-Caveat Lector-
>From slate.com
> Janet Reno
> The Independent Attorney General.
>
> By David Plotz
> Posted Friday, September 10, 1999, at 9:30 a.m. PT
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> TODAY IN SLATE
> Courageous or Clueless? David Plotz Solves the Janet Reno Mystery
>
> <Picture>
>
> Attorney General Janet Reno has always been viewed as the least
> Clintonian member of the Clinton administration. Her boss believes words are
> deeds and images are action. The self-styled "awkward old maid," immune to the
> blandishments of Beltway power, is supposedly the beefy substance of this
> superficial government. Yet no Clinton administration figure depends more on
> image than the attorney general, and none has relied so much on words and
> symbols as a substitute for action. Reno's defining moment, after all, was
> taking responsibility for Waco. Taking responsibility apparently meant doing
> nothing (except supervising a post-mortem investigation that doesn't appear to
> have investigated anything). Even so, the symbolic Reno represents a new
> and mostly encouraging model of attorney general, a perfect fit for an age of
> what legal scholar Jeffrey Rosen calls "criminalized politics."
> Traditionally--at least during the past half-century--there have been two kinds
> of attorneys general. One is the presidential confidant, such as Bobby Kennedy,
> John Mitchell, or Edwin Meese, who treats the Justice Department as the
> president's private law firm. The other is the faceless, trustworthy
> administration foot soldier. Remember Bill Barr? I didn't think so. Reno
> is neither. She arrived in Washington from Miami as Caesar's Wife, and so she
> has remained. She was ignorant and independent of insider D.C., and has stayed
> that way. Bill Clinton never much liked her and never confided in her, and she
> reciprocated. She was, she said, "the people's lawyer," not his. It is this
> outsiderness that has made her such a good attorney general and such a bad one.
> This is a time when the mere act of taking a high-level political job
> subjects any official to suspicion of criminal wrongdoing. During the Clinton
> administration, a primary--arguably the primary--job of the attorney general has
> been to supervise the investigations of her colleagues and boss. Reno has
> appointed independent counsels to investigate six of her fellow Cabinet members
> and her president, and has overseen innumerable internal Justice investigations
> of administration corruption. You can argue about whether this constant
> surveillance of pols is a good thing, but there is no doubt that these are the
> most highly publicized cases the DOJ handles.
>
>
> <Picture><Picture: N>o one is better suited to them than Reno. She is smart, but
> mostly she is trustworthy. She pays the list price for her cars to avoid the
> appearance of favoritism. She avoids the president because she doesn't want to
> be tainted by him. Her employees speak with awe about her integrity. Reno's
> independence has given her the courage to appoint counsels to probe her
> colleagues and her boss, and the courage not to appoint counsels even when the
> wolves were baying for them. She refused to authorize an independent
> investigation into campaign fund raising, despite Republican outrage, because
> she believed the law did not require it. Since she rejected a
> fund-raising independent counsel, some Republicans have painted her as Clinton's
> tool, charging that she was helping him so she could keep her job. (Newt
> Gingrich even likened Reno to Mitchell.) But the charges haven't stuck. Reno's
> entire success at Justice rests on her image as an ethical paragon. The
> independent counsel may be tainted, but thanks to Squeaky Janet, the AG and the
> DOJ are unsullied.
>
>
> <Picture><Picture: Subscribe Now!>
> <Picture><Picture: T>o appreciate the hugeness of Reno's accomplishment, hearken
> back to the Reagan Justice Department. Meese was under investigation. DOJ
> inquiries into other Reagan officials were suspect. The department was
> mistrusted, a national disgrace. Under any Clinton crony (imagine Webb
> Hubbell!), the DOJ would have been similarly compromised. After Watergate, legal
> reformers proposed making the Department of Justice independent of presidential
> control. Janet Reno is the next best thing: the Independent Attorney General.
> Reno is independent not just by temperament but also because she is
> unfireable. Every day since she took office, she has been supervising at least
> one probe embarrassing to Clinton--Whitewater, fund raising, Lewinsky, China
> espionage, etc. Clinton can't afford the political beating he would take if he
> cashiered her.
>
>
> <Picture><Picture: B>ut Reno pays a price for her life tenure and her
> outsiderness. The president has all-but-excluded her from policy-making. Under
> the Crony Attorneys General, the Justice Department exercised vast influence
> over legal policy. Meese and Kennedy, for example, shook up federal law
> enforcement. But the Clinton White House has husbanded crime policy to itself,
> unwilling to entrust it to Reno. This has made her an attorney general
> without measurable accomplishment in law enforcement or prosecution. Crime has
> plummeted, but she gets no credit. Reno brought an ambitious, liberal agenda to
> Justice. She favored alternative punishments, longed to help troubled kids,
> worried about Draconian anti-immigration policy, and disliked the death penalty,
> mandatory minimum sentences, and the crack/powder cocaine sentencing disparity.
> But Clinton and the Republican Congress ignored her. Instead, her Justice
> Department has had to enforce an expanded federal death penalty, throw more
> people in federal prison for longer sentences, punish juvenile criminals more
> harshly, support mandatory minimums and the crack/powder disparity, and double
> the size of the Border Patrol. Reno opposed some of these policies internally
> but had too little influence to stop them.
>
>
> <Picture><Picture: W>hich brings us to Waco, where the symbolism and substance
> of Reno collide most alarmingly. Reno's deserved reputation for integrity is
> merely negative. She has not achieved anything magnificent. Her integrity has
> simply prevented her from corrupting the process. She has not conducted any
> powerful investigations, but she has had the wisdom not to block others from
> conducting them. The Waco mess, however, has exposed the limits of mere
> honor. Most reports suggest that FBI agents lied to Reno over and over about
> what they had done, and Reno believed them. In this case, she, not an
> independent counsel, supervised the operation and the probes, and she settled
> for cursory answers. It's easy to call this gullibility and incompetence, and
> that's exactly what Republicans are doing: A chorus on the right, including
> Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, and
> Larry Klayman, is demanding her resignation. (It's worth noting, however, that
> the FBI similarly deceived Republican AGs over the Ruby Ridge fiasco. Attorneys
> general have an impossible relationship with the FBI: They nominally supervise
> the bureau and hence are held responsible for its misbehavior, but the FBI
> behaves like an autonomous agency.) An attorney general who exerted more
> control over the department and the bureau, who was a better head-knocker, and
> who had the full support of the White House might have dragged the truth out of
> the FBI years ago, as Reno did not and could not. But no such attorney general
> could have survived the Clinton scandals, much less survived them with her own
> reputation--and her department's--intact.
>
> <Picture>
> Related in Slate
> <Picture>
>
> Jacob Weisberg called Washington's nastiness toward Reno "unjustified" in a 1997
> "Strange Bedfellow" column. Also in '97, "Pundit Central" covered another spat
> between Reno and FBI Director Louis Freeh.
>
> <Picture>
> Related on the Web
>
>
> The official Justice Department bio of Reno says she "enjoys reading poetry and
> music ranging from opera to country-and-western." The department collects her
> speeches here. A Sept. 6 Robert Novak column in the Chicago Sun-Times follows
> the trajectory of the Waco spin, with responsibility shifting from Reno to
> Freeh. The FBI site includes a list of "recent major investigative
> accomplishments," from which the Waco incident is notably absent.
> <Picture>Join The Fray <Picture> What did you think of this article?
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> David Plotz is a Slate's Washington bureau chief. You can e-mail him at
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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