Special Counsel Law Needs Changes, White House Says

Signaling a shift in the Administration’s position, White House Counsel Abner J. Mikva said Thursday that the law providing for independent prosecutors to investigate alleged official wrongdoing needs revision to better insulate the process from politics.

Mikva, who acts as President Clinton’s attorney in the Whitewater investigation, said the Watergate-era law was prompted by a desire to assure the public that investigations of top officials would neither “cover things up, nor unduly tilt against them because of political reasons.”

But the process has developed “a political connotation and baggage that makes it impossible to carry that out,” he said, “so I think it ought to be reviewed.”

Mikva voiced his views at an American Bar Assn. meeting and in a later interview.

The counsel, a former federal appeals court judge, said his comments were not directed at Kenneth W. Starr, the Whitewater independent counsel, or at any other counsel investigating Administration officials. He said that he had no ready solution and that he was not sure there was a legislative answer to the problem.

But he said the public needs to know that the prosecutors are not motivated by political ambitions. And they need to be assured that a counsel’s decision to bring criminal charges is not shaped by the political environment, he said.

His remarks came at a time when independent counsels are looking into alleged wrongdoing by former Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy; Commerce Secretary Ronald H. Brown; Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry G. Cisneros; and Bruce Lindsey, the close presidential friend who is Mikva’s deputy.

The Administration fought hard for renewal of the independent counsel law after congressional Republicans allowed the statute to die during the George Bush Administration.

As more and more of his lieutenants have come under investigation, Clinton has continued to publicly defend the statute, as have other Administration officials. Deputy Atty. Gen. Jamie S. Gorelick said in an interview early this year that it was a “good thing” to have the counsel mechanism available even “for those matters that are closely related to an Administration. . . . “

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And Mikva said his comments do not mean he no longer supports the law.

But Administration officials have privately expressed frustration with the wide latitude given prosecutors to search for wrongdoing. Mikva himself wrote independent counsel Donald C. Smaltz to complain of the widening scope of the Espy investigation.

Both Smaltz and Starr are Republicans. Starr, who was solicitor general under Bush, is known to have had ambitions to run for public office.

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BACKGROUND

The independent counsel law provides for a three-judge panel to select a counsel to look into allegations of wrongdoing against top officials, once the attorney general has determined that there is reasonable cause for such an investigation to be set in motion.