Reno Gets 60 More Days to Rule on Ickes-Teamsters Investigation

A special court on Monday granted Atty. Gen. Janet Reno’s request for 60 more days to decide if an independent counsel should investigate whether former deputy White House chief of staff Harold Ickes lied in Senate testimony about the administration’s role in a Teamsters Union strike.

Reno’s unexplained action, coming on the deadline of her 90-day preliminary investigation of the Ickes matter, is the second in a series of three almost back-to-back decisions on whether someone outside the Clinton Justice Department should probe allegations of Democratic fund-raising abuses in the 1996 campaign.

In granting Reno until Jan. 29 to decide the Ickes question, the court that appoints outside prosecutors noted only that Reno “has shown good cause for the requested extension”--the standard required by the independent counsel law.

But Reno’s demonstration of “good cause” was kept sealed by the court, raising the possibility that it dealt with evidence in the case.

“It’s not a question of difficulty in making up her mind,” said a Justice Department official familiar with the matter. “It was a sense that more work needed to be done.”

Last week, citing a lack of any convincing evidence, Reno decided against asking for an outside prosecutor to probe whether Vice President Al Gore lied to federal investigators about his knowledge of how funds he was raising would be used.

Next Monday, the clock runs out on another 90-day review and Reno must decide whether to ask for an independent counsel to investigate whether Clinton and his aides illegally financed so-called issue advertisements in his 1996 reelection campaign.

Political and legal observers consider the Ickes case the most likely to lead to appointment of an independent counsel.

If an independent counsel is named in the Ickes case, much will depend on the investigator’s mandate. Because Ickes is considered the architect of the Democrats’ successful campaign financing in 1996, an independent investigation could result in a broader inquiry of the campaign’s fund-raising practices.

In the matter under consideration by Reno, Senate investigators allege that Ickes became involved in the 1995 Teamsters strike against a Diamond Walnut Growers plant in Stockton in hopes that the union would contribute more money to the Democratic Party.

Ickes, who has denied wrongdoing, was asked during a deposition he gave to the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee in September 1997: “What did the administration do regarding the Diamond Walnut strike?”

He answered: “Nothing that I know of.”

But the Senate panel later uncovered an internal Teamster memo asserting that Ickes had urged then-U.S. Trade Representative Mickey Kantor to intervene in the dispute, and an Ickes aide said Ickes asked her to make sure that Kantor followed through.

Ickes has acknowledged asking Kantor to make a phone call, but Kantor has said his call to the company’s chief executive was not motivated by fund-raising. He merely asked the Teamsters about the status of a possible settlement of the protracted strike against Diamond, Kantor has said, adding that he applied no pressure.

Ickes’ lawyers, Robert S. Bennett and Amy Sabrin, did not return phone calls for comment Monday. When Reno initiated her 90-day probe, they blamed her action on the “hair-trigger provisions of the Independent Counsel Act” and said appointment of an outside prosecutor would be “unwarranted.”

Ickes did not return phone calls.

A 1995 administration memo identified the bitter strike as one of then-Teamsters Union President Ron Carey’s “biggest problems,” and urged Ickes to “assist in any way possible.”

In the report on its investigation, in a section titled, “Misleading and Inaccurate Testimony,” the Senate committee said that “documents produced by the White House and other evidence suggest that Harold Ickes assisted the Teamsters Union with the Diamond Walnut strike and other matters in order to encourage Carey and the Teamsters Union to provide more financial assistance to Democratic candidates and the Democratic National Committee.”

Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.), chairman of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee and a sharp critic of Reno’s failure to appoint an independent counsel in the fund-raising matters, noted that her 90-day investigation of Ickes followed a 30-day preliminary inquiry.

“Now she says she needs another 60 days for this small part of the investigation,” said Burton, who conducted his own hearings on Democratic fund-raising irregularities. “It should not take her half a year to figure out the obvious.

“It has been clear for over two years to everyone across the political spectrum that an independent counsel is needed for the entire campaign finance investigation,” Burton said. “For the attorney general to continue to drag this out is unseemly. She should not be investigating her boss and his closest associates in the first place.”