In the closing days of the Clinton administration, a little noticed drama was still playing out with potentially explosive implications involving the Justice Department, the IRS, and Independent Counsel David Barrett. Barrett was summoned by three of Attorney General Janet Reno’s aides to a meeting on December 20th, and was ordered to terminate a grand jury investigation he had been pursuing since last summer.
Barrett was appointed in 1995 to investigate Henry Cisneros, Clinton’s first Secretary of Transportation who had lied to the FBI about payments he made to his mistress. Ultimately, Cisneros pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor, but that didn’t end Barrett’s investigation. His assignment from the three-judge panel authorized him to look into obstruction of justice as well, which he decided to do. And though Congress allowed the Independent Counsel law to lapse, Barrett is grand fathered in office until he ends his investigation and files a report.
Barrett began investigating whether the IRS and the Justice Department had effectively blocked his probe of Cisneros. He was looking into the sources of the large amounts of money that Cisneros paid to his former mistress. According to New York Times columnist William Safire, he met resistance. Safire says that the Reno Justice Department ordered the IRS not to let him see more than a single year’s tax returns.
The grand jury that Barrett was ordered to shut down was investigating to determine if the Clinton administration was using political influence, through the Justice Department, to interfere with investigations of tax evasion involving Cisneros and other Democrats. According to the Wall Street Journal, Barrett pressured a lawyer in the chief counsel’s office of the IRS to testifying by telling him he was a target of the probe. The IRS employee took the fifth, and under an immunity deal began to cooperate with the investigation. Several other IRS officials have testified as well.
But questions arose early on as to whether or not Barrett had the authority to go beyond the Cisneros case. He has vowed to fight the Justice Department’s efforts to get him to shut down his investigation, and he has hired Jerris Leonard, an assistant attorney general in the Nixon administration, to represent him in this fight if it goes to court. Given the Clinton administration’s proclivity for taking actions that anger Republicans in the final days of their term in office, anything is possible. If John Ashcroft’s confirmation as attorney general is delayed, President Bush will have to name an acting attorney general from the ranks of Clinton appointees at Justice who delayed tendering their resignations.
According to Safire’s sources, the “immunized IRS employee is ‘singing like a birdie,'” and at least one Justice Department official has been talking. Fox News reports that the IRS whistleblower said that Justice department officials have put pressure on the IRS to help friends of Clinton. As with so many other serious abuses of power by the Clinton administration, there has been little coverage of this potentially explosive story by the establishment media.
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