Crack-up at Justice
CRACK-UP AT JUSTICE The number-two job at the Department of Justice, which holds the title of deputy attorney general, is vacant. The number-three job, associate attorney general, is vacant. The...
...At the time, Freeh's bureau vehemently denounced as "baseless" initial suggestions that there had been a coverup of its actions at Ruby Ridge...
...It is President Clinton who has lately populated Justice with refugees from his embattled White House, men and women who take their new assignments already ethically compromised and exhausted...
...Joel Klein is serving as "acting" assistant attorney general in the antitrust division...
...He is said to be very tired...
...She is "secure enough to have involvement from me...
...But the operative theory in Washington is that Clinton, notwithstanding this provocation, cannot remove Reno or Freeh from office...
...The most important assistant attorney general job—in charge of the department's criminal division—has been vacant for an unbelievable 20 months...
...No, more than survived: She found her Washington reputation magically enhanced...
...He cannot be confirmed as solicitor general because Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Orrin Hatch remembers and still resents Dellinger's role in the undoing of Robert Bork...
...So he simply won't nominate one...
...Then Shapiro dispatched two representatives to grill the FBI agent who had noted this fact in Livingstone's file...
...He is Frank Hunger...
...The bureaucratic chaos at senior levels of the Justice Department is not entirely her fault...
...If you were the president, you'd be annoyed, too...
...Enraged, even...
...In May 1993, under Reno's nose, George Stephanopoulos ordered the FBI to alter a press release concerning potential "crimes" committed by the just-sacked White House travel-office staff...
...Her name is Janet Reno...
...She, too, is a counted bean, after all—the reluctant president's third choice for attorney general, a job Clinton believed could go only to a woman...
...And Reno's toleration of a department staffed this way implies a larger problem for the orderly and impartial administration of justice at "the people's law firm," as she likes to style it...
...The FBI, it now appears, has retaliated against a whistleblower in its still-unaccredited and obviously troubled crime lab— over the objections of Justice Department inspector general Michael Bromwich, who publicly accuses Louis Freeh of misleading Congress about the issue...
...Which is what Bill Clinton seems most to fear...
...In the fall of 1995, Democratic activist groups had begun advising the White House that INS naturalization backlogs "represent thousands of potential voters" in "politically important states" and that high-level pressure on INS was necessary lest thousands of Latinos be prevented from "participating in the 1996 presidential election...
...And it is President Clinton who, paralyzed in any personnel decision by ideological calculation and diversity-crazed bean-counting, continues to leave so many crucial Justice offices empty...
...Filling in is John Keeney, a career official who has been with Justice since the Truman administration...
...In advance of Secretary of State Albright's trip to China, White House counsel Charles Ruff asked for a full Justice briefing on the status of the department's Asia-gate investigation...
...At least 168 of those new citizens, it turns out, have serious criminal histories...
...It wasn't...
...She is widely understood not to be in control of her department...
...No one at Justice was ever disciplined for this catastrophe...
...He meant this as praise, evidently...
...In the fall of 1993, Louis Freeh assumed the directorship of the FBI...
...Justice cannot do so because it believes the White House cannot be trusted to keep the information secure from witnesses and targets of the investigation...
...In January, Clinton aide Rahm Emanuel gave an interview about Janet Reno to a correspondent from Legal Times...
...The president is known to be increasingly displeased with both of them for their so-called independence from the White House—for their belated unwillingness to participate in the official administration "spin" on the Asia-money inquiry...
...So the question why he retains Reno as attorney general (and Louis Freeh as FBI director, who should by rights have been fired long ago) is an interesting one...
...He would soon promote his long-time crony Larry Potts to the bureau's number-two slot despite the fact that Potts had supervised the notorious 1992 Ruby Ridge shootout that left an innocent 14-year-old boy and his mother dead...
...Until 1995, Klein helped manage documents and staff testimony involved in various scandal inquiries as an official in the White House counsel's office...
...he admits having shredded a critical internal report on the operation...
...But Janet Reno still refuses to acknowledge even the possibility of such a conflict...
...And what the United States Senate would surely demand as a condition of confirmation from any new attorney general the president might conceivably nominate...
...No doubt...
...And she survived...
...Today, Shapiro is still on the job, despite having thus interfered in an independent-counsel investigation of possible criminal wrongdoing by some of the president's closest aides...
