WASHINGTON — After about 10 years and $21 million spent investigating former Housing Secretary Henry G. Cisneros, the last independent counsel from the Clinton era officially ended his probe Thursday, complaining he needed more time to unravel what might have been a massive "coverup at high levels of our government."
David M. Barrett, a former Republican lawyer and lobbyist who was appointed in 1995 to investigate the Democrat, issued a 474-page "Final Report of the Independent Counsel." With it, he released a one-page statement to the media that alleged a coverup. "An accurate title for the report could be 'What We Were Prevented From Investigating,' " Barrett said in his statement.
"It would not be unreasonable to conclude as I have that there was a coverup ... and it appears to have been substantial and coordinated," Barrett said. "The question is, why? And that question regrettably will go unanswered."
His report offered no evidence of a coverup. It did say that numerous officials at the Justice Department and the Internal Revenue Service were not impressed by his allegations that the former San Antonio mayor might have cheated on his federal income taxes prior to 1992. When the Bush administration came into office in 2001, its top officials also refused to give Barrett permission to dig into old tax files.
In 1999, Cisneros pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of lying to the FBI about how much money he had given to a former mistress. For at least four years afterward, Barrett continued to spend $2 million a year pursuing his theory that his probe had been thwarted.
Several officials who had dealt with Barrett reacted angrily to his final report.
It "is a fitting conclusion to one of the most embarrassingly incompetent and wasteful episodes in the history of American law enforcement," said Robert S. Litt, a Washington lawyer and a former Justice Department official during the Clinton administration. Barrett wasted millions in tax dollars "in the pursuit of his hallucinatory obstruction investigation," Litt said.
Barry Finkelstein, a veteran tax lawyer at the IRS, said he "was hauled into the grand jury on approximately 30 occasions" by Barrett to answer questions as to why no tax investigation was launched against Cisneros.
