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A generation ago, as the nation faced one of its darkest political crises, we summoned
a figure who would stand apart from the partisan wars, do his duty, and then go home.
The special prosecutor was so admired, the independent council was written into law.
Now, two decades later, the nation is having second thoughts, real doubts about whether
there should be any more.
The political generation now in power, which once exalted the independent council, now
seems determined to destroy it.
The case against the institution of the independent council is nearly won, and next year Congress
is likely to complete its undoing.
But one voice has been missing, that of the active prosecutors themselves.
Ordinarily constrained from speaking out, one member of this elite circle has now decided
to break the silence.
One of the independent council is in severe jeopardy.
The president and the attorney general has authorized surrogates to publicly condemn
the independent council as incompetent, as a bunch of Arabian lunatics is affiliated
somehow with very partisan right-wing politics, which is very untrue.
And the statute doesn't have, doesn't seem to have any real spokespersons for it.
And there's a very compelling case to be made for it.
I have a voice, I have the experience, and I can at least recount that for you and for
the rest of the American public that watches your show.
Lord knows all across America, people have made up their minds about one particular independent
council.
Like a shrill civic muzak, that story has become the background noise of our daily lives.
But beyond all the pundit babble and spin is that distant idea that inspired the creation
of the independent council law.
Our job is to gather facts and to evaluate those facts and to get at the truth.
And stands as a challenge to the four out there now.
I have a very strong belief in facts and in truth.
Behind each of these prosecutors is a story, and in a way it is all the same story, trying
to uncover the truth about powerful people who, being powerful, are best able to hide
the truth.
This is that story, told by one of the very few who could tell it, a sitting independent
council, almost certainly one of the last.
This story begins in Washington, D.C., where he was sent to investigate the trouble surrounding
the secretary of agriculture.
President Clinton is announcing the newest member of the cabinet he designed to look
like America.
Mississippi Congressman Mike Espy becomes the first black to serve as agriculture secretary.
But then, hints of scandal, press reports of rides on private jets, football tickets
and other entertainment given to the agriculture secretary by the largest chicken supplier
in the country, Tyson Foods.
And the papers even reported a charge that Espy killed new rules meant to safeguard the
nation's poultry supply.
Espy's rank as a member of the president's cabinet meant that credible allegations of
wrongdoing should trigger the independent council law.
Still, at the Justice Department, there was resistance.
Only a month after the naming of Ken Starr, there were already those sensing the potential
danger of uncontrolled investigations.
The decision fell to Bill Clinton's attorney general, Janet Reno.
She'd come into the job a firm believer in the law.
So she decided to ask for an independent council.
Prosperous Los Angeles attorney, Donald Smaltz, answered the call.
He would either clear Secretary Espy's name or indict him.
We had checked the newspaper reports and I felt that it wasn't going to be very much
there.
We would come in, examine the facts and come to the decision that it would be inappropriate
to indict anyone in the case, close up our investigation and go home.
I figured maybe six months, that's what I told my wife anyway initially.
It's three years, six months, 20 days and 41 hours, but who's counting?
If there were an independent council's playbook, chapter one would say, look for a pattern
of illegal behavior.
So Smaltz starts at the home of Tyson Foods in Fayetteville, Arkansas.
I wanted to go to Arkansas to see what we could find out about allegations against Secretary
Espy that linked Espy with Tyson's and talked about gifts that Tyson's had given Espy and
so that was a place to begin.
Tyson Foods dominates the chicken processing industry.
40 million chickens a week move through the Tyson line.
There are 21 plants in Arkansas alone.
The $6 billion dollar empire is the province of one man, Don Tyson, the son of a truck
driver who moves easily along that fast lane connecting agribusiness and high finance to
politics.
It figures an operation the size of Tyson's is going to be involved in lots of legal action.
Chapter two of the prosecutor's playbook, look for witnesses to possible corruption
and one of the best places is in old lawsuits.
So Smaltz started in Fayetteville where he met with the U.S. attorney.
Ask him, I said, would you please tell me what criminal cases you have pending against
Tyson Foods?
And he looked at me, he said, sure.
And I said, okay.
He said, none.
So I said, okay, what criminal investigations are pending?
He said, we don't have any criminal investigations.
I then moved to civil cases filed, which there were none, or civil investigations, there
were none.
Was that surprising to you?
Sure.
Surprised me.
Are you kidding?
I expected there to be a number of at least investigations.
It seemed astonishing that a company this size wouldn't have at least some legal complaints.
