Justice denied: as President Clinton has time after time made a mockery of his oath of office, his attorney general has followed suit

National Review, Sept 1, 1998 by Robert H. Bork

In the history of the Republic, the names of Bill Clinton and Janet Reno will be forever linked, a prospect that ought to appall Miss Reno. That is entirely due to her efforts to preserve the President from his own follies, to use a polite word. Bill Clinton heads what is probably the most corrupt Administration ever, while Miss Reno has been called the worst of all Clinton's Cabinet appointments. From his point of view, of course, she may be the best, which comes to much the same thing.

Miss Reno's only visible qualifications for the post of attorney general were two: she is a woman and she had been a prosecutor. The first characteristic was indisputable, although, in any non-feminized era, it would have been irrelevant. The second seemed heartening, but it did not prepare her for Washington. Coming from obscurity, she must have been caught off guard by the rampant corruption into which she was thrust. So varied and unceasing have been this Administration's infractions of law that Miss Reno resembles a desperate tennis player, running from side to side of the court and from net to baseline in a frantic effort to hold down the score. Unfortunately for her White House coach, she is becoming winded and wobbly-legged.

She was not in charge from the beginning. Upon taking office, in an unexplained departure from the practice of recent Administrations, Miss Reno suddenly fired all 93 U.S. attorneys. She said the decision had been made in conjunction with the White House. Translation: The President ordered it. Just as the best place to hide a body is on a battlefield, the best way to be rid of one potentially troublesome attorney is to fire all of them. The U.S. attorney in Little Rock was replaced by a Clinton protege. The long-running Waco emergency that culminated in the deaths of eighty Branch Davidian men, women, and children again proved that Janet Reno was not in charge in the Justice Department. Webster Hubbell, Hillary's former law partner in Little Rock and Bill's man at Justice, coordinated tactics with the White House. The President did not even talk to his attorney general throughout the crisis.

Scandal followed scandal. Clinton had hardly been sworn in when he fired the entire staff of the White House travel office. The object, it seems clear, was to divert business to friends of the Clintons. The firings were so obviously unsupportable that the FBI was told to issue a press release suggesting criminality in the travel office. The head of the office was indicted and tried, but acquitted almost instantly. An inquiry suggested that Hillary Clinton ordered the coup. Then it was discovered that the White House had asked for and received nine hundred raw FBI files on Republicans. Nobody knew who had issued the request or hired the unqualified security officer who carried it out. The evidence pointed to Hillary, but she denied responsibility. If her denials were false, she probably committed indictable offenses. Janet Reno sat on her hands until she got all these matters out of her bailiwick by handing them off to the independent counsel.

On the night of Vincent Foster's suicide, his notes and files disappeared. White House Counsel Bernard Nussbaum removed the documents, reneging on his previous agreement to let Justice Department lawyers examine them. This prompted the deputy attorney general, Philip Heymann, who resigned shortly thereafter, to ask, "Bernie, are you hiding something?"

Janet Reno began to see the charms of having an independent counsel, to whom she could transfer politically embarrassing investigations. But she clearly seeks a counsel only when the President permits it. That led to his and her worst mistake: they got Ken Starr. Starr is a fair and judicious man; he assembled a staff of experienced prosecutors and went to work. Though the White House routinely complains that Starr has taken four years and spent $40 million, as if that time and money had been devoted to bringing down the President, Starr has compiled an impressive record: 14 convictions on pleas and verdicts. Now, judging from the White House's hysteria, Starr appears to be closing in on the President. There has indeed been an inordinate delay in Starr's proceedings. By now, his final indictments should have been handed up by the grand jury and his report on possible impeachable offenses should have been delivered to the House of Representatives. This delay is the responsibility of only one man: the President of the United States.

From the outset, the White House has repeatedly withheld subpoenaed documents until threatened with contempt. Administration personnel, when questioned, have displayed premature and highly selective Alzheimer's. The President's lawyers have asserted frivolous claims of privilege and litigated them to the end. The executive-privilege argument was doomed from the beginning. The relevant precedent, fittingly enough, was the Supreme Court's unanimous rejection of Richard Nixon's claim. The idea that Secret Service agents, sworn law-enforcement officers, need not testify because of a hastily cobbled-up "protective-function privilege" was merely laughable. The argument that the President would be in mortal danger if the officers were not at his side suggests it was their duty to be in attendance in the room off the Oval Office when Bill and Monica were there. The conduct of the President throughout these investigations -- from the delays to the litigation of utterly specious privileges -- is the moral equivalent of taking the Fifth. It is Janet Reno's shame that she not only failed to defend Starr against the White House smears but repeatedly assisted the cover-up by actually opposing in court Starr's efforts to get at the truth.