Adnan and Marcos!!
freerepublic.com
Wall Street Journal
September 19, 1997 Editorial
Review & Outlook
Who Is Charles La Bella?
"It was a poorly prepared case," jury forewoman Catherine Balton said. "There was nothing to convince any of them that there was a case."
"We thought the government did a terrible, terrible job," juror Thomas O'Rourke agreed. "It was a totally silly case."
These quotes are culled from a 1990 Associated Press dispatch on the all-counts acquittal of former Philippine First Lady Imelda Marcos and arms dealer Adnan Kashoggi on charges of racketeering, conspiracy, mail fraud and obstruction of justice. The theory was that they conspired with Mrs. Marcos's late husband to loot the Philippines and invest the money in Manhattan real estate. Though Assistant U.S. Attorney Charles La Bella devoted three years of his life to the case, in the end the jury laughed him out of court.
Mr. La Bella's name may sound familiar. Janet Reno has just tapped him to take over the Justice Department's investigation of campaign finance violations by the Vice President and President of the United States. The Attorney General conceded that her previous set of "career prosecutors" had bungled the investigation. Despite this lesson, and despite the clear words of the statute, she continues her refusal to appoint an independent counsel. Instead, she has called on Mr. La Bella to be the white knight to set everything straight.
In the Marcos case, to be sure, Mr. La Bella was up against Gerry Spence, who prior to trial propped his cowboy boots on the prosecutor's table and said, "Why don't you dismiss all the charges so we can all go home?" As Mr. La Bella recounted the episode to the Washington Post, "I told him to get his feet off my desk and that I'd see in him court." At the end of Mr. La Bella's 95 witnesses, Mr. Spence said he was calling no one. "You only call witnesses if you have a case to rebut," he explained. The jury agreed.
After this setback in Manhattan, Mr. La Bella got the chance to mellow out in the U.S. Attorney's office in San Diego. After the Clinton Administration fired all sitting U.S. Attorneys in 1993, its choice for the San Diego position was Alan Bersin, who had been a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford with Bill Clinton and also a classmate at Yale Law School (and a Harvard classmate of Vice President Al Gore). Mr. Bersin, Clinton-Gore campaign manager in San Diego County, told the Washington Times that the new President "has the intellect of Woodrow Wilson and the people skills reminiscent of Franklin Roosevelt." Three weeks into his job as U.S. Attorney, Mr. Bersin demoted the local head of the criminal division and hailed Mr. La Bella from New York to fill the slot.
Now, this is of course a collection of Mr. La Bella's worst moments, and we're confident he has many redeeming qualities. And we rather feel sorry for the previous head of this investigation, the relatively inexperienced Laura Ingersoll, who was thrown in over her head in this sensitive assignment. Our complaint is with the Attorney General. Never having been big fans of the independent counsel statute, our initial instinct was to let the Public Integrity Section of Justice re-establish its reputation. But Ms. Reno's initial appointment was a virtual declaration that this investigation would not be a truly serious one. Now we're offered someone bearing Mr. La Bella's bruises, and this is supposed to reassure us. It's a bad joke.
Perhaps it's unfair to Ms. Reno, of course, to suggest that she makes the decisions for the Justice Department. Both her brazenness here and her tortured excuses for refusing to name an independent counsel suggest a higher audacity. They make much more sense as the acts of a President riding a burgeoning economy to a peak in the popularity polls and believing he can get away with almost anything.
And perhaps he can, given the state of Republicans on Capitol Hill. During Watergate, Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee held the confirmation of Elliott Richardson as Attorney General hostage to his agreeing, without benefit of the present statute, to an extraordinary charter for an independent counsel. The counsel, of course, turned out to be Archibald Cox, who had been Solicitor General under President Kennedy and invited Teddy Kennedy to attend when he was sworn into his new office. (Incidentally, today Mr. Richardson turns up as a trustee of President Clinton's legal defense fund, along with the Rev. Theodore Hesburgh of Notre Dame; they may have some explaining to do about the delay in returning contributions from Charlie Trie.)
Contrast this with the same committee under present Republicans. They recently waved through Eric Holder as Deputy Attorney General. Chairman Orrin Hatch apologized for even raising some miscues in Mr. Holder's record as U.S. Attorney. If the President gets away with his audacity, it will be in no small part the fault of Republicans who refused to play their role in opposition.
The measurement of their failure or success will be first whether Ms. Reno's series of stalls is finally ended by her following the meaning of the statute. And second, by the scope of the counsel's charter--whether the investigation merely covers phone calls from the Vice President's office, or whether it asks if the whole campaign contributions mess results from a conspiracy chartered by the President of the United States.
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