The Disgrace of Janet Reno
The Disgrace of Janet Reno This Wednesday, Attorney General Janet Reno will testify at an oversight hearing of the House Judiciary Committee. The hearing will center on her management of the...
...It raises more than a suspicion about incompetence at Justice, however...
...Hyde's colleagues will also no doubt be curious about a more recent and spectacular Justice fumble, this one involving video and audio tapes of Bill Clinton's White House donor coffees...
...No matter...
...If she decides that it is not, then the entire line of inquiry that produced the evidence must be dropped...
...The hearing will center on her management of the Justice Department inquiry into 1996 campaign fund-raising...
...Committee chairman Henry Hyde's Republican majority will want to know why Reno's career investigators and prosecutors seem forever behind the curve on this matter—which has already spattered more grime on a sitting president's reputation for "public integrity" than any scandal since Richard Nixon's Watergate...
...Complaints about her management of the fund-raising inquiry, Reno says, are the product of ignorance, "innuendo," and "rank speculation...
...In April, Reno announced that Gore had dialed only for "soft-money" contributions to the Democratic party...
...Janet Reno seems the kind of person who grows ever more stubborn as her position grows ever less secure...
...And she will decline to accept any criticism of that task force— something she has lately begun doing with unseemly vehemence...
...Even, it seems, if that line of inquiry promises to bring to light crimes that do not involve covered officials at all...
...on October 2, Ruff went to the Justice Department for a regularly scheduled meeting with Reno...
...At 6:30 p.m...
...First, one Justice lawyer told the Post, "you can't ask someone whether a covered person committed a crime...
...It is preventing all the lesser Democratic ducks—their feathers more deeply stained by implications of fund-raising illegality than Bill Clinton and Al Gore's feathers will likely ever be—from quacking...
...If Justice investigators trip across the slightest hint that a high official covered by that statute's guidelines may be associated with some potential wrongdoing, they must immediately back away and refer the matter to Janet Reno...
...David Tell, for the Editors...
...Janet Reno then reviews whether this initial evidence is sufficient to trigger the statute...
...Former Democratic party chairman Don Fowler clearly intervened with the CIA on behalf of donor-oilman Roger Tamraz, though he absurdly claims to have forgotten the incident...
...If she were truly the person of "integrity" everyone ritualistically says she is, Janet Reno would resign...
...This raises a suspicion about obstruction of justice at the White House, of course...
...Or not doing it, as the case may be...
...On October 3, the Washington Post published an exhaustive account of the Justice Department task force's history...
...No problem, she said...
...Janet Reno has a self-imposed conflict of interest with her broadest responsibility to oath and office...
...White House counsel Charles F.C...
...At the same time, bigger Democratic fish have largely escaped the Justice Department's attention...
...Ruff's staffers "discovered" these tapes, they say, on October 1. At 3 p.m...
...It has not...
...we already know all we need to...
...The hold-up seems rooted in Janet Reno's understanding of the independent-counsel statute...
...Federal laws have been broken, right and left: kited checks, fictitious donors, foreign contributions, fund-raising on property owned by tax-exempt institutions, you name it...
...Has the FBI contacted the committee for information about this troubling event...
...We know that from sworn witness testimony and several thousand pages of DNC documents introduced before Fred Thompson's Senate committee...
...Nor did the Justice task force get around to interviewing so central a figure in 1996 Democratic fund-raising as former White House deputy chief of staff Harold Ickes until late last month...
...She will decline to answer even general questions about the progress of her task force, citing, as she just as routinely does, the sensitivity of any pending criminal investigation...
...on October 3, Reno officially determined that where the Clinton coffees were concerned, "specific" and "credible" evidence that would, by law, require her to secure the appointment of an independent counsel simply did not exist...
...She will decline to answer particular questions of legal interpretation, and refer them, as she routinely does, to her subordinates...
...Janet Reno has managed to turn the independent-counsel statute completely on its head...
...And second, another Justice Department source reported, "even if it looks like a duck, we can't poke it to make it quack...
...And in Reno's hands, the independent-counsel statute is also doing something arguably worse...
...Justice has this year smoothly forwarded a number of Republican controversies to a federal grand jury: an overseas loan secured for a GOP think tank by former party chairman Haley Barbour, for instance, and an allegation by Democratic lobbyist Mark Siegel that House Government Reform and Oversight Committee chairman Dan Burton had pressured Siegel for campaign contributions...
...She is not enforcing the law, and she is not administering the Justice Department in an orderly and credible fashion...
...They will not get much out of her, we wager...
...So we probably won't learn much of anything that's new on Wednesday...
...It will no doubt be a tense and sparky affair...
...On October 4, Ruff's men finally clued her in about the tapes...
...He didn't mention the tapes...
...Here, too, Henry Hyde and company will want to quiz the attorney general hard: about how she squares the language of various formal legal opinions and criminal-code provisions with her refusal so far to recuse her department and seek an independent counsel...
...The Post based this report on publicly available Democratic National Committee documents, copies of which had been sitting unreviewed at the Justice Department the entire time...
...But five months later, the Washington Post reported that Gore's calls had actually generated a fair bit of "hard money"—which may well be illegal...
...The work of the task force, it turns out, has been radically circumscribed by the attorney general's fetishization of the independent-counsel statute...
...She is doing "the right thing," the attorney general insists, and she intends to keep right on doing it...
...That law, designed to ensure the unbiased prosecution of senior government officials, now operates, under Reno's direction, as a near-blanket insurance policy for those officials against such prosecution...
...How is it, for that matter, that the investigative enthusiasm of Reno's department has been allowed to ebb and flow with what looks like a distinctly partisan tide...
...And the attorney general of the United States appears to believe that it is her duty not to investigate those crimes thoroughly and speedily...
...We expect committee Republicans will want to know how the Justice Department could so obviously botch the question of Al Gore's notorious big-buck telephone calls from the White House...
...that's not illegal...
...How is it, in all those months, that it never once occurred to our law-enforcement officials to pursue such basic documentary records...
Vol. 3 • October 1997 • No. 6
