Independent Counsel

We suspect President Bush will be harmed by his decision to pardon Caspar Weinberger and others of the Iran-contra players. Many Americans and historians will no doubt believe he did it out of selfish, protective motive. But we also believe Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh harmed his own reputation by saying petulantly on national television that President Bush had become "a subject" of his investigation into Iran-contra.Mr. Walsh's reputation was already in shreds. He was appointed primarily to find out if criminal acts were committed in (1)

WASHINGTON -- After more than 10 years and $21 million spent investigating former Housing Secretary Henry G. Cisneros, the last independent counsel from the Clinton era officially ended his probe yesterday, complaining that he needed more time to unravel what might have been a major "cover-up at high levels of our government." "It would not be unreasonable to conclude as I have that there was a cover-up, and it appears to have been substantial and coordinated," said David M. Barrett, a former Republican lawyer who was appointed in 1995 to investigate Cisneros, a Democrat.

Robert B. Fiske Jr. has model credentials to head an independent counsel probe of the tangled story of the Madison Guaranty S&L, the Whitewater Development Corp., Capital Management Services and President and Mrs. Clinton. We say that even though he comes from the law firm at which Lawrence Walsh once practiced. Mr. Walsh's seven-year, $37 million Iran-contra effort is a model of how not to manage an investigation.Mr. Fiske has several advantages. He is nearly a generation younger than Mr. Walsh and more likely to stay firmly in charge of a large, young and energetic staff.

WASHINGTON -- With U.S. troops unable to find expected weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, a group of officials met aboard Air Force Two in mid-2003 to discuss how to respond to the growing prominence of one particular critic of President Bush's Iraq policy. Vice President Dick Cheney was on the flight. So was his chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby Jr. It was a scene that suggested intrigue. And if it had occurred as part of a past Washington scandal, the investigator who revealed it probably would have included a wealth of details, naming everyone present and laying out what they said.

WHEN it's all over, when independent counsel Kenneth Starr has shuttered the windows and turned off the last lights of his vast prosecutorial empire, I will bow in gratitude -- we all should give thanks. I won't be relieved simply because this expensive and extraordinary experience is finally done with, whether or not he gets his man. Personally speaking, Ken Starr hit me with a two-by-four and helped make up my mind on two issues I've been in turmoil about for some time.Thanks to the independent counsel, I am now against the grand jury system and the Independent Counsel Act whose enactment I supported two decades ago. The former would require a constitutional amendment to do away with, being a carry-over from 12th century England and now woven into our sense of justice as deeply as trial by jury.

Abbe Lowell, minority counsel for the House Judiciary Committee, asked Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr why his referral to Congress was "substantially different" from the one submitted by Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski in the Watergate impeachment case of Richard Nixon. It is commonly agreed that the Jaworski referral was a model of decorum and facts presentation. And it is widely agreed that the Starr referral was slanted, one-sided, accusatory, filled with innuendo and unnecessary salacious details.

WASHINGTON -- Noting firsthand experiences with the Iran-contra and Watergate scandals, two prominent investigators urged Congress yesterday to keep inquiries into activities of top government officials in the hands of prosecutors independent of the White House.Former independent counsel Lawrence E. Walsh, who investigated the Iran-contra scandal of the Reagan administration, and Sam Dash, who led the Senate Watergate hearings in the 1970s, recommended major revisions in the soon-to-expire independent counsel law, however.

POLITICS SPAWNS perversity. Nowhere on the Washington scene is this more apparent than in Attorney General Janet Reno's refusal to appoint an independent counsel to investigate fund-raising irregularities of the Clinton-Gore campaign.Republicans are screaming so loudly they miss the point that Ms. Reno's decision plays right into their hand. And the White House, seeking comfort wherever it can be found, fails to see that the attorney general has put the Democrats in a tight box.Consider: By insisting that prosecutors in the Justice Department are quite capable of handling what has become a very large probe, the attorney general is virtually committed to come up with evidence damaging to her own administration.

WASHINGTON -- Senior Justice Department prosecutors are recommending that Attorney General Janet Reno seek appointment of an independent counsel to investigate allegations against Labor Secretary Alexis Herman, government sources said yesterday.If Reno accepts their recommendation, which comes after a five-month preliminary investigation, she will petition the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals early next week to name the sixth special counsel to investigate the Clinton administration since it took office in January 1993.

WASHINGTON -- A federal judge has found evidence that Kenneth W. Starr's office may have violated grand jury secrecy laws by leaking information to reporters, according to court documents released yesterday.As a result, a federal appeals court has ordered Starr to face a hearing to defend his office against assertions by President Clinton's lawyers that the independent counsel broke the federal law that bars disclosure of any grand jury material.The rulings, revealed in newly unsealed papers, place Starr in an embarrassing and potentially perilous position just as hisinvestigation of the Monica Lewinsky matter is at a critical juncture.

