Fund-Raising Probe Sparks Debate
By Pete Yost
Associated Press Writer
Tuesday, June 6, 2000; 3:54 p.m. EDT
WASHINGTON In a memo kept secret for 21ˇ2 years, FBI Director
Louis Freeh warned that the Justice Department was ignoring
"reliable evidence" that conflicted with Al Gore's accounts of
his fund-raising activities.
Freeh sent the November 1997 memo, written by staff at his
request, to Attorney General Janet Reno to urge appointment of an
independent counsel to investigate Democratic fund raising.
"In the face of compelling evidence that the vice president was a
very active, sophisticated fund-raiser who knew exactly what he
was doing, his own exculpatory statements must not be given undue
weight," the Freeh memo said.
It preceded a better-known, and more scrutinized, memo by the
chief prosecutor in the case, Charles LaBella, who urged the same
action and also accused his Justice Department superiors of
contorting their investigation to avoid triggering an independent
counsel.
The memos were released by a House committee today as Republicans
in both chambers of Congress examined why a special prosecutor
was never appointed.
"Can you blame the American people or many in Congress for being
cynical?" House Government Reform Committee chairman Dan Burton,
R-Ind., asked after reading from the memos.
The FBI director said the Justice Department's preoccupation with
bit players should be replaced by a top-down investigation
starting with President Clinton and a "core group" of aides under
the theory that "most of the alleged campaign abuses flowed
directly or indirectly from the all-out efforts by the White
House and DNC (Democratic National Committee) to raise money."
Freeh's memo focused in part on fund-raising phone calls Gore
made from his government office. The vice president denied that
he intended to raise "hard money," which is regulated by federal
laws prohibiting solicitations on federal property.
The director's memo suggested the Justice Department was "relying
almost exclusively on the vice president's own statements to draw
inferences favorable to him even where those statement are
contradicted by other reliable evidence."
"If the attorney general relied primarily" on Gore's "statements
to end this investigation, she would be inviting intense and
justified criticism," the memo said.
In a memo responding to that allegation, Lee Radek, the chief of
the department's public integrity section who dealt with
independent counsel issues, said the Justice Department didn't
rely solely on Gore's word.
The conclusion that Gore's phone calls were to solicit "soft
money," outside the scope of the law, was based on "hundreds of
interviews with those who participated in the calls, and the
examination of scores of documents," Radek wrote in a memo also
released today. And the law in question is seldom prosecuted, he
said.
In his own 94-page memo, prosecutor LaBella complained that his
Justice Department superiors were "intellectually dishonest" and
practiced "gamesmanship" to avoid an independent counsel
investigation of President Clinton's and Gore's 1996 fund
raising.
Radek called those allegations "preposterous."
"The authors' attribution of bad faith to those of us who have
disagreed with them on various issues is nothing short of
shocking," Radek wrote.
LaBella's memo also said the re-election campaign "was so
corrupted by bloated fund raising and questionable
'contributions' that the system became a caricature of itself."
He wrote the memo on July 16, 1998, as he was preparing to leave
as head of the campaign fund-raising task force.
Word of LaBella's memo leaked to the media a week after he wrote
it, but Reno resisted demands from congressional Republicans to
release it until recently, saying investigative documents should
be kept confidential.
LaBella and Freeh argued that the Justice Department had failed
to adequately investigate allegations by the government-reform
group Common Cause that Clinton controlled a Democratic Party
advertising campaign and used it illegally to support his
re-election.
Those "arguably are the most serious" allegations," Freeh's memo
said.
LaBella wrote that the department's handling of the Common Cause
allegations "has been marked by gamesmanship rather than an
evenhanded analysis." He said Justice officials were "hostile" to
the idea of seeking an independent counsel and "had to find a
theory upon which we could avoid conducting an investigation."
Radek responded that Reno addressed the Common Cause issue
"squarely" and decided the law wasn't broken.
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