Justice Dangles in Limbo

The Meese investigation leaves a vacuum at the department

Can the Justice Department function effectively without a full-fledged Attorney General? Americans may soon find out. William French Smith insists that he plans to leave the post to return to his California law practice this month, and President Reagan has not pressed him to reconsider. Edwin Meese, Reagan’s nominee as Smith’s replacement, cannot be confirmed until a special prosecutor finishes investigating Meese’s sloppy financial dealings, a process likely to take at least six months. Nor is there officially a Deputy Attorney General to fill in during the interim; Edward Schmults, who had been handling the daily operations of the Justice Department, quit that post last February and has not been replaced.

The White House last week toyed with the idea of finding a temporary fillin, then discovered that it could not bypass the department’s internal succession rules but must go through confirmation hearings for a permanent replacement. So unless Meese decides to step aside or Smith agrees not to, the acting Attorney General for much of the 1984 election year will be, by default, the department’s third-ranking official, Associate Attorney General D. Lowell Jensen.

White House advisers have no personal objection to Jensen, 55, a former district attorney of Alameda County, Calif, who had earlier (1958-66) been an assistant D.A. there when Meese was a deputy in the same office. Jensen helped organize the mass arrests of Berkeley students during the Free Speech Movement of the mid-’60s and prosecuted radicals such as Huey Newton and the kidnapers of Patty Hearst. Jensen does not need Senate confirmation, but his tenuous status could be an election-year liability, reminding voters of the disarray at the department and the ethical quandaries that have plagued Reagan’s Administration. Lamented a top White House adviser: “We are just going to have to live with it.”

At Meese’s request, Smith last week asked a select panel of three senior federal judges to appoint a special prosecutor with a wide latitude to look into charges that Meese was helped financially by people who later got federal jobs, failed to report one loan and a stock purchase, got special treatment in shifting his Army Reserve status and knew more than he has admitted about documents from the 1980 Carter campaign that ended up in his own files. The prosecutor is expected to be named this week. Even if the investigation is completed within six months and Meese is cleared, White House aides think it unlikely he could be confirmed before the elections, if at all.

Meese last week heightened the perception that he faces difficult problems by hiring three lawyers to prepare his defense: Leonard Garment, who replaced John Dean as President Nixon’s special counsel after the Watergate scandal broke; Max Kampelman, a longtime adviser to Hubert Humphrey; and E. Robert Wallach, a classmate of Meese’s at the University of California Law School and now a professor there. (A 1983 change in the special-prosecutor law, made after Carter Aide Hamilton Jordan spent more than $100,000 combating unsubstantiated allegations that he had used cocaine, provides that Meese’s legal fees could be reimbursed by the Government if no indictment results.) In the meantime, Meese has returned to his duties as Presidential Counsellor, attending senior staff and policy meetings for the first time in more than a month. Still standing by his nominee, Reagan assailed Meese’s critics for trying to “destroy a human being.”

The investigative atmosphere has taken on a life of its own. CBS-TV revealed that Meese had been given a pair of jade-and-gold cufflinks worth $375 by South Korean officials when Reagan visited there last year, and had failed to turn the gift over to the Government, as required by law. He did so last week, contending that he did not know they were worth more than the $140 limit on such personal gifts. Presidential Aides James Baker and Michael Deaver and National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane all had turned their cufflinks in promptly after the trip. But last week seven other White House staffers were hurriedly coughing up jade cuff links.

The departing Smith, meanwhile, reimbursed the Government $11,000 after Wisconsin’s watchful Senator William Proxmire learned that Smith’s wife had been using an official limousine for private errands. Treasury Secretary Donald Regan, whose wife took similar free rides, refused to make such restitution, claiming that he did not consider such use “illegal, immoral or unethical.” Contended Proxmire Aide Larry Patton: “Here is an Administration that points to $100 cases of welfare abuse. Then they claim to see nothing wrong about misusing Government perks worth thousands of dollars.”