NY Times Lead Editorial Says Reno Went To Lengths “To Protect Vice President Al Gore” et al.

Source: New York Times
Published: 3/11/00 Author: Howell Raines (but unsigned editorial: “The Justice Department Memos”)

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.