Cisneros Heads Off Trial, Pleads Guilty to Lying

Former Housing Secretary Henry G. Cisneros pleaded guilty Tuesday to a single misdemeanor count of lying to the FBI, just as jury selection was about to begin in his federal court trial on 18 felony charges.

Tacitly acknowledging the weakness of the prosecution’s case, independent counsel David M. Barrett agreed that Cisneros should serve no jail time in return for his plea and pay a $10,000 fine.

Some legal experts viewed the case as yet another excess under the Independent Counsel Act, which Congress allowed to expire in June. Barrett spent four years and $10 million investigating Cisneros--to achieve nothing more than the misdemeanor plea.

Cisneros stood accused of lying, obstruction of justice and conspiracy for misleading FBI agents investigating his background about how much he had paid a former mistress. If he had been convicted, he could have been sentenced to as much as five years in prison on each of the 18 counts.

Appearing Tuesday before U.S. District Judge Stanley Sporkin, Cisneros expressed regret, saying, “I accept responsibility for the conduct as outlined” by Barrett.

Cisneros is estimated to have spent several hundred thousand dollars in legal defense fees. A former mayor of San Antonio who served more than three years in President Clinton’s Cabinet, Cisneros, 52, now is president and chief executive of Los Angeles-based Univision, the nation’s preeminent Spanish-language television network.

A Univision spokesperson in Los Angeles said that the company would have no comment.

Including Barrett, four independent counsels were in office this summer when the law lapsed and they were allowed to complete their investigations. With the law’s demise, Cisneros could become one of the last officials to be criminally indicted under the act.

“This just puts another nail in the coffin of the independent counsel concept,” one prominent Washington defense lawyer and former federal prosecutor said of the Cisneros case.

Conceived in the post-Watergate era, the Independent Counsel Act was designed to ensure impartial investigations of alleged wrongdoing by the president and other top government officials. The law spawned 20 such investigations over 20 years, the most well-known being Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr’s ongoing inquiry.

In large part because of Starr’s broad-ranging, five-year investigation--which led last year to the impeachment of President Clinton--many members of Congress concluded that the law contributed to runaway investigations that were too long, too costly and too easily became political issues.

By letting the law die, Congress assured that the Justice Department will determine the nature of future investigations of high-ranking administration officials. The attorney general could still appoint outside prosecutors.

Judge Acknowledges ‘Second-Guessing’

The judge in the Cisneros case appeared to recognize both the weaknesses of the case and the constraints of the law.

Sporkin at first said that the Cisneros plea bargain seemed too lenient, adding: “I know there will be some second-guessing about” it. But as one who had questioned the credibility of the prosecution’s chief witness, former mistress Linda Medlar, Sporkin said: “I don’t think the Office of Independent Counsel had much choice in this matter.

“We cannot permit an individual to lie his way into public office,” the judge declared.

Barrett said that the plea agreement “should in no way be viewed as minimizing the serious ethical breach by Mr. Cisneros,” who he said exemplifies “deception by public officials and those seeking office.”

But in a surprising aside considering his long investigation--which for a time also ensnared aides to Cisneros and relatives of his former mistress--Barrett added that Cisneros’ conduct, “while egregious, was committed by a person whose life has been otherwise dedicated to public service and this fact must season the final decision.”

Cisneros learned that “truth and candor are important” for political candidates, he said in court Tuesday.

‘I Regret My Lack of Candor,’ Cisneros Says

“During my background investigation, I was not candid with the FBI about a personal matter,” he said later in a statement. “I regret my lack of candor and accept responsibility for my conduct.”

Cisneros added that he was “pleased to say . . . there has not been any allegation that my service at HUD was affected in any way.”

He said that he hopes, when history judges his public life, “the focus will not be on what I said in an [FBI] interview prior to nomination, but on what I did to improve the lives of those who need help the most.”

Cisneros ran afoul of the FBI in late 1992 when, upon his selection to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development, he became concerned that potentially embarrassing information about the large payments he was making to Medlar, now known as Linda Jones, could sink his nomination.

Cisneros and Jones had broken off their affair in a public announcement in 1988. Cisneros was finishing his mayoral term, and he reconciled with his wife, Mary Alice.

But Jones has testified that she was then shunned as a political fund-raiser by other public officials and she could find no useful employment. Her husband also divorced her.

Cisneros, reentering private life as an investment banker, began earning enough money to send her secret monthly payments starting in 1990. But he sought to assure the FBI and other administration officials that the sums had been relatively small and had been phased out.

Jones, concerned that Cisneros’ support could end abruptly, especially if he moved to Washington, had been secretly recording their phone conversations about the money to make a record of his intentions. When he suddenly stopped the payments in January 1994, a year after taking the HUD post, Jones filed a breach-of-contract lawsuit.

Key Witness Had Credibility Problems

Barrett was named a special counsel in 1995 to determine if Cisneros lied to the FBI in saying that he paid Jones “no more than $2,500 at a time and no more than $10,000 a year.”

In fact, Barrett found that the payments amounted to $264,000.

Cisneros, who resigned from the Cabinet in 1996 to contest the charges, claimed that he had made the inaccurate statements without access to any records. Jones later acknowledged to investigators that she had lied about her phone tapes being originals, that she had recopied most of them to delete portions of conversations unfavorable to her.

Adding to her credibility problems as the prosecution’s prospective star witness, Jones pleaded guilty last year to fraud, conspiracy and money laundering in an unrelated Texas case that grew out of Barrett’s investigation. She had hoped that her testimony against Cisneros would lead to a reduction of her 42-month sentence.

Cisneros was the second former Clinton Cabinet member to face trial on criminal charges. The first, former Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy, was acquitted by a jury last December of charges that he received $35,000 in illegal gifts from companies regulated by his department.

Besides Starr, who is winding down his investigation of the roles of President Clinton and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton in Arkansas financial dealings--as well as the Monica S. Lewinsky case and other matters--two other Cabinet members are still under scrutiny by special counsels.

Labor Secretary Alexis Herman has been accused by a businessman of accepting pay to help business interests while serving as a White House aide. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt is reportedly about to be cleared of allegations that he testified falsely to a Senate committee about his role in rejecting an application for an Indian casino in Wisconsin.

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Times staff writer Jeff Leeds contributed to this story from Los Angeles.