Failure To Act: Pressure piling up on ‘naive’ Attorney General Janet Reno

By DAN THOMASSON / Scripps Howard News Service

WASHINGTON — No one should be surprised by Attorney General Janet Reno’s seeming intransigence in the naming of a special prosecutor to investigate the Clinton administration’s growing fund-raising scandal.

Lest we forget, the country’s chief legal officer is an appointee who works directly for the president of the United States. Therefore, it is utterly unrealistic to expect that this attorney general, or any other, can be considered impartial in such politically charged matters.

That’s why Congress passed and the Supreme Court upheld the special prosecutor law. Only once in 33 years in this town have I seen an attorney general, Elliot Richardson, sign off on the prosecution of a White House figure of his own party — Vice President Spiro Agnew.

What is surprising about Reno is her complete lack of subtlety in her apparent dogged determination to do her boss’s bidding through stonewalling, obfuscation and even some dissembling.

But her continuing refusal to appoint an impartial prosecutor based on a lack of evidence of top-level involvement probably got blown to bits this week with the revelation that a Cabinet member allegedly sold access for a charitable contribution.

California entrepreneur Johnny Chung said Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary solicited $25,000 for her favorite charity as a condition for meeting a Chinese delegation being shown about Washington by Chung. He said he made the donation to Africare on the day O’Leary met the delegation.

Chung, who had donated $366,000 to the Democratic National Committee from 1994 to last year, earlier had described how he handed over a $50,000 check for the DNC to Hillary Clinton’s aide, Margaret Williams, as an inducement to take another Chinese delegation to the White House mess for lunch.

And in another bit of disturbing news for Reno, there were implications the Teamster’s Union made substantial donations to the Clinton campaign through the DNC in exchange for DNC contributions to Teamsters head Ron Carey’s re-election campaign.

Even former top Clinton aide George Stephonopolous said Sunday on television he believes the O’Leary affair finally will force Reno to name a special prosecutor. As he noted, the check was written to Africare and the meeting took place.

Reno’s continuing reliance on the progressively weak reed of the “no evidence” clause in the statute is another sign of what is wrong with the attorney general. She was Clinton’s third choice for the job that Hillary Clinton insisted would be filled by a woman, no matter how long it took. Reno’s lack of big-time legal or political experience has never been more obvious as she faces one thorny problem after another.

From almost her first days in office when she allowed the FBI to bully her into a terrible decision at Waco to her “lapse” in notifying the president that the Chinese were buying into his re-election, she has shown an unbelievable naivete.

Most county prosecutors, even ones from volatile Dade County, Fla., don’t really expect suddenly to be named the attorney general of the United States, and it would be a rare one who could go from trying drug peddlers and thieves to the kind of decisions that impact the highest office in the land.

A far more credible excuse for ignoring congressional Republican demands for an outside prosecutor would have been that her own troops — career Justice Department employees who can be counted on generally to make impartial, apolitical judgments — are fully capable of getting to the bottom of this enormous money scandal. Instead she chose the much paler no-evidence defense.

Reno now faces new problems over the refusal of her department (again knuckling under to the FBI) to prosecute an FBI sniper who shot and killed Vicki Weaver in the notorious Ruby Ridge incident. A county prosecutor in Idaho has caused Reno further embarrassment by indicting the sniper for manslaughter, a clearly reasonable charge given the nature of the incident.

Dan Thomasson is vice president/news for Scripps Howard and editor of Scripps Howard News Service.