For all the flurry surrounding Jamal Lewis' indictment on federal drug charges, the Ravens star is probably only the third-most-famous person to fall under William S. Duffey Jr.'s prosecutorial gaze. Numbers one and two would have to be then-President Bill Clinton and wife Hillary Rodham Clinton, whom Duffey investigated as deputy to independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr on the Whitewater case. For all his high-profile work - Duffey inherited a huge investigation into City Hall corruption when named U.S. attorney in Atlanta in 2001 - he tends to avoid the spotlight, friends and associates say. That's probably smart, now that President Bush has nominated him as a U.S. district judge for northern Georgia.

Starr: A Reassessment, by Benjamin Wittes. Yale University Press. 256 pages. $24.95. A funny thing happened on the way to this book: Ben met Ken. Before that, Benjamin Wittes, a Washington Post editorial writer on federal justice issues, had been openly critical of independent counsel Kenneth Starr. He seemed surprised, then, when Starr "consented without a moment's hesitation" [vii] to a comprehensive on-the-record cross-examination by Wittes shortly after leaving office. And the Ken Starr author Wittes got to know then was not the familiar "demonic caricature," but instead a "... decent man who honestly set out to avoid the excesses of his predecessors," but then ended up multiplying those abuses in a "terrifying probe."

WASHINGTON -- The final report of independent counsel Robert Ray on former President Bill Clinton's semantic gamesmanship in the Monica Lewinsky affair is supposed to, if you'll pardon the expression, put the matter to bed. Don't bet on it. Mr. Ray had earlier disclosed that while he believed he had the goods on Mr. Clinton for obstructing justice, he had decided not to prosecute him when the president, in his fashion, owned up before leaving office to...

KENNETH STARR'S greatest disservice to his nation was to discredit the office of independent counsel, or special prosecutor. Even allies in his vendetta against President Clinton let the legal underpinning of that institution lapse. Now is when we need it, for the Enron scandal -- though it is too early to say which Enron scandal. The integrity of company pension plans, the provision of information to the investment and lending communities, auditing, corporate influence on government policy, the possibility of bought protection (which has not been shown to date)

WASHINGTON -- Back in the thick of the Clinton era, when scandal investigation seemed to be the town's chief form of recreation, lawyer Michael Chertoff sat by the side of then-Republican Sen. Alfonse M. D'Amato, doggedly grilling administration officials about everything from Arkansas real estate to a mysterious suicide, and suggesting the first lady was in the eye of the Whitewater storm. Across town, Brett M. Kavanaugh, a young lawyer and longtime protege of Kenneth Starr, led the Whitewater independent counsel's inquiry into the death of Clinton White House counsel Vincent W. Foster Jr. and later would write much of the Starr report, thong details and all. Viet D. Dinh, another young lawyer and rising star among conservative legal scholars, went from Whitewater investigator to Georgetown University law professor to TV pundit, guiding CNN viewers through the impeachment saga and calling the Lewinsky episode "a case about lies -- lies under oath and lies to the grand jury."

THE MESSY scandals, both real and imagined, that the independent counsel investigated throughout the presidency of Bill Clinton, now can move to the talk shows and history books. They are no longer the current business of the nation. The major beneficiary of the bargain reached by potential defendant Bill Clinton and independent counsel Robert Ray is President Bush. Mr. Bush asked the nation to put this issue behind it. The deal provides closure of the legal case without disbarment or indictment, but with an admission by Mr. Clinton of wrongdoing.

WASHINGTON -- Independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr's report to Congress yesterday on "grounds for an impeachment" of President Clinton is a historic first -- an unprecedented opening for the most serious kind of conflict the Constitution allows at the top of the government.Never before has a federal prosecutor, working within one branch of the government but beholden to none, set off a proceeding that could end a presidency.Two other presidents have been drawn into impeachment battles. But Clinton is the first to be put to that test by a single official who is, in a sense, a fourth branch of government all by himself.

WASHINGTON - On his last full day in office, President Clinton admitted for the first time that he testified falsely under oath when he said he did not have sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky. The admission freed him from facing any criminal charges. Independent counsel Robert W. Ray accepted Clinton's admission - made to conclude an Arkansas legal ethics investigation - in return for ending his remaining criminal investigation of the president and promising to seek no criminal indictment.

The Strategic Petroleum Reserve was never intended to fix gasoline prices. Sorry. A Cuban pilot stole a plane to flee to Florida and ditched while heading west toward Yucatan. Give him asylum but no pilot's license. How about an independent counsel to investigate the independent counsel? A N.J. 10th grader will pay $285,000 in fines for rigging stock prices by Net, and recoup from college scholarship offers.