WASHINGTON -- Noting firsthand experiences with the Iran-contra and Watergate scandals, two prominent investigators urged Congress yesterday to keep inquiries into activities of top government officials in the hands of prosecutors independent of the White House.
Former independent counsel Lawrence E. Walsh, who investigated the Iran-contra scandal of the Reagan administration, and Sam Dash, who led the Senate Watergate hearings in the 1970s, recommended major revisions in the soon-to-expire independent counsel law, however.
Walsh and Dash told the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee that the statute allows too many government officials to be investigated over unverified allegations and that the scope of such inquiries is far too broad.
Walsh, who was sharply criticized a decade ago by congressional Republicans for spending $47 million on an investigation that they said ran too long and ranged too wide, said he has learned a few lessons since. He told senators that outside counsels should be appointed only to investigate alleged wrongdoing by the president or attorney general and that all other sensitive inquiries should be left to Justice Department prosecutors.
"I believe that nine-tenths of our work could have been done by the Justice Department," Walsh said of his seven-year investigation.
Discussing the scope of such inquiries, Walsh agreed with much of the criticism directed at independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr by the White House and Democratic critics. Walsh said Starr should not have been permitted to investigate Whitewater and other matters "which occurred before a president was elected."
"The expense and intensity of an independent counsel's investigation should be reserved for an investigation of an abuse of public office, an investigation of specific and credible evidence that the president or attorney general committed a crime in connection with the discharge of official duties," Walsh testified.
Attorney General Janet Reno recently testified before the committee that after seeing how politics influences such investigations, she no longer supports the law.
The committee chairman, Sen. Fred Thompson, a Tennessee Republican, and most other Republicans and Democrats on the panel seem to be leaning toward keeping the law but revising it to limit the length, scope and costs of outside investigations.
Thompson said for the first time yesterday that perhaps Congress should consider a cooling-off period in view of partisan passions directed at Starr.
Dash, who was ethics counsel in Starr's office until he resigned in a policy dispute, said the "near hysterical attacks against Walsh" were similar to those aimed at Starr. He blamed the criticism on "White House counterattacks in a scorched-earth public relations war to destroy the prosecutor."
Dash defended Starr's tactics, which are being investigated by the Justice Department. Starr's investigation has "been conducted no differently from the traditionally aggressive federal investigations conducted by regular federal prosecutors," he said.
Nonetheless, Dash said, new legislation should provide that only lawyers with extensive experience in criminal law be appointed as independent counsels.
"Starr had no such experience and heavily relied on the career federal prosecutors he had borrowed," he said.
Pub Date: 3/25/99