Acting for President Clinton, Reno was first criticized for requesting the resignations of seventy-seven politically appointed US Attorneys shortly after she took office. In fact, the spoils system is as old as President Andrew Jackson. "This is a total bum rap," says Washington attorney Richard Ben-Veniste. "Every time there's a change of administration, they appoint new US Attorneys."

Then came Waco. A little over a month into her job, the FBI persuaded her that children were being abused inside the Branch Davidian compound at Waco, Texas. The FBI's experts further assured her that CS gas could be safely used and that there was little risk that the Branch Davidians would commit suicide in the event of a raid. All three assurances were false, but Reno, new to Washington, trusted the experts, just as President Kennedy trusted the CIA experts who recommended the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. When the Waco raid failed, she took full responsibility for it, introducing herself to a national audience during this tragedy as a straight talker who shunned the normal formulation that "mistakes were made." "This was a judgment I made," she told ABC's Ted Koppel. "I think the responsibility lies with me."

Reno's most persistent politico-legal problem has centered around her decisions on naming special prosecutors or, later, independent counsels to investigate so-called covered persons--high-ranking members of the Administration against whom there is credible evidence of a crime. The method of appointing such counsels was that evidence was submitted to Reno, and if she agreed that there was a credible accusation against a covered person, she would ask a three-judge panel appointed by Chief Justice William Rehnquist to name a counsel. She has come under sniper fire from Clinton Administration officials for being too quick to ask for counsels, and under heavy-artillery fire from Republicans for refusing to request a counsel to investigate Democratic fundraising. Both sides find the same fault: She has followed the letter of the law too closely, rather than its intent.

Thus, Democrats blame her for appointing independent counsels in connection with relatively trivial charges against former Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy and former Housing Secretary Henry Cisneros. But there were in fact plausible charges of wrongdoing against both men, and in addition, Cisneros admitted that he had misled the FBI about how much money he paid to a former mistress. Both the Espy and Cisneros cases showed, however, the potential for abuse of the Independent Counsel Act, which has since expired.

In the case of Espy, who was prosecuted somewhat bizarrely under the Meat Inspection Act of 1907 for accepting sports tickets and other favors, independent counsel Donald Smaltz spent four years and $17 million, and then saw a jury bring back thirty "not guilty" verdicts. Undaunted by this defeat, he uttered a statement that must rank among the atrocities of jurisprudence in this century: "The actual indictment of a public official may in fact be as great a deterrent as a conviction of that official."

The Cisneros prosecution was equally abusive. 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.

Independent counsels were also named to investigate Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, who was killed in an airplane crash before the conclusion of the case, and to investigate Labor Secretary Alexis Herman and Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, against both of whom no charges were filed.

"Espy, Cisneros, Babbitt and Herman--those four cases really irked the White House," says a former Clinton aide. "She pissed people off all the time because she was so independent. She just did not act like a political appointee. She was on the borderline of insubordination."

"She probably could have exercised some discretion over some of those earlier appointments," says Ben-Veniste, a veteran of the Nixon Watergate investigations who is now in private practice. "But the basic flaw is in the triggering mechanism in the statute."

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