-Caveat Lector- <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/"> </A> -Cui Bono?- From: http://www.nytimes.com/library/politics/031100dems-donate.html The New York Times March 11, 2000 Aides to Reno Twice Urged Independent Prosecutor for Gore, Interviews and Files Show By DAVID JOHNSTON and DON VAN NATTA Jr. WASHINGTON, March 10 -- Senior Justice Department officials twice urged Attorney General Janet Reno to appoint an independent counsel to investigate Vice President Al Gore for his role in political fund-raising and at one point came closer to persuading her than was previously known, according to government officials and previously undisclosed documents. Not only did the F.B.I. director, Louis J. Freeh, and Ms. Reno's chief campaign finance prosecutor, Charles G. La Bella, conclude that Ms. Reno was obligated to seek an independent counsel, but so did aides like Robert S. Litt, a highly influential political deputy at the Justice Department who was often said to have opposed such appointments. But Ms. Reno decided against them and ordered the investigation of Mr. Gore closed in December, 1998. That decision lifted an enormous political weight off Mr. Gore as he prepared to seek the presidency and became one of the attorney general's most controversial and criticized moves. Myron Marlin, a spokesman for the Justice Department, said that Ms. Reno made her independent counsel decisions impartially and that her willingness to refer cases to outside prosecutors was demonstrated by her decision to seek such appointments in the cases of seven top Clinton administration officials. As to Mr. Gore, Mr. Marlin said: "The attorney general relied on the advice of a number of officials in this case, career employees who worked throughout Republican and Democratic administrations and had different views on the issue among them. In the end, the attorney general based her decision on the facts and the law without regard to politics." The Justice Department's investigation of Mr. Gore followed an erratic trajectory. It began before the 1996 election when federal prosecutors in Los Angeles opened an inquiry into the vice president's activities at a fund-raising event at the Hsi Lai Temple, a Buddhist temple in Hacienda Heights, Calif., in April 1996. But in an early, pivotal decision, senior Justice Department officials in Washington ordered the prosecutor, Assistant United States Attorney Stephen A. Mansfield, to cease his investigation and turn over any information he had gathered to prosecutors in Washington because Mr. Gore was covered by the independent counsel statute. "As would be necessary in any matter with potential independent counsel ramifications, your office should take no steps to investigate these matters at this time," Lee J. Radek, the chief of the public integrity section, wrote in a Nov. 1, 1996 letter to a top Federal prosecutor in Los Angeles. The letter was recently obtained by The New York Times. The department's temple inquiry exonerated Mr. Gore by 1997, and when he was later interviewed by the F.B.I. in 1997 and 1998, he was never even questioned about the temple. The investigation led to an indictment of Maria Hsia, a California immigration consultant and longtime fund-raiser for the vice president, who was convicted by a Federal jury here last week. Ms. Hsia's conviction has kept alive the political embarrassment that the event caused for the vice president, the putative Democratic presidential nominee this year. His opponent, Gov. George W. Bush of Texas, has vowed to make the vice president's role in campaign fund-raising in 1996 a major issue in the campaign this fall. Today, Mr. Bush said, "The vice president needs to clear up what role he played in raising money from the White House." Jim Kennedy, a spokesman for the president and vice president, said: "The fact that some disagreed with the attorney general's decision isn't news. But the bottom line hasn't changed. This has all been investigated by many people at a cost of millions of dollars with absolutely no finding of wrongdoing on the part of the president or vice president." A review of the Justice Department's inquiry of Mr. Gore's role in the 1996 campaign finance investigation shows that the vice president only narrowly avoided the appointment of an independent counsel to investigate charges of illegal fund-raising, not for any actions related to the temple for but for fund-raising phone calls that the vice president placed from his White House office. The closeness of the call on Mr. Gore's case was not known previously. The debates kept the decision open until the final day of the 90-day deadline imposed by the independent counsel law, when Mr. Radek and other lawyers from the public integrity section persuaded Ms. Reno that the facts would never warrant prosecution, the officials said. The searing debate has left a residue of bitterness among a wider group of current and former Justice Department and law-enforcement officials than has been previously disclosed. In interviews and confidential documents reviewed by The Times, they said that Ms. Reno's handling of inquiries involving Mr. Gore raised suspicions that investigations involving senior White House officials were handled differently than those of lower-ranking officials covered by the independent counsel statute. In a confidential memorandum to Ms. Reno in 1998, Charles G. La Bella, her hand-picked chief of the department's campaign finance task force, argued strenuously that an independent counsel should be appointed to investigate the fund-raising roles of President Clinton and Mr. Gore. Mr. La Bella's memorandum has never been made public. But verbatim notes by someone who reviewed the document demonstrate Mr. La Bella's frustrations. Mr. La Bella said that the Justice Department had begun aggressive investigations of lower-level people "based only on a wisp of information," while he believed that top White House officials had the benefit of a much higher legal threshold. Mr. La Bella pointed out in his memo, some details of which were first reported in The Los Angeles Times, that the independent counsel law had an assurance that senior officials would be "treated neither more harshly nor more leniently than others in less powerful positions." The temple episode, where at least $55,000 in illegal "straw" donations were made to the Democratic Party, was not even among the allegations under review by the Justice Department in late 1997 when Ms. Reno first considered whether to seek an independent counsel to investigate Mr. Gore. In that deliberative phase, which some aides later referred