Pounding the Table

It is not surprising that people being investigated would like to get rid of the investigators, but the U.S. Justice Department has outdone itself in cynicism by urging that the role of independent counsel be abolished. It is beyond belief that the reason it would like this done, as it asserts, is because of concern for constitutional proprieties. This Administration has a habit of trying to disguise self-interest as principle, but this time the effort is so transparent as to fool no one.

The job of independent counsel (formerly called special prosecutor) was set up after the Watergate scandal in the realization that no administration could be trusted to investigate itself and that the public would not believe that an investigation was conducted fairly even if an administration tried to do so. The memory of the Saturday Night Massacre, in which special prosecutor Archibald Cox was fired in 1973 when he got too close to the truth of Watergate, was still very fresh in Congress’ mind when it passed the Ethics in Government Act in 1978, making the independent counsel a regular feature of government.

The law will expire in January unless Congress votes to continue it, which the Justice Department thinks that it should not do. The trouble, according to Assistant Atty. Gen. John Bolton, is that the Constitution requires that all federal prosecutors be accountable to the President, who is accountable to the voters.

Bolton would have us believe that the department’s opposition is unrelated to the fact that Lawrence E. Walsh, the Iran- contra investigator, has been putting the heat on White House officials or that Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III is currently the subject of an independent counsel’s investigation of his role in the the Wedtech scandal or that Meese was previously investigated for giving a federal job to a person who had done him a favor. The Administration would like to get independent counsels under its thumb to remove their independence. It has nothing to do with the Constitution.

Lawyers say that if the facts are on your side, pound the facts. If the law is on your side, pound the law. If neither is on your side, pound the table. Administration officials are pounding the table, and Congress should not let them get away with it. The job of independent counsel may need some fine tuning, but the basic idea should be retained.