Inept or Corrupt? - attorney general Janet Reno

National Review, June 28, 1999 by Byron York

The enigma of Janet Reno and Justice.

Mr. York is an investigative writer with The American Spectator.

Nine months ago, relations between Capitol Hill Republicans and Janet Reno were at an all-time low. The attorney general had roundly rejected the advice of top investigator Charles La Bella that she seek an independent counsel in the campaign-finance scandal. Before that, she had ignored the same recommendation from FBI director Louis Freeh. For a while, Reno refused even to let lawmakers see a heavily redacted version of La Bella's analysis of the case, which led to a serious but unsuccessful attempt to hold her in contempt of Congress. It was hard to imagine relations between the Hill and Reno getting any worse.

Until now. News of the Justice Department's failure to act in the Chinese spy case has led to new calls for Reno's head. Less publicized- but equally galling to some Republicans-is the department's decision to make lenient plea-bargain deals with John Huang and Charlie Trie, perhaps the two most important figures in the campaign-finance case. Taken together, the latest developments have Reno's critics asking a simple, if harsh, question: Is she corrupt, incompetent, or some combination of both?

Incompetent, vote some of those most knowledgeable about Justice's botched spy probe. "National security, espionage, and counterintelligence were never a top priority for her," says a former department official. "She's suffering for it in this Los Alamos fiasco. It was inevitable that something like this would happen." Reno, according to prosecutors who have served under her, has always been more interested in trendier causes, like deadbeat dads, abortion-clinic violence, and school safety.

While she concentrated on those, Reno neglected some of the agencies most critical to national security. By many accounts, she has been indifferent to the department's Office of Intelligence Policy and Review, which is the agency that refused to okay a request to wiretap Los Alamos espionage suspect Wen Ho Lee. As much attention as that has attracted, it's nothing new under Reno. Back in 1995, some insiders complained that the office turned down too many FBI requests to seek search and wiretap warrants for suspected spies. And Reno drew criticism from both her colleagues and Congress when she tried to reorganize the department's internal-security section in a way that placed less emphasis on prosecuting alleged spies. She later dropped the idea.

Reno also de-emphasized the work of the department's criminal division as a whole. For reasons that she has never adequately explained, she chose to leave the top job in the division-one of the two or three most important posts at the Justice Department-empty from 1995 until last year. "The criminal-division head job was vacant when the Los Alamos intelligence was obtained," says the former official. "The division was never briefed on the case."

STONEWALLING

Perhaps the incompetence argument explains some of that. But to what does one attribute the department's actions during the Cox committee's investigation of Chinese espionage? The committee's report says Justice refused to cooperate, forcing the committee "to expend a major part of its available investigative resources in retracing the Justice Department's steps, often in the face of protests from Justice Department officials."

And not only did Justice not supply information to the committee-it tried to keep other government agencies from doing so as well. "If we sent a document request to an executive department," ranking committee Democrat Norm Dicks said recently, "[Justice] would say the executive department couldn't respond to the committee's request, even if it were a subpoena, because they needed first to get in the middle of it." The committee was eventually able to get around that, but members remained frustrated by the department's delaying tactics. "If . . . you're trying to look at this as a national-security matter, then you want to get to the bottom of these things in a hurry," Dicks said. "You don't want to drag it out."

Even when one concedes that Justice performed atrociously in the spy investigation, it is likely that the scandal would not be causing such rancor on Capitol Hill were it not for the deep well of distrust created by Reno's handling of the campaign-finance probe. The reason that so few Republicans trust her to do the right thing now is that she didn't do the right thing then.

During the critical first year of the probe, Reno assigned the case to an inexperienced lawyer and set limits that virtually ensured the investigation would go nowhere while precious time ticked away, witnesses fled the country, and evidence was destroyed. In September 1997, after public exposure of the investigation's shortcomings, Reno brought in the well-respected La Bella and then ignored his findings while listening only to favored staffers who opposed an independent counsel. La Bella, by his own public account, became persona non grata at the department and last month left the government altogether.