Word: reno
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...tried to explain that they were proud of what they had done, and now that they had been caught, promised never to do it again. It was as if they had come to believe the headlines that implied someone might soon be going to jail, that Attorney General Janet Reno had no choice but to appoint an independent counsel...
...week's end Reno was instead left struggling to explain that the problem was not how the laws had been broken but how they had been written in the first place. The rules covering fund raising on federal property, as amended over the years, are now so elastic that they are virtually impossible to break. The biggest loophole of all was the one nearly everyone missed--not that Gore was using a Clinton-Gore campaign credit card when he went dialing for dollars; not that the Hatch Act's limits on fund raising don't apply to Presidents and Vice...
...days Reno had been meeting privately with her top lawyers to figure out if she had grounds to appoint an independent counsel. The fact that everyone from editorial-page editors to Trent Lott to Common Cause reformers was hollering for one meant little to her. Reno's critics were reading the independent-counsel statute; she was reading the criminal code. And she saw a big, fat exception to the law making it a crime to raise money on federal property. The loophole opened in 1979, when Congress inadvertently tightened the definition of "contribution" from money donated for "any political purpose...
...sinister was at work. Soft money had hardly been minted in those days; lawmakers simply wanted to reconcile the wording in two different statutes. "They weren't trying to do anything sneaky," says Fred Wertheimer, former head of Common Cause. But even if the loophole was opened by accident, Reno and her lawyers concluded, the restrictions did not apply to the hundreds of millions of dollars in unregulated, soft-money contributions...
...Reno didn't want to come right out and say so, for fear of looking like the President's personal defense lawyer. So she resorted to smoke signals at her press conference last week and hoped someone would...