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WASHINGTON (AP) — House prosecutors and the White House legal team questioned Monica Lewinsky under oath today in a deposition for President Clinton's impeachment trial that lasted about five hours. The questioning, conducted privately at a hotel, concluded at midafternoon.

Meanwhile, Clinton's lawyer renewed complaints in court that Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr was violating grand jury secrecy laws on a separate matter.

Senators who monitored the videotaped deposition of Ms. Lewinsky at a Washington hotel emerged shortly after it ended but were barred by Senate rules from discussing anything they observed.

"The deposition started at 9:03 this morning it concluded at 3:14 this afternoon. We took several breaks during the day. There was a one-hour break for lunch," Sen. Mike DeWine, R-Ohio, explained. He said senators in the trial could begin viewing the deposition at 8 a.m. EST on Tuesday.

Rep. Ed Bryant, R-Tenn., and lawyers for Clinton questioned Ms. Lewinsky in the presidential suite of the Mayflower Hotel. The questioning took far less time than the eight hours that had been allotted by the Senate.

Before turning to the extraordinary question-and-answer session, presidential lawyer David Kendall announced he was taking legal action against Starr concerning a weekend story in The New York Times that the independent counsel had concluded that a grand jury could indict Clinton while he was still in office.

White House lawyers Nicole Seligman and Cheryl Mills, seen here with Clinton attorney David Kendall, performed Lewinsky's cross examination.

Kendall said he was filing a motion in U.S. District Court asking that Starr be required to show why he and his staff "should not be held in contempt for improper violations of grand jury secrecy."

The story, coming at the time the Senate is trying to find a way to end Clinton's impeachment trial, drew criticism from senators from both parties.

"I thought that the timing was extremely unfortunate and that it was inappropriate to come out while the Senate is concluding the president's trial," said Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine.

Starr spokesman Charles Bakaly today denied Starr's office was the source of the story. "We have no interest in interposing ourselves in the Senate's business," he said on ABC's "Good Morning America."

Starr, asked outside his home if he planned to seek an indictment of the president, said, "It is premature for us to be commenting at all on this, so we're not going to comment. There's a process that is under way and that process should go forward, the process that's under way in the U.S. Senate."

House prosecutors are questioning Ms. Lewinsky, a former White House intern and employee, as they enter the final phase of their attempt to prove that Clinton should be removed from office.

The House prosecutors and White House lawyers each had four hours today to question Ms. Lewinsky about her affair with Clinton and charges that he committed perjury and obstructed justice in trying to conceal their relationship.

Her deposition was taking place in private, presided over by one Democratic and one Republican senator and videotaped for viewing by other senators.

The process will be repeated Tuesday when Clinton's close friend Vernon Jordan, who helped Ms. Lewinsky find a job, will be deposed; and on Wednesday, when White House aide Sidney Blumenthal will be questioned.

"I don't want anybody to think there's some big bombshell out there," Rep. Bill McCollum, R-Fla., one of the 13 House trial managers, said of his expectations from the Lewinsky testimony.

McCollum, interviewed on "Fox News Sunday," said the prosecutors hoped to nail down "beyond a reasonable doubt that the president committed a crime" by trying to get Ms. Lewinsky to conceal gifts he had given her.

White House lawyers argue that Ms. Lewinsky has testified under oath to a grand jury, FBI agents and Starr's investigators more than 20 times and has said consistently that she was never told to lie or offered a job to cover up the affair.

Barring some startling new revelation from the depositions, Senate Republicans and Democrats have agreed that the final vote in the trial should come Feb. 12.

It takes a two-thirds majority of 67 to convict the president and remove him from office.

Collins said she did not know if either the perjury or obstruction of justice charge against Clinton would get even a simple majority vote. She said many senators felt the perjury allegation is particularly weak.

With that in mind, Collins, a moderate, is leading an effort to approve a "finding of fact" that would put the Senate on record as saying that Clinton, while not committing offenses that should lead to his removal, lied under oath. This "increases the accountability of our decisions to our constituents and to future generations," she said on NBC's "Meet the Press."

But senators from both parties expressed concern about the Senate overstepping its constitutional bounds.

"It would be a mistake and without authority for the Senate to act to find the president guilty of criminal conduct. Our role is to remove him from office, if he's guilty as charged by the House," Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., said on CBS' "Face the Nation." Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., told NBC: "This finding of fact is impeachment lite."

The trial is to resume Thursday, after senators have had a chance to review the three depositions. Only then will they decide whether any of those witnesses will be called for live testimony in the Senate chamber. Democrats are adamantly opposed to that, and some Republicans also have said that shouldn't be necessary unless new information comes out of the depositions that could change the course of the trial.

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