Most famously, Reno called for a special prosecutor--the first of whom was New York lawyer Robert Fiske, later replaced by Kenneth Starr under the revived Independent Counsel Act--to investigate President Clinton for an ever-expanding series of alleged offenses, starting with his Whitewater investments and going on to include the suicide of deputy White House counsel Vincent Foster, the dismissal of seven aides in the White House Travel Office, the Monica Lewinsky scandal and Mrs. Clinton's billing records while at the Rose Law Firm. Given this record, it is hard to accuse Reno of going out of her way to protect her fellow Democrats.

On the contrary, in the Lewinsky matter she could quite easily have been more skeptical about Starr's claim that the case was a natural outgrowth of his earlier investigation and that he had no prior involvement in the Paula Jones lawsuit, which had called Lewinsky as a witness. And despite evidence of Starr's misconduct--both in leaks and in advocating impeachment (thus going beyond the independent counsel's mandate in a manner that caused Starr's ethics adviser, Sam Dash, to resign)--Reno never exercised her authority to remove him, which she had a right to do.

In the case of Gore's fundraising, Reno also stuck to the letter of the law. It is illegal to seek federal campaign contributions from a federal building. Gore admittedly raised money from his office. But "federal campaign contribution" is a term of art. It refers only to money raised for the express advocacy of the election or defeat of a federal candidate. What Gore sought was the unlimited "soft money" contributions that are supposedly used by the parties for general education purposes.

In the end, Gore's soft money was mixed in with "hard money." The question then became whether he knew of that mixing, and Gore came up with the story of drinking so much iced tea that he may have had to leave the room, thereby missing that part of the discussion. This excuse may be ludicrous, but it is not specific and credible evidence that a federal crime may have been committed. Faced with this thin evidence that Gore had committed a felony, Reno refused to name an independent counsel to investigate him.

Professor John Barrett of the St. John's University Law School, a former Justice Department employee under Reno, says her integrity is unquestionable, but he faults her in the Gore case for being too literal. "Her use of the various statutes has sometimes blinded her to the larger purpose of those statutes," he says. "She got trapped by the intricacies and didn't see that the broader purpose of the law was to get such cases out of the hands of the Justice Department to remove all suspicion of partiality."

For that reason--the avoidance of all suspicion--former US Attorney Charles LaBella urged Reno in a secret memo to name a special prosecutor to investigate the fundraising abuses. When Reno overruled both him and FBI Director Louis Freeh, Republicans complained that she was covering up for Gore for political reasons. But LaBella deflated such speculation in an appearance on NBC's Meet the Press. LaBella said it was not clear that any crime had been committed, and he defended Reno in these words: "I don't think anybody was protecting anybody. I really don't believe that the Attorney General, in any way, shape or form, was protecting anybody or anybody else at the Justice Department was politically protecting anybody."

Having heard LaBella's argument, Representative Nadler is convinced Reno made the right decision: "LaBella was saying she should have appointed a counsel and subjected Gore and God knows who else to hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees even though he didn't think a crime had been committed. I'm very glad she didn't do that." One might suspect that Reno refused to name a prosecutor to investigate Gore because she had seen how abusive and open-ended the earlier investigations had become. But Barrett points out, "She has never made that argument."

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