A highly unusual and potentially serious split is emerging between FBI Director Louis Freeh and Attorney General Janet Reno over the need to seek an independent prosecutor to investigate possible wrongdoing in Democratic fund raising for President Clinton's re-election.
In a series of private conversations with Reno, law-enforcement officials said Wednesday, Freeh has taken the position that the gravity and scale of the inquiry required the appointment of an outside prosecutor. That is the position espoused by Republicans in Congress.But Reno has steadfastly refused to relinquish the Justice Department's control of the case to an independent prosecutor, after being criticized in Clinton's first term by White House aides who thought she acted too quickly to refer allegations against high-level officials to such prosecutors.
The director of the FBI, who has increasingly taken personal responsibility for the bureau's inquiries, has shown his rising concern about the campaign-finance inquiry in other actions. In recent days Freeh has more than doubled the number of bureau employees assigned to the investigation, from about two dozen agents to nearly 40, with a support staff of about two dozen.
Law-enforcement officials said that the investigators were pursuing far-flung trails of inquiry that led from the United States to Asia, involving Democratic fund-raisers, large contributors, White House officials and seemingly unrelated issues including whether the Chinese government tried to covertly influence American lawmakers.
Freeh has no formal role in the appointment of independent prosecutors. But his position as one of the country's top law-enforcement officials quickly brought more assertions from Republicans in Congress that Reno was trying to shield the White House in refusing to seek an independent prosecutor.
Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who has led the congressional critics in asking for an independent prosecutor, said he was not surprised by a report in the Washington Post Wednesday that said Freeh had recommended an independent prosecutor.
"As the individual actually responsible for conducting this investigation, himself a former federal prosecutor," Hatch said of Freeh, "who better than the FBI director could determine whether there are `grounds to investigate' whether senior White House officials may have been implicated in violations of the law?"
Reno has said that career prosecutors are carrying out an aggressive inquiry, relying on bureau agents, and are determined to find the truth. But she has concluded that so far nothing has been uncovered to legally warrant shifting the investigation from the control of the Justice Department's criminal division to an outside prosecutor.
Reno's conclusion is based on an interpretation of the independent prosecutor statute. She has said that the inquiry had so far failed to produce specific and credible allegations of wrongdoing against any of the two dozen top officials covered by the law. Such a finding would require her to automatically invoke the statute.
Government lawyers said that Freeh, in private conversations with Reno, has not made a formal recommendation for an independent prosecutor, nor had he firmly concluded that there was enough evidence to automatically activate the law by a finding of a possible criminal violation by any of the covered officials.
Instead, they said, Freeh has suggested that the inquiry had widened to encompass a broad swath of Clinton administration officials involved in Democratic fund raising that could create a conflict of interest for the Justice Department, if Clinton's appointees continued to manage the investigation.
Some lawyers said that Freeh seemed to base his views not on a lawyerly fly-specking of the independent-prosecutor law but on an overall assessment that the sprawling and politically incendiary inquiry could be handled with more credibility and less controversy outside the Justice Department.