Reno ? Clinton
LINDBERG, TOD
Reno v Clinton by Tod Lindberg REPUBLICANS EAGERLY DECLARED that they weren't surprised by Attorney General Janet Reno's decision last week not to seek an independent counsel in the Democratic...
...And exoneration by an independent prosecutor, should that be the result of the investigation, is more credible than exoneration by an official of the same administration...
...There wouldn't be as much hammering at Janet Reno...
...he was the one who told Reno to bring in an outside counsel...
...Republicans are fond of citing Reno's own 1993 congressional testimony on the independent-counsel statute...
...Since the attorney general makes the decision, all eyes turn to the attorney general—not to the alleged perpetrator...
...If she really thought now what she thought in 1993, she would long ago have gone to the D.C...
...In fact, if Republicans could take a step back from the trenches in their war over campaign fund-raising, they might just notice that they're fighting on the wrong front...
...One question would be: How can the president preside over an investigation into his own conduct...
...True, Reno has gone back to the D.C...
...In 1993, during a period when the law had lapsed, Reno appointed Robert Fiske special counsel to investigate the burgeoning Whitewater scandal...
...Those were precisely the circumstances that led to the appointment of Robert Fiske to investigate Whitewater...
...But Reno has gone to court on at least two occasions to oppose efforts by those two counsels to broaden the scope of their investigations...
...That's the independent-counsel statute at work...
...circuit, who actually select independent counsels, and sought to have Fiske continue his investigation in accordance with the law...
...These inquiries are still going on, much to the disgust of Democrats...
...And, as it happens, this much-vaunted "independent-minded" attorney general seems independently to reach exactly the conclusion a partisan Democrat would want her to reach, every time...
...She has also clashed with Starr, seeking to block his access to material the White House claimed was protected by attorney-client privilege...
...Nobody listened...
...Reno v Clinton by Tod Lindberg REPUBLICANS EAGERLY DECLARED that they weren't surprised by Attorney General Janet Reno's decision last week not to seek an independent counsel in the Democratic fund-raising scandal...
...If Republicans really want an investigation, they ought to get rid of the independent-counsel law, which mainly serves these days to deflect attention from where it ought to be focused—on the president...
...In the end, he caved...
...Reno has declined as well to unleash independent counsels in the White House travel office and FBI files matters, heaping them instead onto Starr's plate...
...On the other hand, how often do political figures admit they were wrong...
...Whether you like it or not, the law's the law and needs to be enforced, not tortured into some new meaning...
...Oddly enough, the truth is that if Congress did vote to repeal the law, Bill Clinton would have good reason to veto it...
...For 60 days at least, ever since Reno started the clock on her preliminary investigation under the independent-counsel statute—and in fact for a much longer period, when the question was whether Reno would actually start the clock—virtually all the attention on the fund-raising scandal has been directed at: Janet Reno...
...The point is that since shortly after the law was reenacted in 1994, everything Reno has done suggests she regards the independent-counsel statute as ripe for prosecutorial abuse—a point Republicans used to make all the time in the days when their friends were the ones in the crosshairs...
...And it's the attorney general's view of the alleged perp that's the issue—not so much the actions of the alleged perp himself...
...Shouldn't he himself order the attorney general to appoint an outsider of high stature and impeccable credentials to look into the matter...
...At that time, the attorney general noted an "inherent conflict whenever senior executive branch officials are to be investigated" by the Justice Department...
...The court declined to appoint him, in a move that stunned Washington, instead replacing Fiske with Kenneth Starr, whose reputation as a GOP partisan quickly became an article of Democratic faith...
...It's hard to find anyone in the GOP who doesn't think the fix is in—that the Justice Department and Reno are twisting themselves and the law into pretzels to avoid siccing an independent counsel on Bill Clinton or Al Gore...
...At the time, Janet Reno said she was perfectly capable of doing the job...
...But that's not all...
...Instead, they demanded to know why Bill Clinton thought this was proper...
...After Congress reauthorized the law, she went to the judges of the D.C...
...And to top it off, Reno has steadfastly refused to use her discretionary authority under the independent-counsel law to seek a counsel in the Democratic fund-raising scandal...
...Reno and the independent-counsel law got off to a bad start and never recovered...
...That was somebody else—somebody who must be just delighted that all the heat these days is directed at the attorney general...
...circuit to ask for a special prosecutor...
...Given Reno's 1993 view, Republicans (and others) have asked how she can avoid seeking an independent counsel now...
...circuit seeking prosecutors to investigate other Clinton officials—former HUD secretary Henry Cis-neros and former agriculture secretary Mike Espy, among them...
...Senate Governmental Affairs Committee chairman and erstwhile fund-raising investigator Fred Thompson, in his initial blast in response to Reno's decision, hinted at the possibility of congressional toughening of the independent-counsel statute to preclude further Reno-esque misinterpretation...
...Now, whatever else may be true, Janet Reno didn't rent out the Lincoln Bedroom, suck up cash from Indonesian billionaires, or figure out a multimillion-dollar way around those pesky campaign-finance laws...
...Bad idea...
...She has instead relied on the mandatory provisions of that law, arguing that the conditions under which she must seek a counsel have not been met...
...At the moment, it serves him well...
...Has she gone too far...
...Actually, you don't have to imagine such a world...
...The answer is quite simple, really: Janet Reno has changed her mind about the independent-counsel statute...
...Tod Lindberg is editorial-page editor of the Washington Times...
...Imagine a world without the independent-counsel law...
...True, she hasn't said as much...
...Well, put her on the witness stand and grill her, of course, and keep the heat on in the press...
...What's a Republican to do...
...the hammering would be at the White House...
...An independent-counsel investigation ensures the appearance of fairness, she said then...
...Republicans certainly think so...
...It is, all in all, a portrait of an attorney general profoundly at odds with the law she is sworn to enforce and willing to go to some lengths to avoid it...
...The Democratic fund-raising imbroglio potentially involves the president, vice president, key political aides at the White House, and senior officials at the president's reelection campaign and his national party headquarters...
Vol. 3 • December 1997 • No. 14
