New York Times 7/16/99 William Safire "… The most dramatic clash between the F.B.I. and the heavily politicized Reno Department of Justice took place in February 1997. Stimulated by press reports of "the Asian connection" to the Clinton-Gore campaign, the Bureau teletyped all field offices for reports on foreign attempts to influence U.S. political campaigns. On Washington's Birthday the F.B.I.'s counterintelligence chief, John Lewis, delivered a packet of those top-secret reports to Janet Reno. "The Attorney General gave the packet of teletypes to then Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick," reports Michael Bromwich, the in-house Inspector General. At the same time, White House Counsel Charles Ruff made two calls to Justice seeking to find out what embarrassment was in store. Never told by Ms. Reno of F.B.I. restrictions on the documents, Ms. Gorelick bucked them to the Office of Intelligence Policy and Review. They then blithely passed them on to Laura Ingersoll's Justice "task force," selected for its ineptitude. Nothing doing, said the F.B.I., which "retrieved the packet shortly after the Task Force received it," according to Bromwich. When I asked the F.B.I. Director, Louis Freeh, yesterday if he had been aware of the confrontation -- an unprecedented dispatch of agents to snatch back evidence from Main Justice -- he replied, "I knew about it and certainly approved of it." …Justice was passing the surveillance of messages to Ted Sieong and Maria Hsia -- both in direct contact with Al Gore in his fund-raising -- all over the building. And so the F.B.I. acted to prevent contacts with the White House officials under investigation, to avoid the sort of improper "heads up" given them in Whitewater….The name-no-names whitewash by Ms. Reno's I.G. admits that Congress was not given two pieces of espionage information it should have had until September 1997 -- after the Senate investigators had all but closed shop and Democrats happily declared the Asian penetration unproven…."