Controversy Swirls Around Chief Gingrich Investigator

Former Idaho Rep. George V. Hansen knows the special counsel investigating House Speaker Newt Gingrich and he has passed along some blunt advice to the embattled Georgian about James M. Cole: Watch out.

“I sat right across from Cole for a week during my trial,” said Hansen, who served time in federal prison for breaking federal financial-disclosure laws. “I don’t think he’s the least bit evenhanded. His job is to find anything that’s questionable, make a case out of it and get a prosecution. . . . Cole is a wolf in sheep’s clothing and Newt’s about to be devoured.”

Hansen might be expected to say such things. Cole helped send the former GOP lawmaker to prison on charges that later were overturned. But even Cole’s admirers agree that the veteran lawyer at the center of the Gingrich inquiry is not the sort one would want poring over one’s dirty laundry.

Cole has little tolerance for wrongdoing by those in the public trust, a sentiment built up by close involvement in some of Washington’s biggest political scandals in recent years--from the investigation of a questionable book deal involving former Speaker Jim Wright (D-Texas) to the scandal over the House bank.

As Cole prepares to release his report on the Gingrich case today, official Washington is busy speculating about the very private man behind the very public investigation. Is he “trying to get someone’s scalp to improve his resume,” as Hansen puts it, or is he impartially sifting through the facts without regard to the partisan storm around him?

“I think he has been scrupulously objective and nonpartisan,” said Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), a sentiment shared by other members of the bipartisan House Ethics Committee that hired him. “He’s not out to get anybody. He always tells us that he is sticking to two things--the law and the facts.”

But with the House prepared to vote on Gingrich’s punishment on Tuesday, some Republicans are bracing for a bombshell, a damning report from Cole that might give ammunition to Democrats who would love to see the speaker forced to give up his post.

One senior House Republican said of Cole: “He’s one of those guys, a prosecutor with a big reputation. They have one vision going into a courtroom--that’s seeing a head on the plate.”

Big cases are nothing new to Cole, who before he went into private practice in Washington specialized in prosecuting public officials at the Justice Department’s public integrity division, which was created after the Watergate scandal. Neither is he a stranger to criticism.

He has successfully prosecuted two federal judges, a congressman in the House bank scandal and a variety of other bureaucrats, prompting cries each time that he was an overeager prosecutor trying to wreck a career. But he has also taken the government on as a defense attorney in white-collar-crime cases, defending some of the “ghost” employees on the payroll of former Rep. Dan Rostenkowski (D-Ill.) and others who have been pursued by the agency he once worked for.

Not every verdict has gone Cole’s way. Hansen’s prosecution was overturned a decade later while the ex-congressman was serving time on a separate bank fraud conviction. And a jury acquitted New Orleans Dist. Atty. Harry Connick (father of the singer) of aiding and abetting a bookmaker in another Cole case.

Keeping his politics to himself, the graduate of San Francisco’s Hastings College of Law has gone after Democrats and Republicans with equal gusto. It was that reputation for impartiality that in December 1995 won him the sensitive post of investigating Gingrich. As the case has dragged on, Cole’s contract was extended half a dozen times, earning him $600,000.

“As much as he is aggressive, he is also someone who is not afraid to decline a case,” said former House Counsel Stanley Brand, noting Cole’s decision not to pursue an indictment for Wright’s book deal. “I think he is as close to an evenhanded umpire as you can get.”

With the Gingrich case, however, Cole is under pressure like never before. The Republicans and Democrats on the Ethics Committee have engaged in fierce partisan sniping throughout the process, leaving him in the middle.

Cole has complained to committee members only that the schedule pushed by GOP leaders did not give him adequate time to complete his written report or to prepare for public disciplinary hearings this week.

“He is feeling pressures,” said Eric Holder, the U.S. attorney for Washington who worked with Cole at the Justice Department. “He’s human. But I know he has developed a thick skin. In that job, you know no matter what you do, people are going to take shots at you.”

Even as the furor over the Gingrich case has escalated, the methodical Cole has holed up inside his Capitol Hill office in recent days, trying to write into a cogent report a year’s worth of investigative documents--hundreds of thousands of pages. Needless to say, the mustachioed 44-year-old has not had much time lately for his personal passions of golf, sailing or late-night poker.

Cole has said very little about his work. He has issued two brief statements to the press during the course of the inquiry--when the theatrics around him seemed to be spinning completely out of control. On Jan. 2, he disputed an Associated Press report that an ethics subcommittee had worked out a tentative agreement to support a reprimand for Gingrich. Later, he unsuccessfully called on the committee to delay a Jan. 21 vote on Gingrich’s punishment.

But it is Cole’s words in the Gingrich matter--his written report and oral summary of the speaker’s rules violations--that lawmakers all over the Capitol are anxious to hear.

Times staff writer Janet Hook contributed to this story.