Wall Street Journal August 13, 1997 EDITORIAL Review & Outlook Vacant Justice--II In this space Monday, we detailed Attorney General Janet Reno's record of politicized foot-dragging on matters uncongenial to the White House--enforcing the Beck decision, filling the top criminal division post now vacant for two years, and finally seeing no reason to appoint an Independent Counsel to monitor the lava pouring out of the campaign finance volcano. All this nonfeasance appears to be just another day at the office for this most political of Justice Departments, as now suggested by its alliance with Senate Democrats to thwart an investigation of vote fraud in Louisiana. Last April, a bipartisan team of outside lawyers recommended that the Senate look at last year's voting for the Senate seat from Louisiana. The allegation, which has been widely reported in the Louisiana media if not beyond, is that gambling interests financed the use of dozens of vans to pick up New Orleans voters, pay them and haul them from one precinct to another to vote using other people's names. At this juncture it is not possible to know if there are enough disputed ballots to call Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu's 5,788 vote victory into question, but there is legitimate cause for an inquiry. The Senate Rules Committee, under the direction of Senator John Warner of Virginia, began looking into the matter. Then in June, the committee's Democrats withdrew their support. What's interesting is what happened next: Attorney General Reno recalled the two FBI agents who'd been assisting the committee, though they'd been on the job only 18 days. Her rationale was that the FBI has a tradition of only providing agents for bipartisan Congressional investigations. Obviously such a policy would allow the Democrats to shut down any investigation if they thought no public outcry would ensue. In a letter last week to Ms. Reno and FBI Director Louis Freeh, Senator Warner said that Justice's action creates an "appearance of impropriety--that the agents were withdrawn to block the Committee from completing a thorough investigation and find out the facts." New Orleans was the only one of 64 parishes to violate state law by opening its voting machines without any candidate present as a witness. Morris Reed, a black Democrat who ran for New Orleans district attorney in the same election, asserts that both he and GOP Senate candidate Woody Jenkins were victims of a vote fraud by Mayor Marc Morial's political machine, an organization called LIFE. Last year, Mr. Reed, formerly an assistant U.S. attorney handling civil rights cases, was worried enough about reports of impending fraud that he wrote to Attorney General Reno asking that federal poll watchers be sent. He heard nothing from Ms. Reno. Last week, Senator Warner subpoenaed Mayor Morial's LIFE organization and 11 other groups or individuals. This week he is conducting closed-door hearings in New Orleans. He has invited both the Justice Department and committee Democrats to attend, but neither are expected to show up. LIFE has responded by writing to Ms. Reno accusing Republicans of systematically targeting blacks with their subpoenas, possibly in violation of civil rights laws. Mr. Reed, the black candidate who says LIFE stole votes in his race last year, notes that LIFE has never filed any federal or state disclosure reports. Louisiana Senator John Breaux, Ms. Landrieu's Democratic colleague, spent hours this month trying to revive a bipartisan investigation. He came close to a deal, but then received what the New Orleans Times-Picayune called "a rare public rebuke from his Democratic colleagues." The newspaper reported that "some Democrats on the Rules Committee didn't want the probe to continue no matter what kind of deal Breaux could work out." Against this backdrop, Attorney General Reno's six-week-old decision to yank the FBI out of the Bayou State looks partisan. She appears to be an accomplice in an effort to sabotage the Senate's first major investigation of vote fraud since the 1950s. So long as she holds to her theory about "bipartisan investigations," Democrats can assert that there's insufficient evidence to warrant continuing the probe. Even having the Attorney General onboard isn't enough; now the Democrats have threatened to slow down all Senate business this September if the probe isn't terminated. The Democrats' position is novel; Republicans as the minority party never used this technique to thwart the Watergate, Iran-Contra or October Surprise investigations. So what are they afraid of and what are they hiding? Ms. Reno was before the ABA last week, sounding hurt that the Senate won't clear some of the administration's judicial nominees. It's not hard to see why. Having found ways to resist an Independent Counsel for the campaign-funding mess and now the probe in Louisiana, this Justice Department is looking more than ever like merely an appendage of this White House's 24-hours-a-day, global political operation. Copyright © 1997 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.