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Change Your Life! |
No special investigation of Gore fund-raising |
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August 24, 2000
WASHINGTON (AP) - U.S.Attorney General Janet Reno announced Wednesday she has decided not to seek appointment of a special counsel to investigate Vice President Al Gore's 1996 campaign fund-raising activities. Reno told a news conference that after reviewing a transcript of an April interview that Gore had with federal investigators, she concluded that "further investigation is not likely to result in a prosecutable case." "I've concluded that there is no reasonable possibility that further investigation would produce evidence to warrant charges," said Reno, rejecting for the third time the notion an outside counsel should investigate the vice president. The decision is good news for Gore's presidential campaign. It comes less than a week after it was disclosed, on the day of Gore's acceptance speech to the Democratic National Convention, that special prosecutor Robert Ray has assembled a new panel to decide whether President Bill Clinton should be indicted after he leaves for office in connection with his relationship with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky. The attorney general's decision, first reported in Wednesday's editions of The New York Times, also was likely to renew criticism of her by Republicans in Congress. They bitterly criticized Reno's two early decisions not to seek an outside investigator to look into fund-raising telephone calls that Gore made from his office and into whether he lied to investigators when he said he thought the money he raised was to be used for general party-building rather than for the Clinton-Gore re-election effort. This time, Robert J. Conrad Jr., head of Reno's campaign task force, urged her, after he interviewed Gore in April, to name an outside counsel to determine whether Gore lied about whether he knew that a campaign event at a Buddhist temple in California was a fund-raiser. That event has led to convictions of others on charges that the true donors were concealed. |
