Clinton Criticizes Justice Dept. Over Wen Ho Lee Case

Contradicting his own attorney general, President Clinton said Thursday that he is “quite troubled” that former Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee was kept in jail for months without bail before a plea agreement set him free.

“I always had reservations about the claims that were being made denying him bail,” Clinton told reporters, referring to statements of federal prosecutors who were backed by their Justice Department superiors.

“We took those claims on good faith by the people in the government that were making them,” he said. The president’s remarks, his first comments on the Lee case, also marked a rare public divergence between a president and his top law enforcement official.

Three hours before Clinton’s remarks, Atty. Gen. Janet Reno defended her department’s conduct in the case, including demands by prosecutors that Lee be held in solitary confinement for nine months.

Reno said that Lee “must look to himself” if he is unhappy with his long confinement. If he had explained why he had downloaded large volumes of nuclear defense secrets on an unsecured computer network at Los Alamos National Laboratory and what he had done with tapes he had made of the data, he could have been freed, Reno said.

“We made the best decision we could, based on the evidence and the law. And I feel very comfortable about that,” Reno said at her weekly press briefing.

On Wednesday in Albuquerque, however, U.S. District Judge James A. Parker questioned why the government had ignored an offer by Lee’s lawyers, shortly before his indictment Dec. 10, that the scientist take a polygraph test to answer questions about the tapes. Had they responded, the judge suggested, the last nine months might have been different for Lee. “Nothing came of it, and I am saddened that nothing came of it,” Parker said.

In her remarks, Reno flatly rejected sentiments expressed by Parker, who apologized to Lee and said that the Clinton administration’s handling of his case had “embarrassed this entire nation.”

“I am not embarrassed,” she told reporters.

The contrasting comments of Clinton and Reno served to highlight the ongoing tensions in their relationship. Reno was Clinton’s third choice to head the Justice Department, although she has now served throughout his administration, becoming the longest-serving attorney general in U.S. history. While the two communicate on significant law enforcement issues, they never meet socially, according to associates.

That frostiness is atypical of the relationships many presidents have had with their attorneys general. John F. Kennedy’s brother Robert served as his attorney general, while Richard Nixon chose his friend and campaign manager, John Mitchell, for the job during his administration. William French Smith, who served under Ronald Reagan, for years was Reagan’s personal lawyer.

Clinton, who was Arkansas attorney general before he was elected that state’s governor, rebuked Justice Department officials for adopting what he said were seemingly opposite positions.

“I think that it’s very difficult to reconcile the two positions--that one day he’s a terrible risk to the national security and the next day they’re making a plea agreement for an offense far more modest than what had been alleged,” the president said.

Lee pleaded guilty to a single felony charge of illegally retaining national defense information, scaled down from a 59-count indictment that had accused him of seeking to harm national interests. He could have been sentenced to multiple life sentences if convicted on those charges.

Parker, the presiding federal judge in New Mexico, reduced Lee’s sentence to time already served. Lee, 60, who was fired last year from Los Alamos for security violations, must undergo extensive questioning as part of the plea agreement.

Prosecutors want to learn why he downloaded the equivalent of 400,000 pages of classified documents unrelated to his work and will investigate his contention that he destroyed the tapes of the material.

The president, who was asked about Lee’s case during a White House briefing on patients’ bill of rights legislation, suggested that he agreed with Parker’s harsh assessment of the prosecution. The judge said he “felt great sadness that I was led astray” by government lawyers during the bail hearing in December.

“What should be disturbing to the American people,” said Clinton, “we ought not to keep people in jail without bail unless there’s some real profound reason.”

The president, however, credited law enforcement officials with honorable motives. “I have absolutely no doubt that the people who were investigating and pursuing this case believed they were doing the right and just thing for the nation’s security,” he said.

Clinton’s criticism of the government’s case against Lee, and Reno’s defense of it, are in some respects reflections of their different roles: his as president and hers as the nation’s top law enforcement official.

While Clinton’s relations with Reno are aloof, his dealings with FBI Director Louis J. Freeh are even more distant, worsened by Freeh’s critical view of the president’s conduct in the Monica S. Lewinsky affair and the FBI’s institutional role in assisting former Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr’s investigation.

Freeh also has been among top law enforcement officials who recommended appointment of an independent counsel to investigate the White House role in 1996 Democratic fund-raising abuses. Reno has rejected the recommendations.

In discussing the Lee case this week, Freeh said that the scientist’s confinement was necessary to keep him from communicating with possible foreign powers. The government’s actions were appropriate in protecting national security, the director insisted.

Agreeing with Freeh, Reno told reporters that everyone had acted with a “desire to protect national security,” which she suggested was the responsibility of the executive branch, not the judiciary.

Referring to the judge’s scolding and his apology to Lee, Reno said that the Taiwan-born scientist does not deserve an apology because he refused to cooperate in explaining why he took nuclear secrets. “I regret deeply that Judge Parker feels that way. . . . We didn’t try to lead anybody astray,” Reno said.

The government’s case against Lee unraveled in recent weeks, in part because chief FBI investigator Robert Messemer acknowledged on the witness stand his errors in earlier testimony, and the judge found that the government’s evidence was much weaker than he originally believed. Lee, in fact, was never officially charged with espionage, even though that was the government’s initial theory.

Reno said that Lee still has not explained his motives for taking the sensitive materials, although that issue will be examined thoroughly during interrogation sessions over the next several months in which Lee will be threatened with penalties of perjury.

During his confinement in a Santa Fe jail, Lee was permitted to see his family one hour a week and to exercise alone one hour a day. He was shackled hand and foot even during those periods, however, as well as during his meetings with his lawyers.

Lee has lived in the United States since the 1960s and is a naturalized U.S. citizen.

*

Times staff writer Edwin Chen and Times researcher Robin Cochran contributed to this story.

*

BACK HOME

Lee spends his first full day of freedom away from the media, doing mundane tasks. A20