In the battle for perceptions, Mr. Starr suffered a blow on Friday when Samuel Dash abruptly resigned as his ethics adviser.

Mr. Dash himself was recently criticized for taking $400 an hour to serve as ethics adviser.

After hiring lawyers, accountants, IRS agents, outside consultants, law professors, personal counsel, ethics advisers, and a professional public relations expert.

Ronald D. Rotunda, a law professor at the University of Illinois, was an ethics adviser to Kenneth Starr.

He and his ethics adviser, Sam Dash, keep pointing out that most of the 16 other people appointed under the independent counsel law have continued to work on private cases.

Now she's got the same ethics adviser as John Rowland," said John DeStefano, who is the New Haven mayor and one of the Democratic candidates.

Two decades later, Dash was again in the news after resigning his post as ethics adviser to independent counsel Kenneth Starr.

The details of the arrangement are still being worked out, with crucial features, like an ethics adviser to represent the research participants themselves, still under discussion.

Currently, she handles the Senator's energy, environmental, agricultural and trade issues, in addition to serving as the ethics adviser for the office.

When Starr needed someone to show the American public that he was acting fairly, he hired the Watergate hero Sam Dash as his ethics adviser.