to as Gore I, Ms. Reno and her aides pondered a single question: whether Mr. Gore's telephone fund-raising phone calls from his office violated an old antigraft law barring solicitations on public property. The second phase of her decision, known at Justice as Gore II, involved allegations that the vice president lied about the phone calls. Mr. La Bella wrote his stinging memorandum a few months before the attorney general exonerated the vice president in Gore II. The precise steps in the decision making process at Justice remain hidden behind a veil of official secrecy. Nevertheless, a pattern became well known within the Justice Department. Accusations that were referred to the public integrity section seemed to languish and then die. Meanwhile, career prosecutors who had intended to aggressively investigate the accusations were left to speculate about what had happened. Mr. Mansfield, the Los Angeles prosecutor who originally investigated the temple fund-raiser, said in a recent interview that he had prepared to investigate aggressively. "I wanted to move very quickly, to gather evidence by issuing subpoenas, interviewing witnesses and considering the execution of search warrants," said Mr. Mansfield, who had extensive experience prosecuting campaign finance fraud cases and who is now a partner at the law firm of Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld. "But it got yanked off my desk and as far as I know, nothing happened for many, many months. The consequence of a strategy of sitting back and doing nothing means you effectively make the matter go away. It is so much harder to develop. Speed is everything in a highly publicized case." In the months that elapsed, several figures involved in the temple fund-raising fled the country. During the early period of her department's investigation in 1997, Ms. Reno said repeatedly that the campaign finance task force was "vigorously" pursuing every lead with more than 120 agents, lawyers and staff members. In October 1997, Ms. Reno said her team was "investigating and confronting low-level targets, and moving up the chain of those involved to whomever is responsible." Mr. Gore, meanwhile, said initially that he did not know that the temple event was a fund-raiser, though later he said he knew it was "finance-related." As for the calls he made, he has said he was sometimes inattentive at meetings where the types of fund-raising were discussed and that he was unaware that some of the money he raised from his office were federally restricted. In a letter in October, 1997, after her task force had been investigating for about a year, the attorney general had already decided that the practices that had first raised the biggest questions about the Democrats, among them the use of the White House as a fund-raising tool, did not merit an independent counsel. But one fund-raising statute, a 1883 civil service law that barred elected officials from using government offices to raise money, was clear and troublesome for Mr. Gore, who had made 45 fund-raising calls from his vice-presidential office. Mr. Gore's supporters have said that the accusations were baseless, and that the applicable law was created to correct political abuses before the invention of the telephone. In December 1997, Ms. Reno absolved him of any wrongdoing by saying that his calls were intended to raise unrestricted soft money only for general party purposes, not for potentially illegal hard-money donations for the use of the re-election campaign effort. Repeatedly, the attorney general has denied charges by Republicans that she refused to appoint an independent counsel for political reasons. And some aides said that, although she became more skeptical of the law, she never wavered in her insistence in fully evaluating every accusation involving Mr. Clinton and Mr. Gore. Despite strong objections from Mr. La Bella and the F.B.I. director, Ms. Reno said Mr. Gore's actions were lawful. "Evidence found by the investigators shows that the vice president solicited only soft money in these calls, not hard money," she said. Gore II, as it became known within some Justice Department circles, focused on whether Mr. Gore lied to investigators during the initial inquiry into his fund-raising phone calls. But this time, Ms. Reno's advisers were sharply divided and there was much deliberation. Mr. La Bella and Director Freeh, this time joined by Mr. Litt and other Justice Department officials, redoubled their efforts to get the attorney general to appoint an independent counsel. Again, this time more narrowly, Mr. Gore escaped the appointment of an independent counsel when Ms. Reno overruled her advisers. The Justice Department's second investigation of Mr. Gore began in September 1998 when the White House belatedly disclosed a fund-raising memo by David M. Strauss, a deputy chief of staff to the vice president. Mr. Strauss's notes were taken at a White House meeting on Nov. 21, 1995 and suggested Mr. Gore might not have been truthful in the 1997 inquiry. Mr. Gore had told investigators that he thought his White House telephone calls were only to raise soft-money donations. But the Strauss memorandum indicated that Mr. Gore might have known when he was questioned by Justice Department investigators that money was being split into both unrestricted soft-money accounts and restricted hard-money accounts. According to new documents, the former White House chief of staff, Leon A. Panetta, recalled that the vice president was present and seemed attentive when there was a White House discussion of how money would be split among party accounts. But Mr. Gore said he was sometimes inattentive and missed parts of fund-raising meetings. Additionally, he told the F.B.I., according to notes of a 1998 interview, that "he drank a lot of iced tea during meetings, which could have necessitated a restroom break." Ms. Reno concluded the evidence against Mr. Gore was too slight to support a prosecution. But some aides protested vigorously that her role -- under the independent counsel law -- was to determine not the weight of evidence but merely whether it was credible and specific information that indicated a covered official may have committed a crime. In a brief to the three-judge panel of appellate judges, Ms. Reno concluded that there was "only weak circumstantial evidence of the vice president's knowledge -- his presence at a meeting where the subject was briefly discussed -- which I do not believe provides reasonable ground to believe that further investigation of this matter is warranted." 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