One Witch Hunt Ends

David Barrett ended the longest investigation conducted by an independent counsel today with the release of 746-page report. Barratt, ostensibly, set out to investigate former Clinton Housing Secretary Henry Cisneros, but, upon realizing there wasn’t anything to investigate, decided to turn the proverbial molehill into a mountain.

Lars-Erik Nelson of The Nation summed up Barrett’s activities as follows (excerpt from this):

The Cisneros prosecution was equally abusive (as that of Mike Espy, former agriculture secretary under Clinton who was the target of another special prosecutor appointed at the behest of the Republican congress). Independent counsel David Barrett charged Cisneros with felonies worth ninety years in prison for concealing the extent of his relationship with a former mistress. Then, on the first day of jury selection, he allowed Cisneros to plead guilty to one misdemeanor and pay a $10,000 fine.

Of course Barrett, being the individual who ran “Lawyers For Reagan” in 1980, refused to take “I give up, you got me,” for an answer. As the blogger Betty The Crow reports, Barrett proceeded to milk his investigation, which he tried to focus on the IRS, for over ten years.

So, out of a prosecution at a cost of $10 grand, he ended up closing out this fandango for a tag of $3 million on our dime (hmmm...shades of Ken Starr?). So what do we get for our money?

This, to quote the CNN report (buried near the bottom of the story):

"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 S. 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."

One of Barrett’s ridiculous claims is that he was thwarted by Janet Reno into investigating Cisneros’ finances more thoroughly, but as Nelson pointed out in his column, Reno actually antagonized the Clinton Administration by giving Barratt access to a year’s worth of Cisneros’ records, which, given the fact that this was a joke of an investigation anyway, was more than generous.

I’m still “on the fence,” more or less, on the issue of whether or not the independent counsel law should have been allowed to expire (of course, how con-veee-nient is it for the Repugs that it has in light of all of the shenanigans coming out with Jack Abramoff and the “K” Street project), but I’m inclined to believe that it should have been renewed, even with the possibility that political nonsense such as Barrett’s investigation could happen again.

So there we have it, ladies and gentlemen. Our tax dollars in the amount of $3 million down the drain on this nonsense.

It sounds to me like someone should be appointed to prosecute the prosecutor.