This ain't fair!

Posted on Tue, Mar. 09, 2004
Some see politics in court's reimbursements to GOP officials
By Carol D. Leonnig
WASHINGTON POST

WASHINGTON - A little-known Washington court that oversees the investigations of presidents has approved more than a million dollars in legal-fee reimbursements for Republican administration officials caught up in the probes while rejecting similar requests from Clinton-era officials.

The three-judge panel has in recent months rejected the bulk of five requests for reimbursements totaling $5.5 million from former President Clinton and associates involved in the Whitewater independent counsel investigation.

It has granted small parts of three requests worth $114,000, or about 2 percent of the total.

After the Iran-Contra independent counsel investigation of the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, the court ordered government repayment of $1.5 million to 17 Republican officials and associates.

It rejected five requests worth about $1.5 million, mostly from people who did not qualify because they had been indicted.

In a series of decisions over the past decade, the panel has justified the disparity in writing.

It said the Iran-Contra figures were unnecessarily embroiled in a highly unusual probe, whereas the Whitewater figures were properly interrogated in an investigation that ultimately uncovered federal crimes.

Democrats and academics who have studied the court disagree.

"The partisan pattern is undeniable," said John Barrett, a St. John's University law professor who was a lawyer in the independent counsel's office for the Iran-Contra investigation.

"Republican petitions have been getting reimbursed. And people connected with Democratic administrations are getting turned down. And it makes the court look bad."

But Michael Carvin, a former official in President Reagan's Justice Department who has advised clients on the Independent Counsel Act, called allegations of partisan bias "utterly unjustified paranoia."

Carvin said the judges have correctly noted the differences in the two investigations.

The three-judge court, officially called the Special Division of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, is headed by U.S. Circuit Judge David Sentelle.

The folksy, cowboy-boot-wearing North Carolinian credits a conservative icon, former Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., for launching his career.

Sentelle named his daughter Reagan, after the president who put him on the federal bench in 1985.

Sentelle, 59, appointed by Chief Justice William Rehnquist to head the panel starting in 1992, has handled requests for repayment stemming from the two most wide-ranging and costly investigations in the independent counsel's 25-year history. Each lasted seven years.

Sentelle and his two colleagues on the panel, retired judges Peter Fay, 74, a Nixon appointee of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, and Thomas Reavley, 83, a Carter appointee of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, have declined to comment on their decisions.

The court was established to select independent counsels and to oversee their work. Even though the independent counsel law expired in 1999, the court continues to weigh a number of fee requests.

Under a 1982 amendment to the special counsel law, public officials pulled into investigations but never charged with crimes can be reimbursed for legal bills if they show that a career prosecutor would not have pursued a similar investigation or delved as deeply.

The goal was to protect government employees if a politically driven counsel, with no limits on time or cost, unfairly pursued them.

It was sparked by a $200,000 independent counsel investigation into allegations, later proved to be fabricated, that President Carter's chief of staff, Hamilton Jordan, had snorted cocaine at New York's Studio 54 club.