Plainly, there weren't any loose lips in Tyson country.
Smaltz figured with all that slicing and dicing at Tyson's, there had to be injuries and perhaps
some disgruntled employees who might have seen corruption on the inspection line.
Since you have online inspectors from USDA present in the plants, there might be people
who had been injured who believed they were unfairly compensated through workman's compensation
or whatever, who might be willing to tell us about what they knew about inspectors or
USDA operations in Tyson plants.
So we attempted to check workman's compensation records.
We were told that we had to award our subpoena to give us access to all the records, which
we did.
But Smaltz says he was ambushed.
As soon as he did subpoena all the records, as he was told he must do, the subpoena was
leaked to the local press.
He'd barely begun his investigation and the headlines attacked him for overreaching.
Tyson Foods outraged by Smaltz's ongoing witch hunt.
SB Probe becomes Tyson Witch Hunt.
The war on this independent council had begun.
It appears to us that he's on somewhat of a witch hunt.
Tyson Foods also opened a Washington front, unleashing lawyers with Beltway Savvy to go
after Smaltz.
We climbed all over him initially by just never missing an opportunity to berate him
and to tell him that he was way outside the playing field, he was like three dugouts over.
He was just out of control.
Out of control, a term that Smaltz would hear again.
He feared that the bad publicity, a vivid display of Tyson muscle, would further inhibit
potential witnesses, but prosecutors have ways of finding people who will talk.
The question was, who's going to know about what SB allegedly did or did not do with Tyson?
On those types of situations, you know, the best place of information, sources of information
are usually ex-wives, if they'll talk to you, or chauffeurs, ex-chauffeurs, or airplane pilots.
As it happens, Tyson had ten pilots, flying a small squadron of corporate jets.
When you're trying to sell someone millions of dollars a chicken at a time, you try to
impress them.
You'll send an airplane to their airport, and you pick them up and take them right to
our hangar, and they walk in and there's a big wet bar in there and couches, but you're
really impressing them.
Everything you do, you're doing, they spend the top dollar on it.
After 15 years, Joe Henrickson had become Tyson's number two pilot, but when he disputed
a management decision by the chief pilot, Henrickson says he was promptly fired.
We didn't find any ex-wives who would talk to us, and we didn't find any former chauffeurs,
but there was a former pilot who had had a public dispute that ripened into litigation
with Tyson, and he had sued Tyson.
That's right.
Sued?
On what ground?
Well, on wrongful termination.
But Henrickson began to worry that Tyson would not abide a legal assault from a former employee.
Our attorney at the time told us to come down to the office one day, and she had something
to talk to us about, so we took the kids with us and sat them down, and she said, no, the
kids need to go outside.
They don't need to listen to this.
So we sat down, and she sat down and told us that she'd been up, she was doing some
checking on me, and she'd been up to the corporate office, and she'd met with, I believe
she said four or five people.
She told her that they would swear in a court of law that I'd used the airplane, if I didn't
drop the lawsuit against them, they were going to say I'd used the airplane for smuggling
drugs with, and I couldn't believe this.
You get a reputation like that in the flying business, you're not going to be doing a
lot of flying for anybody reputable.
She said, you'll be homeless, you'll be penniless, you'll be broken, you won't have any money
left trying to defend yourself, Joe could do jail time, we're sitting here in chairs
looking at each other with our mouths open.
She also relayed to, not only would I not fly in Arkansas, I would not fly in the United
States ever again either.
We just said, we've got to go home, we've got to go home, and we went home, and we sat
on the bed, and we just looked at each other, this happens in the movies, this doesn't happen
to people, and we didn't know what to do, we did not know what to do.
So I called the FBI in Little Rock, and I made a report to an agent there.
That's right, I mean we didn't know what to do, I was afraid that I'd go to college one
morning and have drugs in my car, I didn't know what could happen to us, we were afraid.
The Henriksons waited to hear from the FBI, then they finally got a call.
We called on a Sunday evening, the next day he showed up and sat in the room while we
finished our interview with somebody else, and we got to Mr. Henrikson.
I cooled my heels in this little office for about 30 minutes, and finally they take me
in and introduce me to Donald Smaltz, and we sat down and they started asking me questions
about some fellow named Mike Espy, and had I ever seen him, I said I've never even heard
of him, let alone seen him, I have no idea who he is.
I asked him, was this about the threat I perceived from the attorney, and they didn't know anything
about that, and they said, no, we located you through lawsuits of people that filed
against Tyson over the last year or two, and we contacted you through your attorney, and
I said, okay, and then we proceeded to ask me questions about Mike Espy, and I said,
I don't know anything about Mike Espy.