...He and Reno, Emanuel said, have a "very good" working relationship...
...Dellinger is expected to leave the department later this year amid persistent whispered complaints from Supreme Court clerks that his briefs are unreliable, unhelpful, and excessively political...
...And through it all, as her "people's law firm" descends further into a muck of dysfunction and politicized sleaze, Janet Reno sleeps...
...The Office of Legal Counsel, which handles policy matters, also has a vacancy at the top...
...But it did...
...Louis Freeh swore it would never happen again...
...Which would require her, by law, to request the appointment of another independent counsel...
...And Reno backed Freeh up...
...The blind and cozy "deference" shown the White House during the Filegate caper, Shapiro wrote in his report, represented a "complete abdication of management responsibility" at the FBI...
...The following month, under still cloudy circumstances, Reno ordered the FBI assault that ended in the deaths of 80 Branch Davidian cultists in Waco, Texas—25 children among them...
...It is President Clinton who has, from the start, imposed on Reno a series of deputies with much more intimate personal and political connections to the first family than she herself enjoys—people like disgraced associate attorney general Webb Hubbell...
...The attorney general is a doormat...
...In at least one recent case, the president has good reason to be upset...
...But that's not the real reason we have the miserable Justice Department we do, and why we're likely to have it for quite a while...
...But Janet Reno tolerates it all...
...And there is an attorney general of the United States...
...He is Al Gore's brother-in-law...
...It would "look bad...
...It's a problem that has been famously in evidence almost from the moment Reno was confirmed to office in March 1993...
...Its "acting" head is Beth Nolan, yet another White House lawyer who worked on Whitewater in Vince Foster's office...
...In July 1996, barely a month after his Filegate report was released, Shapiro tipped off the White House that Livingstone's own security-clearance file indicated that Livingstone had originally been hired at the behest of no less an eminence than Hillary Clinton...
...The Justice Department believes it cannot support the president in the defense of American national security by telling him what it knows about Chinese involvement in controversial Democratic fund-raising last year...
...As 1993 became 1994, the FBI cooperated in what bureau general counsel Howard Shapiro would later call a "massive invasion of privacy" perpetrated by White House staffer Craig Livingstone: the unjustified requisition and rifling of security-clearance files on 500 retired White House employees...
...The fog has only thickened in succeeding years...
...And we're stuck with her...
...No one has lost his job for that, either...
...Last year, the FBI ruined the life of one Richard Jewell by publicly, repeatedly, and falsely identifying him as a suspect in the Atlanta Olympic bombing...
...Potts is the target of a related federal grand jury probe...
...Nor has anyone been disciplined at the Immigration and Naturalization Service, another arm of the Justice Department, which in 12 months ending last fall granted citizenship to 180,000 aliens who had not completed a background check...
...And it is safer for the president to have them "inside," as it were, than outside—giving witness against him—in private life...
...So Vice President Gore's "reinventing government" task force dove into action, with a flurry of memos on the need to "lower the standards for citizenship" and thereby produce "a million new citizens before election day...
...Keeney has recused himself from his office's most important current investigation because his son is Lippogate principal John Huang's defense attorney...
...Emanuel is a former ballet dancer and campaign fund-raiser who for the past several years has held the Justice Department "portfolio" at the White House—and who, by all accounts, has managed that portfolio very aggressively, bossing Justice staffers around at will...
...Nominally...
...But Reno took full "responsibility," justifying her actions with references to allegations of Davidian "child abuse" that have never been substantiated...
...Freeh rebuffed him—and, by extension, a request from the president of the United States for information central to an immediate foreign policy initiative...
...The Department of Justice has a major conflict of interest, in other words...
...There is an assistant attorney general for the department's civil division...
...Thus was inaugurated at the Justice Department a culture of Clinton-style damage control and managerial slipperi-ness...
...She is President Clinton's worst major cabinet appointment...
...The FBI's E. Michael Kahoe has since pled guilty to felony obstruction-of-justice charges in the matter...
...Freeh and Reno are not fundamentally independent of the White House, as a closer look at the latest crosstown flap makes clear...
...The solicitor general's office, which represents the United States before the Supreme Court, is being run by former White House deputy counsel Walter Dellinger...
...David Tell, for the Editors...
...The catalogue is almost endless...
Vol. 2 • April 1997 • No. 30
