Add one more straw to the camel's back of evidence that Janet Reno's Justice Department has ceased to function as an independent law-enforcement agency -- and now operates, instead, as a coordinated arm of the president's personal criminal-defense team. The latest example comes from PBS's Frontline series of investigative reports. Last week's episode, reported by correspondent Peter Boyer, profiled the experience of Donald Smaltz, the independent counsel, appointed to investigate allegations of a corrupt relationship between Tyson Foods of Arkansas, the poultry firm, and former Clinton agriculture secretary Mike Espy.
In the course of his inquiry, Smaltz stumbled across someone named Joe Henrickson, who had once piloted Tyson's fleet of corporate airplanes. Henrickson told Smaltz he'd never met Mike Espy. But Henrickson also said that he had several times been instructed by Tyson executives to deliver envelopes stuffed with $ 100 bills to then-governor Clinton in Little Rock.
Whereupon Smaltz wrote a letter to the attorney general asking her to sanction an expansion of his jurisdiction to cover this new testimony about influence peddling. Whereupon Tyson Foods began an intensive anti-Smaltz lobbying campaign in Washington -- and James Carville began smearing the independent counsel as a "liar." Whereupon Janet Reno rejected Smaltz's request and told him the Justice Department itself would investigate Henrickson's allegations about cash payoffs to Bill Clinton.
Joe Henrickson, Frontline further reports, has never been contacted by the Justice Department.