Christopher-
Now that you mention posting the URLs from the N.Y. Times, I realize I had a hard time getting through at work because of our fire walls. I had our network administrator configure Netscape to bypass both the N.Y. Times and WSJ Interactive Edition to access them. I've learned my lesson, thanks for the heads-up.
Here's the story:
By DAVID JOHNSTON
ASHINGTON -- 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. |
