August 20, 1998
The Reno Watch
While President Clinton's reputation for integrity continues to plummet,
Attorney General Janet Reno seems to be thinking about salvaging
hers by appointing an independent counsel.
Aides say that within the next few days she will complete her review of an
exhaustive report in which her chief prosecutor for campaign finance
irregularities, Charles La Bella, argues for naming an independent prosecutor
to investigate White House fund-raising during 1996. Such an appointment is
18 months overdue, but it is encouraging to see news reports that Ms. Reno
is at least lurching in the right direction.
The Attorney General is responding to the report in her own peculiar way, of
course. La Bella, who has returned to his job as Acting United States
Attorney in San Diego, apparently recommended appointment of a counsel
with a broad mandate to look into all aspects of campaign fund-raising. The
Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal reported that Ms. Reno was
thinking about a narrower inquiry by an independent counsel, focusing on
former deputy White House chief of staff Harold Ickes or the telephone
solicitations by Vice President Gore.
But until she turns the whole matter over to a prosecutor with broad
authority, Ms. Reno will continue to be seen as a law enforcement official
who puts party loyalty above the law. One reason is that trying to contain an
investigation of the Democrats' sprawling and reckless money machine is like
trying to keep puppies in a basket. Something keeps popping out.
Witness the report by David Johnston in today's Times. It says that
investigators have found a 1995 memo suggesting that Gore may have
known that some of the money raised in calls from his office would go
directly into the re-election fund. If the memo says that, of course, it blasts to
pieces Ms. Reno's excuse that the phone calls were not illegal because Gore
thought he was raising "soft money" for purposes of maintaining the party
rather than "hard money" going directly to campaign accounts.
When it comes to campaign law, Ms. Reno has been full of ideas that do not
conform with the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1974 or the
Independent Counsel Act. For example, she has clung to the notion that she
can investigate her own boss. Both La Bella and Louis Freeh, the Director of
the Federal Bureau of Investigation, have told her that the law requires her to
step aside. She also invented a theory of "soft money" that validated the
White House practice of using such funds for campaign ads. Her
interpretation effectively erased the spending limits in the Campaign Finance
Act. An independent counsel would almost certainly have a less tolerant
attitude toward the ad campaigns planned by President Clinton, Ickes and
other key aides in 1996.
But it would be unfair and incomplete to focus the investigation solely on
Ickes, Gore or any other single individual. That could be regarded as nothing
other than a scam to avoid getting at the more serious questions of whether
the Clinton campaign bartered Presidential audiences or policy decisions for
contributions. A narrowly focused inquiry could miss the towering problem of
how so much illegal foreign money, possibly including Chinese Government
contributions, got into Democratic accounts. It might also miss the
Republicans' use of soft money in ads for Senator Robert Dole.
All that said, we are heartened by reports that Ms. Reno is thinking about
doing what the law requires of her. We urge her not to take the
time-consuming step of invoking the 90-day "preliminary investigation"
allowed under the Independent Counsel Act. In some cases that is
appropriate. But the La Bella report, Freeh's advice and the 18-month
investigation conducted by her own staff all show that it is time for an
independent counsel to get to work right now.
nytimes.com
August 20, 1998
New Questions on Gore Fund-Raising Role
Related Articles
Coverage of the Campaign Finance Inquiry into Clinton's Re-election Effort
By DAVID JOHNSTON
WASHINGTON -- Justice Department investigators have obtained a
November 1995 White House memo with hand-written notations
that appear to contradict Vice President Al Gore's account of his fund-raising
phone calls during President Clinton's re-election campaign, government
officials said on Wednesday.
The notations indicate that at a meeting on Nov. 21, 1995, Gore and several
campaign officials discussed how some of the large contributions being raised
by the vice president for use only for general campaign purposes by the
Democratic Party would be diverted to accounts to directly finance the
Clinton-Gore re-election effort, the government officials said.
The officials would not provide the notations on the memorandum, which
they said they had been written by an unidentified senior aide to the vice
president. The officials said that the notes were not conclusive evidence of
what the vice president knew about fund-raising activities and they did not
provide details of the discussion between Gore and others at the meeting.
Attorney General Janet Reno has said that telephone solicitations for hard
money by the president or vice president were subject to federal campaign
finance laws and could be illegal. Last December, she absolved Gore of
wrongdoing on the issue of the phone calls, based on what she said was the
absence of evidence that he had raised funds for the campaign.
The issue of Gore's fund-raising telephone calls is significant because it has
emerged as a focal point of debate at the Justice Department in recent
weeks, after Reno decided to reconsider whether to seek the appointment of
an independent prosecutor to investigate fund-raising abuses during Clinton's
re-election campaign, the officials said.
