Ex-Atty. Gen. Assails Special Counsel Law

The independent counsel law has a “cruel and devastating” impact on individuals, falsely destroying their reputations and costing them great sums of money, and is “used more for political purposes and media appetite than to achieve justice,” President Reagan’s first attorney general asserted Monday in an uncharacteristically strong attack.

The blunt criticism by former Atty. Gen. William French Smith was sent to a Senate subcommittee considering changes in the law as U.S. District Judge Barrington Parker heard arguments and took under advisement a constitutional attack on the law by Lt. Col. Oliver L. North, the fired National Security Council aide.

Smith, in a letter to Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), a copy of which was given to The Times, noted that he dealt with the independent counsel provision of the Ethics in Government Act longer than any other attorney general and said that it wastes substantial money and has been “a nightmare to administer.”

‘Wholly Irrelevant Trivia’

“Because of the high-profile nature of the cases involved, the independent counsels selected have felt it necessary to undertake massive investigations, delving into minute detail and wholly irrelevant trivia,” Smith wrote.

“This has required the establishment of legal and investigative bureaucracies and has resulted in the process being drawn out from five months to almost a year--and this at tremendous personal anguish to individuals and great cost to the taxpayers.” Levin is chairman of the Senate Governmental Affairs subcommittee on oversight of government management.

Smith made no mention of it in the letter, but his law partner, Theodore B. Olson, who heads the Washington office of the Los Angeles law firm of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, has been under investigation by an independent counsel since last May--the longest-running of such probes.

Olson, who served under Smith as assistant attorney general in charge of the office of legal counsel, is under investigation for testimony, challenged as false, that he gave Congress in a 1983 confrontation over Environmental Protection Agency documents.

Reform Measure

Smith, whose criticism of the independent counsel provision went far beyond that of any attorney general since the ethics law was enacted, said there is no historical justification for the legislation. The act was passed in 1978 as a reform measure in the wake of the Watergate scandal of the Richard M. Nixon Administration.

The law provides that the attorney general will ask a special court to appoint an independent counsel to investigate current and former government officials for alleged violations of federal criminal laws if he finds reasonable grounds to believe that violations occurred.

The law also provides for seeking an independent counsel if an investigation by the attorney general or other Justice Department officer may result in a personal, financial or political conflict of interest.

“Whenever in the past it has been necessary to have a special prosecutor, one has been appointed--from Teapot Dome to Watergate--and without the need for any special legislation,” Smith said. “The act essentially is an effort to legislate morality,” Smith said in the letter to Levin. “It has not achieved and cannot achieve that goal.”

‘Probably Unconstitutional’

Smith repeated a view that he voiced as attorney general--that the law is “probably unconstitutional,” because it “is an effort to deprive the President of authority given him by the Constitution.”

At the nearly two-hour court hearing, where Parker gave scant indication of how he would rule on North’s constitutional attack, the former NSC official’s attorney, Barry Simon, branded independent counsel Lawrence E. Walsh and his 19 associate counsels “a group of vigilantes--private citizens with no authority.”

Guy Struve, arguing for Walsh’s office, contended that, if “the independent counsel is unconstitutional, then the Watergate special prosecutor was unconstitutional.”

The court challenge took an unusual turn when Judge George E. MacKinnon, an appellate judge who heads the special federal court that names independent counsels, strode across the courtroom after the hearing to shake North’s hand, telling him: “I wanted to meet you.”

MacKinnon told North, who sat at the plaintiff’s table wearing his Marine uniform emblazoned with six rows of campaign ribbons and medals, that as a Navy officer he had coached Marine football teams at Cherry Point, N.C., during the early part of World War II.

“I just thought I’d like to meet him,” MacKinnon said.