Washington – After the longest independent counsel investigation in history, the prosecutor in the case of former Housing Secretary Henry Cisneros is finally closing his operation with a scathing report accusing Clinton administration officials of thwarting an inquiry into whether Cisneros evaded paying income taxes.
The marathon legal saga of the prosecutor, David Barrett, lasted 11 years and consumed $21 million.
Barrett began his investigation with the narrower issue of whether Cisneros lied to the FBI when he was being considered for the Cabinet position. He ended it accusing the Clinton administration of a possible coverup.
His report says Justice Department officials refused to grant him the broad jurisdiction he wanted; for example, Attorney General Janet Reno said he could look at only one tax year. And after Internal Revenue Service officials in Washington took a Cisneros investigation out of the hands of district-level officials in Texas, the agency deemed the evidence too weak to merit a criminal inquiry.
Former officials of the Justice Department and the IRS dismissed Barrett’s conclusions in appendices attached to the report, saying they were the product of an inquiry that was incompetently managed from the start.
After being indicted on 18 felony counts, Cisneros pleaded guilty in 1999 to a misdemeanor charge of lying to investigators. He was later pardoned by President Clinton.
Barrett kept his office open more than six years after the law that created the independent counsel system was allowed to die; lawmakers in both parties had grown weary of the many inquiries that had failed to achieve the goal of removing political influence from criminal investigations of administration officials.
Some Republicans contended that efforts to end Barrett’s operation were aimed at suppressing information that could reflect badly on President Clinton and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.
But to Democrats and other critics of independent counsels, Barrett’s inquiry has stood as a prime example what went wrong with an important post- Watergate law. It allowed prosecutors armed with virtually unlimited time and money to pursue their subjects into areas few federal prosecutors were likely to venture.