-Caveat Lector- <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">
</A> -Cui Bono?-
From:
http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/editorial/11sat1.html
The New York Times
March 11, 2000
The Justice Department Memos
Any hope the Democrats may have had that their past finance scandals
would fade in importance as an issue in this year's presidential
campaign probably vanished yesterday. Several extraordinary and
heretofore secret documents were disclosed that suggested the lengths to
which Janet Reno and her top aides went to protect Vice President Al
Gore and other senior officials from a thorough, independent
investigation into their fund-raising activities in the 1996 campaign.
The documents are further evidence of Ms. Reno's politicized handling of
the campaign fund-raising issue and of her dedication to protecting
Democratic Party interests from start to finish. Given her record, it is
unlikely that these revelations will now shame her into appointing
another strong prosecutor to reinvigorate her department's languishing
campaign finance investigation. But she owes the public an explanation
of her behavior, and Congress will need to explore ways to force action
from attorneys general who protect their cronies while ignoring the
recommendations of professional investigators.
One document is a memo to Ms. Reno written in July 1998 by Charles G. La
Bella, her hand-picked chief of the department's campaign finance task
force. The memo, parts of which appeared in yesterday's Los Angeles
Times, accuses senior officials of "gamesmanship" and legal
"contortions" to avoid an independent inquiry, and faults them as well
for "intellectually dishonest" double standards that allowed Ms. Reno to
investigate lesser figures but not President Clinton, Vice President
Gore, Hillary Rodham Clinton or Harold Ickes, a key White House
political operative.
The document does not accuse any of these Democrats of illegal
activities. What it does say is that the department's failure to appoint
an independent counsel, and its insistence on using its own lawyers, was
"a recipe for disaster" guaranteeing that the public would never learn
the truth. In many respects the La Bella memo echoed the views of Louis
J. Freeh, the F.B.I. director, who also told Ms. Reno that under the
independent counsel law she was legally obliged to appoint an outside
investigator who would not be troubled, as Ms. Reno inevitably would be,
by the conflicts of interest inherent in investigating her boss and the
vice president.
The second damaging document, disclosed in today's New York Times, is a
letter from a senior Justice Department official ordering a federal
prosecutor in Los Angeles, Stephen Mansfield, to stop his investigation
of the now-famous fund-raising luncheon that Mr. Gore attended in April
1996 at a Buddhist retreat in California. With presumably unintended
irony, the official, Lee J. Radek, informed Mr. Mansfield that he should
cease and desist because the matter could have "independent counsel
ramifications" -- even though Ms. Reno never had any real appetite for
such a counsel.
Mr. Mansfield halted his investigation, and in the following months
several figures involved in the temple fund-raising scheme fled the
country. The department's own internal inquiry exonerated Mr. Gore. So
far the only person nailed in the affair has been Maria Hsia, a
California immigration consultant and fund-raiser for Mr. Gore who was
convicted by a federal jury in Washington last week.
Ms. Reno's spokesman insisted yesterday, as Ms. Reno herself has
insisted all along, that she had fully evaluated every allegation
against Mr. Gore, never found sufficient reason to merit the appointment
of an independent counsel and never acted from political motives. These
latest documents, however, cast further doubt on her wisdom and add to
the evidence that she has run a Justice Department that often puts
politics ahead of impartial law enforcement.
Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company
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