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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Reno Says She’s Unfazed By Republican Attacks

New York Times

Buffeted by Republican attacks on her refusal to refer charges of campaign finance irregularities to an independent counsel, Attorney General Janet Reno said Thursday that she was committed to “seeing that justice ultimately is done.”

At her weekly news conference, the attorney general professed to be unfazed by the criticism she has received from Republicans in Congress like House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who compared her to John Mitchell, who was President Richard M. Nixon’s attorney general and who served 19 months in federal prison in the 1970s for obstructing the Watergate investigation.

But she sounded frustrated by her inability to persuade her Republican detractors that her decision Monday not to appoint an independent counsel was an appropriate reading of the relevant law, the Ethics in Government Act.

“As I’ve tried to explain, I take everything into account based on the evidence and the law,” she said. “I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t. So the best thing I can do is ignore the politics, ignore the pressures - pressures from both sides - if they say, ‘You do this,’ or ‘You do that,’ and just call it like I see it.”

Reno said, as she also did in a series of letters to lawmakers Monday, that she had found no specific evidence of wrongdoing from a credible source against any of the top administration officials covered by the law. Therefore, she said, the investigation should remain at the Justice Department.