Ex-investigator says Reno's anti-prosecutor decision not political

WASHINGTON - The prosecutor who once led the Democratic fund-raising investigation said yesterday he didn't think politics motivated Attorney General Janet Reno to reject his recommendation for an independent counsel.

Charles LaBella, who lost his Washington assignment after recommending an outside investigation of President Clinton and other top White House figures, also said such an investigation might well have failed to produce criminal charges.

"The standard was information, sufficient information from credible sources .... I believe we had substantial information from credible sources to warrant a full-scale investigation of many of these allegations," LaBella said on NBC's ••Meet the Press••.

Once an experienced prosecutor reviewed the allegations, "I think most of these, if not all of them, would have washed out," LaBella said.

He was brought in from California in September 1997 to head a Justice Department team looking into alleged fund-raising abuses, largely by the Democrats, during the 1996 president campaign.

The following July he wrote Reno that his investigators had uncovered information that merited follow-up by an independent counsel without links to the White House. Reno declined to seek a special prosecutor.

"It was never politics. It was bureaucratic agendas, I think. Protecting turf internally at the Department of Justice," LaBella said.

"I don't think anybody was protecting anybody. I really don't believe that the attorney general, in any way, shape or form, was protecting anybody, or anybody else at the Justice Department was politically protecting anybody."

In a report last month, The Los Angeles Times quoted the memo as saying Justice officials used "gamesmanship" and legal "contortions" to avoid an independent inquiry into Clinton-Gore fund-raising matters.