August 28, 1997
Al Gore Meets the Enemy
In legal terms, it does not really matter whether Vice President Al Gore made only a few fund-raising calls from the White House, as he first suggested in March, or the 50 his office later contended, or the 86 now acknowledged. Whatever the number, the calls were repugnant. Witness Mr. Gore's obvious embarrassment during his legendary "no-controlling-legal-authority" news conference.
Notwithstanding his loophole defense, it still looks to us as if using the White House to make such calls collided with the spirit and the language of the Federal law against fund-raising on Federal property. In any event, the "controlling legal authority" to decide the issue ought to be an independent counsel, not Mr. Gore or the nation's oblivious Attorney General, Janet Reno.
The benefit of special prosecutors was again clear yesterday with the indictment of former Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy. After an investigation of nearly three years, Mr. Espy was accused of receiving favors from companies with interests before the Government and then trying to cover them up. He is entitled to the presumption of innocence, but the indictment sends a signal that it is best for questions of propriety involving senior officials to be conducted by a counsel not associated politically with the Administration.
The expanding menu of abuses by President Clinton's re-election team has long justified appointment of a special counsel, if only because of the inherent conflict of interest in an investigation by Ms. Reno's lawyers into the political activities of her boss and his senior staff.
Earlier this year, however, Ms. Reno declined to recommend such an appointment on the grounds that the calls by Mr. Gore did not violate the ban on fund-raising from Federal property because they were so-called "soft money" donations to the Democratic Party and not direct contributions to a particular campaign.
But as Senator Orrin Hatch, the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, noted, such a construction would not necessarily be accepted by an independent counsel. Moreover, he pointed out, the question of whether illegal activity had occurred would turn on "the resolution of disputed factual, legal and state-of-mind determinations" involving top officials. Even if Ms. Reno feels that the law does not require a special counsel, she would have to agree that the law certainly permits such an appointment. The public's revulsion over the actions in the Clinton-Gore campaign can only be eased by the assurance that all such questions will be examined without partisan taint.
There is finally the question of Mr. Gore's wavering explanations and disclosures throughout the recent revelations. The Vice President has many gifts, but they do not seem to include candor when it comes to the business of politics. Along with the erratic recollections of the number of calls he made, Mr. Gore has shifted stories on how they were paid for and insisted implausibly that he was unaware that his now-infamous appearance at a Buddhist temple in Los Angeles had anything to do with fund-raising. It cannot have been pleasant to have made so many fund-raising calls and then to have invented such distorted excuses. Mr. Gore did it to make sure that Mr. Clinton remained his best political friend. But in the process, Mr. Gore became the worst enemy to date of his own Presidential ambitions.
Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company
