Cloud Over Meese

President Reagan’s loyalty to an old friend has blinded him to the ethical failings of his former attorney general, Edwin Meese III, and to the shame that Meese brought on the Justice Department. Instead of commending the department’s Office of Professional Responsibility for its thorough investigation of the man who once was the nation’s highest law-enforcement officer, Reagan denounced the report as “unnecessary and unwarranted,” the work of Meese’s “political enemies.”

Oh? In fact, the report is the work of Michael E. Shaheen Jr., a career Justice Department lawyer who has headed the Office of Professional Responsibility since its inception in 1975. He is the expert on the department’s own ethical guidelines as well as the 1965 executive order that commands all federal employees to refrain from activities that would shake Americans’ confidence in government integrity. So Shaheen speaks with some authority when he says that Meese engaged in “conduct which should not be tolerated of any government employee, especially not the attorney general.”

The Office of Professional Responsibility is the third investigative body to criticize the former attorney general--more proof, if any were needed, of the gravity of Meese’s offenses. Its report contains no bombshells, simply more details about how Meese used his influence to boost the business concerns of E. Robert Wallach, failed to report income to the Internal Revenue Service and made decisions about telecommunications while owning telephone stock--all in violation of established ethical standards. Meese claimed total vindicaton last summer when independent counsel James C. McKay concluded that he had broken conflict-of-interest and tax laws but decided not to indict him. Shaheen’s report, however, points out what should have been evident to Meese--that escaping indictment is not the same as vindication. “The American public is entitled to both the appearance and the reality of impartial, honest government,” the report said. Thus it dispatched “the claims by Mr. Meese that the appropriate standard for official behavior is whether an independent counsel seeks an official’s indictment.”

None of this apparently matters to Meese, now happily working for a foundation, or to the President, dreaming of his retirement, just two days away, in California. On ethical questions, neither seems educable. But the report of the Office of Professional Responsibility should stand as a reminder to future Administrations that official sleaziness will be exposed and that no one, not even the President’s old friends, is above the law.