We were interested if he had ever transported Secretary Espy around in a Tyson vehicle and
if so where, and it turned out that there was no such information that this individual
had.
There was a dry hole at that point, I didn't have anything to tell him.
What changed it?
Well, they asked me if I'd ever seen anything else that I thought was illegal or strange,
and the only thing I said was, you know, the times I'd seen when we'd taken envelopes
of money that were to be delivered to the governor, and that, I mean, Smaltz, I remember
because he was sitting across the table from me, turned away, and he turned around, it
was like his jaw almost fell open, and what?
He dropped a revelation on us that we didn't expect to hear, and we heard it so far near
the tail end of the interview that it was difficult to comprehend at the time.
It was basically one of these, you know, the ears went up.
This is the first we ever heard of that, and we were trying to figure out what to do with
it, and it was relevant to us from the standpoint that if Tyson, if this was a practice and
a pattern that Tyson had, we wanted to investigate to see whether or not it ever impacted or
reached any of the secretaries of agriculture, including Mr. Espy.
It had the smell of pay dirt.
If Hendrickson's story about delivering envelopes stuffed with $100 bills to Governor Clinton
were true, Smaltz could begin to show a pattern of influence buying by Tyson Foods.
We'd take them, hold them up into the direct light, and you could see the $100 bills in
there.
So you were personally handed an envelope, intended for the Governor?
Yes.
By a Tyson executive?
Yes.
Same case, plain envelope with cash inside?
That's correct.
And again, how did you know cash was in it?
Same way.
Look, you could see it through the light.
And what were you told?
I wasn't told anything.
It was just to be delivered to Little Rock for the Governor.
Smaltz believed Hendrickson and tried to corroborate his story with other pilots, but he didn't
get far.
The unwritten rules of company town life hold that you don't badmouth the man who writes
the checks.
Smaltz says he encountered a wall of silence within Air Tyson.
Arkansas is a relatively small community.
If an individual falls out in favor with the power structures that be, he or she can lose
and often loses their ability to work in the community, particularly at the job of their
choice.
A number of people.
Tyson's lawyer insists the absence of witnesses proves Hendrickson's story isn't true.
That accusation was easily disproved and should have been dismissed out of hand.
The guy never flew an airplane by himself.
There was always another pilot, okay.
There were plenty of people at the airfield on both ends.
There were just a bunch of people who would have been in a position to verify that accusation.
You could go out, you could find these people, you could talk to them.
You would know in days, if not hours, that this was preposterous, okay.
But that's a notion that doesn't come easily to Mr. Smaltz.
It's not a question you can answer just by picking up the phone in a two hour inquiry.
There's more to it than that.
The federal government often encounters efforts to influence the testimony of witnesses.
I've always felt that there was an attempt, sometimes not so subtly, but never through
violence to influence the testimony of some of the witnesses in our investigation.
Donald Smaltz had only been on the job 90 days, but he had already sent up an alert
to Don Tyson and now to the President of the United States.
If in the interest of pursuing ESPY, he indicted Tyson for giving money to Governor Clinton,
the President would be vulnerable too.
This episode with the pilots was the clearest evidence that his radar had kind of latched
on to under President Clinton.
We were not investigating the President, but if Tyson did give cash to public officials,
that would be relevant to our investigation.
Smaltz's investigation had made allies of Tyson and the President's defenders.
To remind me of Kurt Waldheim, he conveniently forgot he was a Nazi.
I'm sorry.
Are you suggesting that I'm Nazi?
No.
Allow me to finish.
Let me tell you, I take umbrage at being compared with anyone affiliated with the Nazi party,
sir.
I'll tell you one thing, for a man that has the power that he does, he might not be a
Nazi, but he's a pretty big liar.
I'll tell you that right now.
You want to talk about obstruction of justice?
He's a pretty big liar.
You want to talk about conspiracy theories?
He's a nickel-dime guy with a bunch of nickel-dime charges.
Needing cover, Smaltz asked Attorney General Janet Reno for permission to expand his investigation
to include the cash to Clinton allegations.
Under a strict reading of the law, he needed what is known as an expansion of his jurisdictional
charter.
So I sent a letter to the Attorney General seeking to expand my jurisdiction to specifically
include Tyson and Tyson-related activities, and she refused to either expand my jurisdiction
or refer the matters that we were looking at as a related matter.
That surprise you?
It did.
Yeah, it did.
