The US Vice-President, Mr Al Gore, who would succeed Mr Clinton if he were to be removed from office, spoke out briefly at a Democratic business committee yesterday in cautious support of the president.
Mr Gore said that Mr Clinton "is my friend and our president and his policies have been manifestly good for the United States of America and those policies must be continued for the United States of America".
Mrs Hillary Clinton later introduced the president to the committee. She has been urged by some supporters to say publicly that she forgives him and to ask the American public to do the same.
White House lawyers made lastditch attempts to have publication of the 435-page Starr report, accusing President Clinton of impeachable offences, delayed for several days until they can study it and submit a rebuttal. Mr George Mitchell's name has been mentioned in connection with a search by the White House for a very senior lawyer with political experience to manage relations with Congress during the impeachment process.
Republican leaders on Capitol Hill are determined to release the report as soon as possible on the Internet. Even if the report is not delayed, the White House intends to submit a "counter-report" denying allegations by the independent counsel Mr Ken Starr that the president was guilty of a series of offences warranting impeachment by the House of Representatives.
The news agency Associated Press, citing "sources familiar with the report", said that "it lays out a detailed body of evidence that prosecutors contend will show President Clinton committed perjury, obstruction of justice, witness tampering and abuse of power".
Mr Clinton, on August 17th last, admitted publicly that he had "an inappropriate relationship" with the former White House intern Ms Monica Lewinsky but claimed that his denial of sexual relations in a deposition last January was "legally correct".
Since then, the president has been strongly criticised for not making a full apology for lying and for not showing sufficient contrition.
Yesterday he met a delegation of Democratic senators in the latest of a series of meetings with Democrats to try to win their support for any future vote on impeachment in Congress.
Later, the president said that the meeting was "a part of this process I am going through talking to people with whom I work, to ask for understanding and forgiveness and their commitment not to let the events of the moment in Washington to deter us from doing the people's work in building the future of this country".
The Senate minority leader, Mr Tom Daschle, who was at the meeting, said that Mr Clinton "apologised to us personally and we expressed the hope that the president would continue to demonstrate his contrition to his family, his friends and the American people". Mr Clinton "indicated a desire to do this".
Mr Daschle also said that they urged the president to co-operate with the procedures now under way in the Congress. "We expressed our strong desire that we be as certain as can be that the process will be a fair one. The president's story needs to be heard and we need to get the facts," Mr Daschle said.
Later, Mr Clinton also met his Cabinet to apologise to its members for misleading them last January, when he strongly denied the reports that he had an affair with Ms Lewinsky. Some leading members of the Cabinet came out of the meeting to express full confidence in the president's denial.
On Capitol Hill, legislators worked late drafting a resolution which will permit the Starr report to be released and also sent to the Judiciary Committee, which will review it in detail as the first stage in the impeachment process.
The Republican chairman of the committee, Mr Henry Hyde, said that the 445 pages included a 25-page introduction, a narrative of 280 pages and a 140-page explanation of possible evidence of impeachable offences.
The intention is to release all of the report today but not the 2,000 pages of appendices or the 18 boxes of material such as grand jury transcripts. Mr Starr, in his accompanying letter, told Congress that the grand jury material had "information of a personal nature that I respectfully urge the House to treat as confidential".
Meanwhile, the grand jury which heard witnesses during the Starr investigation met again yesterday, showing that its work is not yet finished. There is speculation that Mr Starr may ask the jury to indict some of Mr Clinton's aides on criminal charges.
The report on the investigation into President Clinton will cause huge but local congestion at the time it is to be put on the Internet, experts said yesterday. But it is unlikely the World Wide Web in its continuing role as the town crier of the late 20th century will come crashing down as a result of the traffic.
The US House of Representatives said it would release the summary on
the Library of Congress web site - http://thomas.loc.gov - or on a special house site being prepared at www.house.gov/icreport, probably between 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. (5 p.m. and 7 p.m. Irish time today).
There could hardly be a worse time, said Ms Alaina Kanfer, a research scientist at the National Centre for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois. "The east coast around the District of Columbia has real bottlenecks in the afternoon," she declared.