GOP Senator Predicts Fund-Raising Inquiry

As partisan recriminations escalate, Atty. Gen. Janet Reno will soon receive a report from a top Justice Department investigator that Republicans hope will step up pressure on her to appoint an independent counsel to probe Democrats’ fund-raising practices in the 1996 campaign.

The report is coming from department prosecutor Charles G. LaBella, who in a statement Sunday acknowledged that he had once urged Reno to seek appointment of an independent counsel to investigate telephone fund-raising calls by President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore.

LaBella said in the statement, however, that he is “completely comfortable” with Reno’s decision in December not to seek an independent counsel and that he has not recommended one at any time since.

Still, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), after meeting last week with LaBella, predicted Sunday that LaBella’s upcoming report to Reno will contain bombshells about fund-raising improprieties.

“Within the near future Janet Reno will have no choice but to request the appointment of an independent counsel,” Hatch said on “Fox News Sunday.”

Hatch’s comments are the latest in a series of GOP efforts to generate new pressure on the fund-raising issue, which in recent months had been eclipsed by allegations about improper sexual advances by Clinton. House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) has for the last week been accusing Clinton and fellow Democrats of obstructing a House committee fund-raising investigation.

In a separate development, controversy broadened Sunday over a decision by House Government Reform Committee Chairman Dan Burton (R-Ind.) to release selected portions of telephone conversations involving Clinton associate Webster L. Hubbell and his wife while Hubbell, a former Justice Department official, was in jail. The tapes fueled new allegations that Hubbell is hiding damning information about First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Critics attacked Burton on Sunday when it was revealed that, in preparing partial transcripts of those tapes, he edited out possibly exculpatory passages about Mrs. Clinton and Hubbell.

Presidential aide Rahm Emanuel, appearing on CNN’s “Late Edition,” charged that Burton’s selective release of transcripts “changes both the meaning and the context of those tapes.” He called on Congress to consider action against Burton, saying: “Never before in history has a chairman done what he has done.”

And Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles) accused Burton of putting himself above the law in unilaterally making portions of Hubbell’s conversations public.

For his part, Burton defended his action as a response to what he called obstruction tactics by the White House. “They’ve blocked us and blocked us and blocked us,” Burton said. Burton said later that he will “release the entirety of the 54 conversations from which we previously made public only extracts.

“I believe this will once and for all put the lie to any accusations of ‘editing,’ ‘doctoring,’ or ‘out-of-context quotation,’ ” he said in a statement reported by Reuters.

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Hubbell’s lawyer, John W. Nields Jr., rejected such a release as an invasion of the Hubbells’ privacy.

In the excerpts Burton released last week, Hubbell and his wife seemed to suggest that the first lady had been involved in possible wrongdoing and that Hubbell was prepared to “roll over” to avoid disclosing it. “I will not raise those allegations that might open it up to Hillary,” Hubbell said at one point.

He also expressed the belief that his loyalty to Mrs. Clinton was responsible for his prison sentence.

But Clinton supporters criticized Burton for deleting portions of the conversations in which Hubbell asserts that he was not being paid “hush money,” and that Mrs. Clinton--who had been a partner in the same law firm as Hubbell--was not guilty of criminal activity.

And they argued that a passage in which Burton suggested Hubbell was talking about a possible presidential pardon, he was actually talking about a possible grant of immunity from independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr.

On the campaign finance front, LaBella is preparing his report to Reno because he is scheduled to leave his post July 1 to become interim U.S. attorney in San Diego.

A former top assistant U.S. Attorney in San Diego, he had been brought in by Reno in September 1997 to head up and reinvigorate the department’s campaign finance task force. Since then, the task force has brought charges against several people, including Democratic fund-raisers Yah Lin “Charlie” Trie and Maria Hsia.

Reports about LaBella’s past support for naming an independent counsel in the campaign finance probe first surfaced Sunday in the New York Times. Reno, in an interview on “Fox News Sunday,” refused to comment on the report.

“I’ve long made it a practice not to discuss what my advisors tell me,” said Reno, who had announced in early December 1997 that she would not seek an independent counsel, saying she did not find enough evidence that Clinton or Gore had violated the federal statute barring political fund-raising on government property.

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LaBella issued his statement late Sunday to clarify his position. “I had a full opportunity to present my views to the attorney general. At the end of the process, I was completely comfortable with her decision not to seek an independent counsel.”

LaBella said the report he is preparing for Reno is an effort “to pull together all of the many strands of the investigation for the attorney general” and for his replacement as head of the campaign finance inquiry.

“If I conclude that the evidence and the law warrant appointment of an independent counsel, I will so recommend,” he said.

Hatch met with LaBella last week to discuss the status of the investigation, in a session that Hatch said was “hard-hitting.”

Noting LaBella’s success in winning the cooperation of Democratic fund-raiser Johnny Chien Chuen Chung, a Torrance businessman, Hatch said: “There is an awful lot of information there; there’s an awful lot of cooperation now.”