As scandals go, the investigation into former HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros was always pretty weak. In case you’ve forgotten, Cisneros, during an FBI background check, acknowledged an extramarital relationship he had years prior, and admitted to having paid the woman, but misled investigators about how much he gave her.
An independent investigator, David Barrett, began a relentless inquiry, spanning nearly 11 years and costing $21 million. Barrett lead a full-time staff of 30 federal investigators who ultimately unveiled the truth — that Cisneros low-balled the FBI about the size of the payments. Cisneros plead guilty to a misdemeanor charge and paid a fine of $10,000. He left Clinton’s cabinet, returned to San Antonio, and was ultimately pardoned in 2001.
Cisneros made a terrible mistake, got caught, and paid a price. Game over? Hardly. Barrett continued his investigation, exploring whether anyone at the Clinton White House conspired to interfere with his inquisition.
Barrett’s office leaked word to the New York Times that his probe, the longest independent counsel investigation in history, is finished.
[Barrett’s] report says Justice Department officials refused to grant him the broad jurisdiction he wanted; for example, Attorney General Janet Reno said he could look at only one tax year. And after Internal Revenue Service officials in Washington took a Cisneros investigation out of the hands of district-level officials in Texas, the agency deemed the evidence too weak to merit a criminal inquiry, a conclusion strongly disputed by one Texas investigator.
Former officials of the Justice Department and the I.R.S. dismissed Mr. Barrett’s conclusions in appendices attached to the report, saying the findings were the product of an inquiry that was incompetently managed from the start.
If anyone needed an example of why the independent-counsel statute deserved to die, David Barrett is Exhibit A.
Barrett alleges a cover-up. Does he have any proof? After 11 years of looking, he does not. Conceivably he could have continued looking forever, but even Republicans were getting tired of Captain Ahab’s crusade.
As for government officials who had to work with Barrett, most came to think of him as something of a clown.
Justice Department officials who disputed Mr. Barrett’s findings portrayed his investigation as deeply misguided and said the tax case against Mr. Cisneros had little merit. They suggested that the prosecutor had turned his disappointment in his inability to prove the obstruction allegations into unprovable theories.
Robert S. Litt, one of the Justice Department officials involved, wrote in a comment letter on May 31, 2005, that he was allowed to read only edited parts of the report but that he concluded that the report was “a fitting conclusion to one of the most embarrassingly incompetent and wasteful episodes in the history of American law enforcement.”
You might be wondering how, exactly, David Barrett got this job in the first place. It’s a detail that seems to have been widely overlooked.
Barrett was a HUD employee in the Reagan administration who — get this — was questioned by prosecutors as part of a criminal investigation into influence peddling at the agency. Why this man was chosen to head up an “independent” investigation of Cisneros remains a mystery.
Barrett “would not seem to most people to be an ‘A’ choice,” said Charles Lewis of the Center for Public Integrity. “Why he was chosen is frankly mystifying.” Barrett’s history of being “deeply enmeshed in the housing contract culture,” Lewis said, makes for a “peculiar juxtaposition” with his current role.
When Barrett was tapped for the Cisneros investigation, Rep. Tom Lantos (D-Calif.) compared the selection to “appointing the well-fed fox to investigate the missing hens at the chicken coop.” Eleven years and $21 million later, it’s an observation that holds up nicely over time.