The money trail

Attorney General Janet Reno offered a decent compromise last week over her investigation of White House fund-raising activity. By including FBI Director Louis Freeh — not a big fan of the president’s — she has removed some of the conflict of interest questions around the Justice Department’s work.

Attorney General Reno needed to improve public confidence in her investigation. Her office not only trailed the media in discovering potential fund-raising violations, but has occasionally seemed surprised by information that has turned out to be common knowledge among the White House’s money people. For example, the existence of videotapes. A special prosecutor, which Republicans have been demanding, could make for a more aggressive investigation — although it might not solve the conflict-of-interest problem; Kenneth Starr is evidence of that.

What is more interesting, however, is the recent rise in emotion over the president’s misdeeds. It has been just over a week since Senate Republicans killed the first substantial opportunity in years for campaign-finance reform but, listening to their rhetoric, one might think they had never heard of the animal.

Having protected their own cash flow, GOP senators have been eagerly showing videotapes of the president referring indirectly to the need for soft-money support — that’s the money sent to the political parties that is not supposed to to be used to help individual candidates. They fail to say, however, that their party outraised the president’s in soft-money contributions — $140 million to $120 million — in the last election. They further neglect the fact that it was the failure to find compromise in the battle over soft money and union activity that killed the McCain-Feingold campaign reform.

The president appears to have violated at least the spirit if not the letter of the law; Republicans set records in amassing soft money in 1996 and are on track to break that record. If Attorney General Reno can effectively coordinate her Justice Department with the FBI on questions surrounding the president, those senators sincere in their efforts to find truth and justice in this case should ask the investigation to continue in Congress. Or would they prefer a special prosecutor?