Your Dec. 4 editorial on Janet Reno’s decision not to appoint an independent counsel astounded me. You reduce the wide usage of soft money in the place of hard money and the many illegal coordinations between the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton-Gore campaign down to a few phone calls made from the White House.
Even if we assume that the law against such things only applied to hard money, as Ms. Reno says it does, this is not the whole story. There has to be a wider investigation to see if a conspiracy took place to circumvent election laws. This is what FBI Director Louis Freeh refers to when he recommends appointment of an independent counsel. Investigating a couple phone calls would be clearly ridiculous and wouldn’t require 150 lawyers at the Justice Department. Obviously there is a larger issue.
More to the point, you state, “Her investigators found no valid basis for the allegations. Thus, no warrant for a prosecutor.” But if there was the “specific and credible” evidence of a crime that Reno was looking for, there wouldn’t be need for an independent counsel then either, because Justice would already know to proceed to prosecution! Under this definition there is no basis for ever having independent counsel.
This seems to be the point of the second part of the editorial, which states that special prosecutors ought to be reserved for very limited and specific instances. But this is a separate debate. The fact remains that the law has already been written by Congress and signed into law by the president, and nothing can change this. No matter what cases you would like the law to be limited to, it is not limited to the cases discussed in the editorial.
So Ms. Reno should be obliged to follow the law as it is, not as you would like it to be. But her constricted view of when the law has to be applied (a meaning certainly never intended by Congress) would have essentially knocked out any of the other special prosecutors she appointed over the past four years, including Kenneth Starr’s investigation. To say that Reno’s Justice Department would have produced these convictions without an independent counsel is laughable.
