Reno Vows Thorough Review of Lee Case

A week after President Clinton blasted the Justice Department’s handling of the Wen Ho Lee investigation, Atty. Gen. Janet Reno met Friday with the president and pledged a thorough internal review of questions raised by the controversial national security case.

Clinton, in turn, said through a spokesman that Reno has his “strong support” as attorney general--defusing for the moment speculation that the Lee matter has created a damaging rift between the president and his top law enforcement official in the administration’s waning days.

In their 45-minute meeting at the White House, Clinton and Reno agreed that the priority in the case is for agents to conclude their debriefing of Lee and determine what happened to the computer tapes that the fired nuclear scientist admits making improperly by downloading material from Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory, where he worked, officials said.

“They both agreed that the most important thing we can do is to try to get to the bottom of this, and that process continues, as far as looking at the tapes,” White House spokesman Joe Lockhart said.

After nine months spent mostly in solitary confinement, Lee was freed from federal prison in New Mexico last week, a martyr in the eyes of many Asian Americans and others who believed he had been unfairly branded a spy.

Lee pleaded guilty to a felony charge of illegally retaining national defense information. The government dropped 58 other counts against him, and the judge who oversaw the case said the government’s handling of it “embarrassed this entire nation.” Clinton was also critical, saying he was “quite troubled” by the case and had reservations about claims used by the Justice Department to keep Lee imprisoned without bail for months.

Reno, speaking to reporters Friday morning before her meeting with Clinton, said that she had spoken with the president briefly by phone Wednesday and that she thought he would come to support the Justice Department’s position.

“As I read it, he--like everybody else--said, ‘How do you go from here to here and why did it happen?’ ” Reno said. “We had a chance to talk and I think we’ll talk this morning. And I think he’ll understand.”

But if Reno was looking for the president to retreat from his strong criticisms last week, there was little sign after the meeting that she had succeeded.

Asked whether the meeting had changed Clinton’s mind, Lockhart said: “I think, as the president made clear, he had questions on a narrow part of this,” namely why the government fought bail for Lee for his entire pretrial imprisonment. Reno assured Clinton that her Office of Professional Responsibility will review that issue, and the president and the American public “should look forward to an accounting there,” Lockhart said.

But if Clinton’s concerns remained solid, so too did Reno’s defense of her department, as she continued to voice no regrets about the handling of the investigation.

“Our case against Dr. Wen Ho Lee was critical for national security,” Reno said in a statement after her meeting with Clinton. “Dr. Lee downloaded nuclear secrets onto unsecured computer tapes and offered no explanation as to why. The United States had an obligation to find out what happened to the information on those tapes.”