Special Prosecutor Accuses Clinton Administration of Blocking Investigation Into Whether Cisneros Dodged Taxes on Payments to Mistress

Interesting article in today's New York Times, Inquiry on Clinton Official Ends With Accusations of Cover-Up, by David Johnston & Neil A. Lewis:

After the longest independent counsel investigation in history, the prosecutor in the case of former Housing Secretary Henry G. Cisneros is finally closing his operation with a scathing report accusing Clinton administration officials of thwarting an inquiry into whether Mr. Cisneros evaded paying income taxes....

The final report, scheduled to be made public on Thursday, discusses in detail why the office remained in operation for so long: an intense behind-the-scenes clash between senior Justice Department officials and Mr. Barrett, who was trying to explore possible obstruction of justice within the Justice Department and the IRS....

The report reveals little new about the accusations that led to Mr. Barrett's appointment - that Mr. Cisneros misled investigators about payments to a former mistress. Those issues were the subject of news accounts during the 1990's. But it was not widely known that Mr. Barrett believed that Mr. Cisneros's handling of the payments to the former mistress might have violated tax laws or that he suspected Justice Department and IRS officials of criminal obstruction to help Mr. Cisneros avoid scrutiny. The New York Daily News reported on Wednesday that Mr. Barrett would issue a report alleging a Clinton administration cover-up of Mr. Cisneros's tax problems.

Mr. Barrett's 746-page report said that the tax and obstruction phase of the inquiry ended without a definitive conclusion, but it declared: "These agencies' treatment of possible charges against Cisneros was at best questionable and at worst represented serious wrongdoing. There seems to be no question that Cisneros was given special consideration and more limited scrutiny because of who he was - an important political appointee."...

Mr. Barrett said IRS officials in Washington took over a district-level inquiry in Texas into Mr. Cisneros's taxes and concluded that there was insufficient evidence to go ahead with a criminal investigation. But in a 1997 memorandum protesting the decision, an I.R.S. investigator in Texas said there was evidence that Mr. Cisneros had diverted substantial parts of his speaking fees in the early 1990's to the former mistress, without the knowledge of co-workers. But other IRS and Justice Department officials said that a fairly complete listing of Mr. Cisneros's income from various sources was available to his accountants, whom he relied on to prepare his tax returns. That would have made it impossible to sustain a prosecution, they said.