Smaltz had assumed the Attorney General was on his side, but what he didn't know was
that there was a secret battle against the independent councils within the Justice Department
that was beginning to sway the Attorney General.
Her career lawyers were offended by the very premise of an independent council, that only
an outsider could avoid a conflict of interest.
And the politically oriented at Justice echoed White House worries that Smaltz seemed to
be on a path that pointed straight to the President.
And while Reno was considering Smaltz's request, Tyson's public relations and lobbying efforts
were going full bore against him.
In the end, the Attorney General denied Smaltz's request.
My sense was that Tyson was putting a lot of pressure on the Justice Department.
They had gotten their congressman, followed by the name of Dickey, to come to the Justice
Department and seek to curtail my investigation, but it had a very chilling effect on our ability
to bring people forward and get them to cooperate.
First of all, we had Dickey running around and saying, I'm crazy.
We had the Tyson publicity machine running full stroke saying that we're out of control.
Now we have the Attorney General allegedly saying, I can't investigate anything about
Tyson.
All right?
Now you add those things up and you try and bring witnesses forward.
It doesn't work.
I mean, you're seeing some of the same thing today when if you can demonize the Independent
Council, the reluctance of people to come forward and give evidence, as is their obligation
and duty, is going to be chilled.
It began to occur to Smaltz that the effort to kill his investigation had allies in the
Justice Department itself, but he was defiant.
In March of 1995, despite the Attorney General's orders, Smaltz issued a stream of subpoenas.
Every subject matter imaginable came up in the Tyson case, which have absolutely no relevance
to his jurisdiction.
Here's a subpoena that asks for X.
This has got nothing to do, here's the order setting up this Independent Council.
This subpoena has got nothing to do with the subject matter of this order.
You couldn't torture a connection out of this subpoena.
And then Smaltz waved his biggest red flag.
He called the pilot, Joe Henriksen, before the grand jury.
To his detractors, this was proof that Smaltz was bent on going after the President and
Tyson Foods.
Tom Green, Tyson's lawyer, believed that Smaltz had to be stopped.
He wrote a very tough letter to the Attorney General, saying that he was just out of control,
in essence, and outside his territorial jurisdiction.
And I cited a number of examples, of which the pilot was one of them.
And I asked her to exercise her authority to remove Mr. Smaltz, because he was far out
on the fringe, in my view.
Pardon?
You wanted him fired?
Removed.
At the Justice Department, there was sympathy for Tyson's argument.
Top justice lawyers were dismayed by Smaltz's open defiance of Reno's order not to pursue
the broader investigation of Tyson.
Smaltz says the Attorney General took the extraordinary step of insisting that he answer the charges
of Tyson's attorney.
I refuse to do that.
I don't send defense counsel letters, and I'm sure as hell not going to report to the
Attorney General about accusations made by defense counsel when I know that they are
without foundation in fact, and they are politically motivated, politically inspired in an effort
to kill the investigation.
I'm not going to play that ballgame.
So I refuse to do that.
I just became angry.
I felt that they can say what they're going to say, and there's no sense trying to respond.
I was personally determined that I was not going to let these people, no matter what
they said or what they did, run me out of the town.
A confrontation was building.
Justice insisting that Smaltz directly answer the Tyson letter, Smaltz refusing.
He said he would only discuss the Tyson allegations one-on-one with the Attorney General.
We arrived about ten minutes early, and I walked into the anti-room to the Attorney
General's office, and lo and behold, I saw a whole covey of people.
It was the Attorney General, the Deputy Attorney General, the Assistant Attorney General in
charge of the Criminal Division, the head of public integrity, and the deputy head of
public integrity.
I was trying to take a very accommodating tone, so after we sat down, I said, let me
walk you through how our investigation got to this point, this point, and this point.
Let me show you the steps and the evidence that we accumulated that caused us to walk
this far down this road, and then you decide.
You were a prosecutor, but she wouldn't look at it.
She wouldn't even touch it.
In fact, she caused it to be shoved back to me like this, both of them.
She didn't want to see them.
So it seemed apparent to me that we sure as hell were not there to talk about the facts,
and that's what I wanted to talk about with her.
I was angry.
I was angry that there could be that much concentration of power over this simple issue.
Smalls was ordered to turn over his files about the Tyson cash to Clinton story.
The Justice Department told Smalls it would continue the investigation itself.
Attorney General Reno declined our invitation to be interviewed.
So did every other top official in the Justice Department.
They offered instead Reno's former deputy, Paul Fishman.
