A Hard Call Made On The Legalities Ideological Slant From Safely Out Of The Fray, It’s Easy To Question Reno’s Motives.

Every editorial writer has heard, and most have repeated, this definition of their craft:

Editorial writer: someone who charges downhill after the battle and slays the wounded. Joke or not, the line carries a certain sting of truth. So U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno had better protect her head from a swarm of pundits headed her way.

Reno, you see, OK’d the Justice Department’s decision not to prosecute four FBI officials over the North Idaho shootout in which, five years ago today, a federal marksman killed Vicki Weaver on Ruby Ridge.

Had the Justice Department spent millions to prosecute the four officials and failed to convict, the same or other second-guessers would be castigating Reno and her aides for legal ineptitude or waste or both.

As it is, the lawyers in the Justice Department spent two years trying to figure out how the 11-day standoff got out of hand, who made what mistakes, who set ill-advised shoot-to-kill policies, who knew about them and who, if anyone, tried to cover it up. They tried to decide if laws were broken and, if so, was there enough evidence to pin it on anyone.

One official, E. Michael Kahoe, was convicted of obstruction of justice. Several others, including former deputy director Larry Potts and his aide Danny O. Coulson, had been reprimanded by the FBI. But the prosecutors decided they didn’t have enough evidence for criminal charges against Potts, Coulson, supervisory special agent Michael Baird or Gale Evans, former chief of the FBI’s violent crimes unit.

From safely out of the fray, it’s easy to question Reno’s motives or overlook inconvenient facts: It was Republican President George Bush’s FBI that shot it out with Randy Weaver. The Republican Senate’s own hearings produced only questions and general conclusions about FBI handling of the incident. Reno’s supposedly lackadaisical prosecutors once went so far as to ask a judge to misrepresent a court proceeding in hopes it would influence FBI agents to share incriminating information.

It’s especially easy to do all those things if you have an ideological dislike for Reno and the Clinton administration in the first place.

In making judgments about when to prosecute suspected criminals, however, partisan predispositions don’t stack up very impressively against other kinds of credentials. Legal training, for example.

, DataTimes MEMO: See opposing view under the headline: Justice’s blindness purely self-inflicted

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