effort by Byrd and 43 other Democrats to deny the House managers the time-honored right to call witnesses to prove their case. While the Senate rejected those efforts, nobody claims that it lacked the discretion to adopt them. And the Senate has imposed severe and unprecedented restrictions on how many witnesses the managers can call and how they can be questioned.

So now Democrats like Byrd–who voted to cast precedent aside to truncate the trial and who called for an unprecedented, extraconstitutional, postacquittal censure–are crying foul at the far less radical idea of findings of fact.

Findings of fact during the trial are preferable to a proposed censure afterward for at least four reasons: 1) They would help make this precedent-setting case intelligible; 2) they could not be reversed by a future Congress; 3) they would be a step toward an honest and honorable conclusion; and 4) they would be more likely to pass than a postacquittal censure motion, which might well fizzle because most Democrats would vote only for he- was-a-naughty-boy language, which most Republicans would reject as meaningless.

Besides, what business does the Senate have censuring anyone for having a consensual sexual affair? That’s a key tenet of most Democratic censure proposals. And that would be a step toward the ”sexual McCarthyism” of which Starr has unfairly been accused.

This is not to deny that the proposed findings would serve a political purpose for Republicans by pre-empting Clinton’s widely anticipated effort to claim vindication. But they would also help any Democrats who wanted to salvage some honor by showing that they were not just craven White House lackeys. For others, findings would also be an honesty-enforcing mechanism, although the idea of honesty as a virtue is admittedly a hard sell these days.

Many in the Democratic Party, and its auxiliaries in the media, academia, and the legal profession, have spent the past year distorting the evidence and the law to rally around a lying, lawless leader with high poll numbers. Their last chance to show some character is at hand.