I'm not going to characterize what the department did or didn't do.
I will say that I'm confident that the information was fully and fairly evaluated by the department.
If it did investigate, wouldn't the pilot, Joe Henriksen, have at some point been contacted
by some representative of the Department of Justice?
I can't comment.
Joe Henriksen has never been contacted by the Justice Department.
Do you know what justice has done with that piece of the investigation?
To my knowledge, they haven't done anything with it.
So regarding Henriksen?
That door was slams shut.
For the Tyson team, mission accomplished.
Did you go to war with him and did it work?
Well, sure you go to war with him.
I mean, here's a guy who wants to conduct an investigation, bring extraordinarily serious
charges against your client or clients, and essentially wants to see you punished.
And if you believe that all of that is unfair and unwarranted and unnecessary, yeah, you
go to war with him.
I called my wife at the end of the meeting when we got back here, and I told her.
She had always been concerned that I was in physical danger.
I never really thought that, but I said, you know, Lo, I said for the first time since
I've been back here, I'm afraid.
Afraid?
Not for me.
I was afraid that some organization could have that much influence with the United States
government to cause the attorney general, the deputy attorney general, the assistant
attorney general, the attorney general in charge of the criminal division, the assistant
attorney general, the head of public integrity and the deputy, six of them, to sit down at
a meeting, all we're doing is discussing my investigation.
I mean, there are much greater forces and needs for that talent at the time than my
little old investigation.
So at that moment, at that time, that particular battle, Don Tyson had won.
You could say that.
At the independent counsel's office in Alexandria, Virginia, Smalls regrouped.
Now he was at war with his targets and with the Justice Department.
If Janet Reno wouldn't let him go after Tyson Foods, the alleged giver of the gratuities,
Smalls would stick to Mike Espy, the alleged taker.
And that sent him to Espy's home state of Mississippi.
The Mississippi Delta, the alluvial spill from the Mississippi River has made it the
best farmland in America.
But even here, the farmers look for help and get plenty of it from Uncle Sam.
Among the most prized holdings in these parts are government subsidy payments.
And some farmers have become very shrewd at getting them.
Back in the 70s, we had a whole lot of big operations that were earning astronomical
payments, half a million dollars or whatever, you know, one individual.
There's a guy who owns a big mansion or whatever and got five Rolls Royces and three Mercedes
and he's earning half a million dollars of taxpayers' money.
So they passed it on and said no entity could earn more than $50,000 in a payment year.
And that's when the tricks began to be played.
The Department of Agriculture changes regulations so fast that even the local office that deals
with farmers, sometimes they don't even have a chance to read all of them.
And I had the God-given ability to read through this and deal with farmers saying if you go
this way in three years, this is what, you know, your operation is going to look like.
If you go this way, it will look like this.
Ron Blackley had a reputation as a fixer, guiding farmers through the maze of the agricultural
bureaucracy.
One of Blackley's clients was a cotton farmer named Keith Mitchell.
Mitchell wanted more than his $50,000 subsidy.
So he turned to Ron Blackley, who contrived a scheme.
Here's how it worked.
Mitchell divided his farm on paper into six separate operations.
He kept one for himself.
He owned two more, one with each of his sons, and that was three, his legal limit.
And then he created three more.
Each son owned one individually, and they owned one together.
So out of one family farm, Keith Mitchell created six.
In the farm subsidy game, this scheme is known as a Mississippi Christmas tree.
They were trying to earn five or six payments, maybe $350,000 or $400,000 a year.
It would qualify for if you had enough entities to earn it.
At the time, and what I had seen, and what the policy was for those payment limitations
at the time, Mr. Mitchell complied with the policy and met every determination necessary,
to my knowledge.
It was as bogus as any plan I've ever reviewed.
I mean, you know, it's just, it's obvious.
The state review board rejected Mitchell's plan.
Mitchell and his fixer, Ron Blackley, appealed.
And they was turned down again.
And they were given appeal rights to the Washington level.
That's automatic.
What happened?
It was turned down there.
That's it?
That's it.
You'd think that's the end of the line.
In fact, the correspondence that came back, we got a copy of it, you know, expended your
appeal rights.
Case is over.
And then one day, Arkansas's Bill Clinton was elected president.
And he appointed Mississippi Congressman Mike Espy as agriculture secretary.
And Mike Espy appointed his old friend and former aide, Ron Blackley, as his chief of
staff.
Near the top of the agenda at the new agriculture department was to tend to some business back
home.
I got my notice that I was no longer employed.
