WASHINGTON – The independent counsel who investigated former Housing Secretary Henry Cisneros charged in his final report Thursday that the Clinton administration thwarted his work, drawing the curtain on the longest probe under a post-Watergate-era reform law.
Officials who worked in the Clinton administration flatly deny the allegations by prosecutor David Barrett, who closed a decadelong investigation with a report detailing a behind-the-scenes battle inside the government as he tried to look into possible tax violations by Cisneros.
Cisneros, who was housing secretary during the Clinton administration, pleaded guilty in 1999 to a misdemeanor of lying to the FBI about payments to a former mistress when he was answering questions during his confirmation for the Cabinet-level post. President Clinton eventually pardoned him.
When Barrett went to the Department of Justice seeking to broaden the probe, Attorney General Janet Reno allowed the prosecutor to look into only a single tax year, the report maintains.
“There seems to be no question that Cisneros was given extra consideration and more limited scrutiny because of who he was – an important political appointee,” said the report. “This office received little in the way of cooperation from (the Department of Justice), whose purpose should be to protect the public interest and not to circle the wagons in protection of government personnel.”
In strongly worded rebuttals, officials from the Justice Department and IRS rejected Barrett’s allegations.
“The inaccurate statements and unfair insinuations contained in this final report are too numerous to catalogue,” said Jo Ann Farrington, former deputy chief of the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section.
Robert Litt, one of the Justice Department officials involved, called Barrett’s suggestions of obstruction “a scurrilous falsehood,” adding that the report was “a fitting conclusion to one of the most embarrassingly incompetent and wasteful episodes in the history of American law enforcement.”
Barrett’s report is the last chapter in the controversial history of the independent counsel law, which Congress refused to renew. The investigations caused serious political damage to both Republican and Democratic administrations.
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