E D I T O R I A L - Investors' Business Daily

Partners In Obstruction 

Date: 10/14/97 

With the heat turned up on her, Attorney
General Janet Reno took to the airwaves
Sunday to make her case. But try as she
might, she could not erase the impression
that she's been toeing the White House
line. 

Reno told NBC's ''Meet The Press'' that no
one has been ''exonerated'' in the
fund-raising probe. She also said she's
''mad'' that the White House didn't tell her
sooner about the coffee-klatsch tapes. 

This was clearly an attempt to show that
she's been doing her job as the nation's top
law-enforcement officer. 

But her actions - make that lack of action -
show just the opposite. 

Far from pursuing the fund-raising case
aggressively, Reno has given the White
House every chance to keep the evidence
buried. The Clinton White House isn't
telling, but neither is she asking. 

Call it a game of ''hide and no seek.'' 

In the now-famous three-day gap between
the White House's discovery of the coffee
videotapes and its heads-up to the Justice
Department, Reno met with White House
counsel Charles F.C. Ruff. Much is being
made of Ruff's failure to tell Reno about
the tapes - and rightly so. But what did she
ask him? And if she's conducting a
thorough probe of the White House, why
is she sharing information with a White
House attorney? 

The discovery of the tapes was due to
pressure from Congress, not the Justice
Department. 

Indeed, the department seemed to have
bought the White House line that there
were no videotapes of fund-raising events.
Never mind that the Pentagon-based White
House Communications Agency routinely
shot videos at the coffees, and someone
had to have noticed. 

The White House had sent out a memo in
April requesting any and all data on fund-
raising events from the WHCA, among
other units. The WHCA didn't hand over
any tapes. 

But now its chief of operations says he
didn't even get the full memo. 

The White House said it ''inadvertently''
failed to include the request for coffee
tapes. That's standard procedure for this
White House. Standard procedure for
Justice is to let the White House get away
with it. 

Former deputy chief of staff Harold Ickes
was the White House political coordinator
and at the center of the fund-raising
efforts. According to Sen. Pete Domenici,
R-N.M., he told the Senate 76 times that
he couldn't recall specific actions. Such
evasive answers are usually a sure sign
someone knows more than he's telling. 

But the Justice Department didn't get
around to interviewing Ickes until last
month. And it told him he was not a target
of the investigation. 

The Justice Department's fund-raising task
force seemed designed not to find out
anything really damaging to Bill Clinton. It
deliberately avoided following leads to
Clinton, Vice President Al Gore or other
higher- ups. 

As The Washington Post reported last
week, FBI agents were told to alert Reno
if they happened upon any evidence of
crime by top officials. But the Post said
Justice lawyers insisted that ''the agents
were not to go looking for such evidence.'' 

The Democratic National Committee's
finance director, Richard Sullivan, was not
interviewed by the FBI until after he had
been questioned by the Senate panel. In
fact, the Justice task force didn't start
interviewing senior officials until eight
months into its 11-month-long probe. 

Reno said earlier this month she would
invoke the next phase under the
Independent Counsel Act for Gore. This
law's time periods for review dovetail
neatly with the White House tactics of stall
and obfuscate. 

Reno could ask for an independent
counsel right now. But she has been taking
all the time that the law allows, giving the
White House more time to spin and
obstruct. 

And obstruct it has. Tapes are
''inadvertently'' not requested. Documents
aren't produced except under threat of
contempt of Congress. White House
spinmeisters, from the president on down,
keep changing their stories. 

Yet Reno and members of the Justice
Department seem more interested in
keeping their jobs than in enforcing the
law. If she's as mad at the White House as
she says she is, she should quit. Then we
might believe her when she says she was
honestly digging for the facts and was
duped by the Clinton crew. Last we heard,
though, she was still working for them. So
we have to assume she's willing to be
duped again - as a full partner in
obstruction. 


(C) Copyright 1997 Investors Business
Daily, Inc. 
Metadata: E/IBD E/SN1 E/EDIT