If the opening Whitewater hearings proved anything, it is the abiding and sometimes intrusive interest the Clinton White House takes in the administration of justice.
Early last year, the Clintons ordered Attorney General Janet Reno to take the unprecedented step of firing all U.S. attorneys across the country and replacing them immediately with deserving Democrats.We wondered then if the primary purpose of that partisan purge was pure patronage or to delay the indictment of Rep. Dan Rostenkowski by Republican Jay Stephens in D.C. Now we can logically surmise the reason was to provide cover for the quick installation of Bill Clinton's campaign worker and law student, Paula Casey, as U.S. attorney in Little Rock to abort a potentially dangerous investigation into a fraudulent loan that benefited the Clintons.
Casey apparently tried to and may be in trouble. At a recent appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Reno was asked by Arlen Specter, a former prosecutor who takes his oversight responsibility seriously, "Would you continue a U.S. attorney operating actively if that U.S. attorney were the subject of a criminal investigation?" Her answer was an evasive "That depends. . . ."
Specter said that Robert Fiske (frequently described in this space as "the non-independent counsel" and rightly replaced by the court) had confirmed that "there is an investigation which is under way for obstruction of justice."
Clinton appointee Casey refused to reduce charges against, or grant immunity to, the Small Business Administration's David Hale; when given such an incentive by Fiske, Hale accused the Clintons of pressuring him to make a fraudulent $300,000 loan, part of which helped prop up their Whitewater investment.
How any Clinton-appointed prosecutor - under threat of prosecution for abusing her power by rejecting criminal accusations for political reasons - can continue to determine prosecutions boggles the mind but is part of the pattern of keeping friendly faces in troublesome places.
Judiciary Sens. Biden, Hatch and Specter, along with House Judiciary's Jack Brooks, are unaware of a Clinton plan to revamp the Criminal Division. Its purpose: partly to transfer power from Justice professionals to the all-Democratic U.S. attorneys and mainly to repackage current operations to make it appear the Clintons are tough on crime.
Jo Ann Harris, a respectable New York prosecutor, is now the criminal division chief. (She, along with Bernard Nuss-baum, recommended the hiring of the gentle Fiske, her former boss, after a tougher choice demanded assurance that White House counsel would not assert attorney-client privilege.) To the dismay of Justice professionals, her division is about to present itself as the nation's defender against violent crime.
For this public relations purpose, the division is to be resectioned. Violent crime is supposed to be split off from terrorism and set up as a high-visibility unit under Mary Incontro. Its first foray into publicity will be to dramatize crackdowns on violence at abortion clinics, which has a powerful appeal to a Clinton constituency.
The reason for today's inside baseball is to show how the inclination to jazz up and jiggle justice is a Clinton trait. Naming Day on Ninth Street by matriarchal management may be merely silly, but keeping control of self-investigation is dead wrong.
Hence the hurried appointment of Casey in Little Rock and the presidential fury at the recusal of Roger Altman.
In this week's eye-popping analysis by Michael Duffy, Time magazine calls this a "Culture of Deception." It's giving Justice a bad name.