2 Top Investigators Urge Counsel Law Be Fixed, Renewed

Citing first-hand experiences with the Iran-Contra and Watergate scandals, two prominent investigators urged Congress on Wednesday to keep inquiries into activities of top government officials in the hands of prosecutors independent of the White House.

But former independent counsel Lawrence E. Walsh, who investigated the Iran-Contra scandal of the Reagan administration, and Sam Dash, who took part in the Senate Watergate hearings in the 1970s, recommended major revisions in the soon-to-expire independent counsel law.

Walsh and Dash told the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee that the controversial statute allows too many government officials to be investigated for unverified allegations and that the scope of such inquiries is far too broad.

The irony of his recommendation was not lost on Walsh, who was sharply criticized a decade ago by congressional Republicans for spending $47 million on an investigation that ran too long and ranged too widely, including dozens of people.

Declaring that he has learned a few lessons since, Walsh told senators that outside counsels should be appointed only to investigate alleged wrongdoing by the president or attorney general and that all other sensitive inquiries should be left to Justice Department prosecutors.

“I believe that nine-tenths of our work could have been done by the Justice Department,” Walsh said of his seven-year investigation.

Discussing the scope of such inquiries, Walsh agreed with much of the criticism directed at independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr by the White House and Democratic critics. Starr, said Walsh, should never have been permitted to investigate Whitewater and other matters “which occurred before a president was elected.”

“The expense and intensity of an independent counsel’s investigation should be reserved for an investigation of an abuse of public office, an investigation of specific and credible evidence that the president or attorney general committed a crime in connection with the discharge of official duties,” Walsh testified.

Atty. Gen. Janet Reno recently testified before the committee that, after seeing how politics influences such investigations, she no longer supports the law.

Sen. Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.), the committee chairman, and most other Republicans and Democrats on the panel seem to be leaning toward keeping the law but revising it to limit the length, scope and costs of outside investigations.

But Thompson said for the first time Wednesday that perhaps Congress should consider a cooling-off period in view of partisan passions directed at Starr.

“Perhaps, regardless of what we do, we should wait and not try to meet the June 30 deadline,” he said, referring to the expiration date of the law.

Dash, who served as ethics counsel in Starr’s office until he resigned in a policy dispute last fall, said the “near hysterical attacks against Walsh” were similar to those aimed at Starr. He blamed the criticism on “White House counterattacks in a scorched earth public relations war to destroy the prosecutor.”

Dash defended Starr’s tactics, which are being investigated by the Justice Department. Starr’s investigation has “been conducted no differently from the traditionally aggressive federal investigations conducted by regular federal prosecutors,” he said.

Nonetheless, said Dash, new legislation should provide that only lawyers who have extensive experience in criminal law should be appointed as independent counsels.

“Starr had no such experience and heavily relied on the career federal prosecutors he had borrowed,” he said.