WASHINGTON (AP) -- Former Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy, cleared of corruption charges after a four-year, $17 million independent counsel investigation, has a few regrets about public service. Among them: supporting the law that put an outside prosecutor on his trail.
Now he hopes to tell Congress that his case is a good example of how the independent counsel process can run wildly out of control."I think it needs to be substantially reformed -- or quashed," Espy said in an interview Thursday, a day after a federal jury rejected independent counsel Donald Smaltz's allegations that he abused his office by taking sports tickets and other handouts from farm companies.
Espy voted for the independent counsel law while a Democratic congressman from Mississippi.
Congress must decide in June whether to renew the law, which allows the Justice Department to defer to outside prosecutors in criminal investigations of politicians and senior government officials.
Distaste for independent counsel Kenneth Starr's Whitewater and Monica Lewinsky investigations is foremost as opponents argue the 20-year-old law should be scrapped.
But critics of the law agree with Espy that his case is a cautionary tale of how an independent counsel investigation can drag on for years and take many turns away from the original target.
In general, critics such as Yale Law School professor Akhil Reed Amar view the independent counsel law, a reaction to the Watergate scandal, as a license for overzealous prosecution and needless time and expense.
"We've seen it again and again, in prosecution after prosecution," Amar said Thursday.
The Espy case is "added ammunition" against the institution, "or at least in favor of limiting severely the kinds of crimes and people who can be attacked by an independent counsel and limiting the time and money available to them," said Georgetown University law professor Paul Rothstein.
Rothstein and others said most prosecutors would never have brought the Espy case at all.
"A normal prosecutor, if he doesn't feel it's much of a case, will say, 'Let's go onto other cases, there are plenty of bad guys,' " said Theodore Olson, a Justice Department official during the Reagan administration who was the focus of an extended independent counsel's investigation himself. The probe was closed with no charges against anyone.