Column: No justice in Reno's department

Was there ever a doubt? Did anyone really believe that Janet Reno would dare seek a special prosecutor to investigate Al Gore's fund-raising activities in 1996?

The attorney general has been stonewalling on behalf of her bosses, the president and vice president, for the past four years.

No way was she going to drop a political bomb on Gore a mere 12 weeks before this year's presidential election.

So Gore has gotten away with his illegal buckraking.

And if he somehow manages to get himself elected -- with a big assist from the child-snatcher at Justice -- one perjurer will follow another into the Oval Office.

What particularly galls is Reno's profession of impartiality. How dare anyone suggest, she said, that her dereliction of duty -- that is, her failure to uphold the laws of the land -- was politically motivated.

"I don't do things based on politics," she harrumphed. "I realize that politics will be hurled around my head. I just sit there and duck as it comes."

Yes, of course. This attorney general is above politics.

Then why, may we ask, did the former alligator 'rassler wait until now to announce a decision that she actually made several weeks (if not months) earlier?

Well, Reno conceded, she delayed her announcement until this week because she didn't want to step on the Republican and Democratic conventions. That sure sounds a lot like political calculation on her part.

But that's precisely how Reno has operated since the careerist -- with no place else to go -- begged a reluctant Bill Clinton to re-appoint her attorney general after his re-election in 1996.

As a condition of her re-appointment, she obviously agreed not to sic any more independent counsels on her White House bosses, no matter their wrongdoing.

So this marks the third occasion that Reno has refused to seek an outside counsel, unbeholden to the White House, to ascertain whether Gore broke the law with his fund-raising activities in 1996.

In so doing, the attorney general has rejected, yet again, the recommendation of a prosecutor she hand-picked to head the Justice Department's investigation of the now 4-year-old crime.

Indeed, the head of Justice's campaign-finance unit, Robert Conrad, advised Reno back in June that she should appoint an independent counsel to investigate whether Gore lied to him about his fund-raising exploits. His recommendation was based on a April interview he had with Not-So-Honest-Al.

At issue was the vice president's role in the notorious fund-raising coffees at the White House and the infamous fund-raiser at a suburban Los Angeles Buddhist temple.

When asked about the 103 coffees, which were held for campaign donors in 1995 and 1996, Gore stated they were not "fund-raising tools" to generate loot for the Democratic Party.

Yet, the individuals who attended the coffees contributed a total of $7.7 million within one month of having attended them.

Then there's the matter of Gore's participation in the coffees. He told Conrad that he only attended one. In fact, he hosted 23 and attended eight others with the president.

As to the April 1996 luncheon at the Hsi Lai Temple, Gore claims that he had no idea that it was a fund-raiser. Despite the fact that it raised $100,000 for his re-election bid. Despite the fact that several of his trusted aides were well aware that they were shaking down the monks and nuns for campaign contributions.

The reason Gore adapted the Clintonian defense (deny, deny, deny) in his interview with Conrad is that he knows that it is illegal to raise campaign funds in the White House; just as it is illegal to raise campaign dough on the grounds of a religious institution.

And the very last thing he wanted to do was acknowledge that he knowingly and willfully broke the law.

For he would appear, in the eyes of the American people, to be no less corrupt than the man he hopes to follow into the Oval Office: the scandal-ridden president they are quite ready to be rid of.

That's why Gore ought to send Reno a box of bonbons (or three). If Tipper Gore were attorney general, she couldn't have done more to derail the federal probe of the vice president's illegal fund-raising activities.

There is no justice at Justice. Bill Clinton saw to that, upon his re-election, when he forced Janet Reno to sell her soul to keep her job.

Joseph Perkins is a columnist for The San Diego Union-Tribune.

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