Scofflaw

National Review, Dec 22, 1997

FIRST Janet Reno became the only attorney general to endorse the independent-counsel statute. Now she is the first one blatantly to disregard its provisions. In a decision everyone has seen coming for weeks, Miss Reno has announced she will not ask for an independent counsel to investigate fundraising calls by President Clinton and Vice President Gore. Politically, the calls are a minor matter -- no one is going to impeach the President because he called donors from the White House -- but they are still a violation of the law. Miss Reno is willing to ignore that because no violations of the statute in question -- the century-old Pendleton Act, forbidding campaign solicitations on federal property -- have ever been prosecuted. But perhaps that is because the act has never been violated as part of such a wide-ranging plan to use federal property -- the Lincoln bedroom for sleep-overs, the Map Room for coffees, Air Force One for cozy flights -- as fundraising tools. Another, more independent prosecutor might have reached different conclusions regarding the Clinton - Gore calls.

It is exactly to avoid such doubts that the independent-counsel statute is on the books. Janet Reno presumably understands this. Not too long ago, she told Congress that she supported the broadest possible interpretation of the provision of the statute that allows an attorney general to request a counsel whenever he has a personal, financial, or political conflict of interest. There is nothing novel about this idea -- it is what prompted the appointment of counsels in the Iran - Contra, Whitewater, Travelgate, and Filegate investigations.

Nor is there any question that Miss Reno has a conflict in the case of the Clinton fundraising scandal. Notwithstanding her image of rugged independence, she has always been a loyal servant of the Administration, appointing a counsel in the Whitewater case only after Clinton gave her the go-ahead and trotting out briefs to support Clinton's dubious claim of civil immunity in the Paula Jones case (rejected by the Supreme Court 9 to 0).

Now, for nearly a year, she has been conducting a timid, see-no-evil investigation -- regularly beset by public embarrassments -- of a scandal that has disturbed the peace of Clinton's second term and threatened the presidential designs of Al Gore. No wonder even FBI Director Louis Freeh says Miss Reno has a conflict and should ask for an independent counsel. As Landmark Legal Foundation president Mark R. Levin puts it, "Janet Reno is the first attorney general since John Mitchell to conduct her own investigation of her own President and political party." The fundraising scandal, of course, goes well beyond those White House calls -- which the Democrats are happy to make the focus of public discussion -- to allegations of money laundering, bribery, foreign contributions, and espionage. Janet Reno is defying her own public position on a law she has vigorously supported in order to avoid having an independent party conduct an investigation of any of it. Why?