On Wednesday, a spokesman for Gore would not comment on the issue.
At the Justice Department, the officials said Reno's advisers are divided
about the significance of the notations on the Gore memo and some said they
doubted that the memo -- by itself -- would lead to the appointment of an
independent prosecutor. But the document, along with a lengthy confidential
report sent to Reno in late July by the former head of her campaign finance
unit, have re-energized the long-running Justice Department debate about
referring the case to an independent prosecutor.
That report written by Charles La Bella, who last month returned to his
prosecutorial job in San Diego, urged Reno to send the case to an
independent prosecutor. He based his conclusions on a review of the
massive array of evidence collected during the Justice Department's criminal
grand jury inquiry.
At the beginning of the month, Reno opened a formal 30-day review of
Gore's phone calls, the first step toward deciding again whether to seek an
independent counsel. Under the statute, Reno has until the end of the month
to extend the investigation by ordering a 90-day preliminary inquiry into the
vice presidential phone calls. After that investigation, Reno must decide
whether to seek an independent prosecutor.
But so far, the officials said, Reno has been unable to decide whether to
advance the Gore phone call issue to the 90-day review. Reno's efforts to
reach a decision are said by officials to be painfully labored even by the
standards of the protracted decision-making that has become a hallmark of
her tenure as attorney general.
Gore has said he believed his solicitations were lawful and intended to raise
what is known as "soft money" to be used only for general party purposes.
Officials would not explain how the notations on the memo, according to
people who have seen it since it was obtained last month, show what Gore
knew about plans for his fund-raising calls.
Several high-level Democratic National Committee officials attended the
November 1995 meeting, including Donald Fowler, the committee chairman,
and Marvin Rosen, the finance chairman.
The vice president's fund-raising phone calls have been under scrutiny
before. Reno cleared him in the earlier investigation by saying evidence
showed that he made calls to raise money exclusively for generic party
purposes, a category of funds which are largely unregulated.
Some memos about Gore's fund-raising activities also surfaced during these
investigations. Last year, his aides disclosed a memo by Ronald Klain, the
vice president's chief of staff, which was given to Gore before he met with
President Clinton and other chief fundraising officials in February 1996.
At that meeting, Gore did not use the talking points, which show him actively
involved in the formulation of fund-raising strategy and in the fund-raising
effort. In contrast to the image of a vice president detached from the
day-to-day details of fund raising, the memo showed him deeply involved in
the effort to reach the Democrats' $108 million goal, the officials said.
La Bella found that the effort to re-elect Clinton rested on an aggressive but
legally dubious attempt to evade the federal laws designed to limit campaign
contributions, law enforcement officials said.
Reno's independent counsel review reflects a deep split among senior law
enforcement officials. La Bella and FBI Director Louis Freeh have each
recommended appointment of an independent counsel, but some of Reno's
closest advisers have been opposed, These include Lee Radek, the head of
the Justice Department's public integrity unit, and Jo Ann Farrington, a senior
career lawyer who has become a chief interpreter of the independent counsel
statute, the officials said.
The internal warfare over the appointment of an outside prosecutor has been
fought on at least four separate occasions. Each time, Reno has rebuffed the
lawyers who favor an independent prosecutor. But officials said that this time
the arguments seemed especially intense, suggesting to some officials that
Reno may be slowly shifting her position. Although resistant to outside
campaign finance inquiries, Reno has referred more issues to independent
prosecutors than any other attorney general.
The deadlines of the independent prosecutor statute are not the only weight
bearing down on the attorney general. Reno has been cited by a
congressional committee for contempt of Congress for refusing to turn over
reports by La Bella and Freeh. She has told lawmakers that she would
review La Bella's report by the end of this week although officials said they
do not know when she will conclude those deliberations.
That report, which is said to pose an embarrassingly direct challenge to
Reno, did not refer to the newly found Gore memo, but assembled
previously known evidence in the case to argue that the fund-raising activities
in behalf of the Clinton-Gore campaign amounted to a conspiracy to evade
the country's federal campaign laws, the law enforcement officials said.
Overall, La Bella is said to have argued that the case raised such serious
issues that Reno had no alternative but to seek an independent counsel and
said that she had misinterpreted the law in her decisions rejecting the
appointment. Like Freeh, La Bella said that the totality of the evidence
provided sufficient grounds for an appointment under the statute.
But until now, Reno has refused to examine campaign fund-rasing
abusesexcept in a limited way. Her critics inside the Justice Department say
that her decisions have created the impression that she has twisted the
independent counsel statute to protect Clinton and Gore as confidence in her
and the Justice Department have eroded.
nytimes.com |