And sometime shortly after that, all of those cases that Mr. Blackley had sit in on with
the state office and were turned down and were turned down to Washington levels were
reopened and were overturned and approved.
As chief of staff, Blackley asked for yet another review of the Mitchell subsidy request.
As chief of staff, he got it.
This time, Keith Mitchell finally got the additional subsidies he'd been denied.
And he got something more.
Mr. Mitchell was appointed to the state committee.
He became a member of the state committee.
Mitchell actually was appointed to the committee that...
That's correct.
It's quite fantastic, almost.
And that's probably where the story would have ended.
And for Donald Smaltz, the story about Farmer Mitchell and his remarkable change of fortune
offered a chance to get information about Mike Espy.
We regarded Ron Blackley as a link in the chain.
I mean, he was the secretary's right-hand man.
He was the second most powerful person in USDA.
His official job description describes him as the alter ego of the secretary, had been
somebody who had been with the secretary since the secretary had been a congressman back
in Mississippi.
Here in Greenville, Smaltz turned his sights on Mitchell and his Mississippi Christmas
tree as a way of getting at Ron Blackley.
But Smaltz had the same problem he faced with Tyson, the Department of Justice.
It was the considered judgment of the prosecutors in the department who reviewed the evidence
that Mr. Smaltz had presented that the matter was not sufficiently related to what Mr. Smaltz
was already doing.
And the department believed that since it was outside the scope of Mr. Smaltz's jurisdiction,
that it was appropriately the department's role to investigate those matters.
That's just to speak for out of control.
In fact, the Justice Department had already considered the cases of Mitchell and Blackley
and had decided not to prosecute.
Justice had not pressed forward with the prosecution.
It had earlier declined to prosecute.
The Justice Department doesn't want to go forward.
They don't want you two either.
That's right.
We had the indication that if we didn't go forward, that they would.
We thought it was important that this avenue be explored because it seemed to us to have
direct impact on our investigation of the secretary.
So we decided to file an application with the special division.
The special division.
Three federal judges that oversee the entire independent counsel process.
Smaltz tried a bold gambit.
Go to the court directly.
Bypass justice.
You could go either way.
You could either go to justice and they could agree to refer to you as a related matter
or you could go to the court directly.
In a rare head-to-head legal battle with an independent counsel, the Justice Department
tried to stop Smaltz.
The department believes in order for the independent counsel act to be constitutional, the gatekeeper
for an independent counsel's jurisdiction must be the attorney general of the United
States.
And the department took the position with respect to Mr. Smaltz's application that
even though the independent counsel statute says that Mr. Smaltz can go to the court to
get this jurisdiction, to get something declared related, if the attorney general doesn't agree,
then you have violated the principle of separation of powers because it is the attorney general
whose power is being essentially given up to the independent counsel.
You know, at the time the statute was passed, in 1994, there had to be testimony in support
of it.
And the year before, in March of 1993, the attorney general went up in the hill and she
supported reenactment of the statute.
There is an inherent conflict.
And she did so vigorously.
Executive branch officials are to be investigated by the department and the attorney general.
The attorney general serves at the pleasure of the president.
It is absolutely essential for the public to have confidence in the system.
And you cannot do that when there is conflict or an appearance of conflict in the person
who is, in effect, the chief prosecutor.
There is an inherent conflict here.
And I think that that's why this act is so important.
At the time it was reenacted, the president of the United States, William Jefferson Clinton,
called it the cornerstone for the foundation of trust between the citizen and the government.
And it is, I agree with those statements.
But the problem is, the attorney general doesn't like the way it's, and the administration
doesn't like the way it's working now.
The federal judges ruled in Smulse's favor.
The Justice Department's interference had caused a nine-month delay.
Now, armed with a precedent-setting decision, Smulse turned again to Mississippi, the next
chapter of the prosecutor's playbook.
To get the big guy, you put the squeeze on the little guy.
When the division said it was a related matter, it not only extended to the Blackley matter,
it also extended to the Mitchell matter.
My biggest dismay with the whole ordeal is that this investigation, which is supposed
to be of one person, Mike Espy, now somehow has turned itself and expanded itself to include
a small farmer in Mississippi who's probably been to Washington, D.C. maybe twice in his
life before this happened.
And how that is related to the Espy investigation will always be a mystery to me.
Smulse shifted into full prosecutor mode.
The FBI paid a visit to Farmer Mitchell.
He got a phone call, said, Mr. Mitchell, we'd like to come to your house and talk to you
about Mike Espy.
He had no reason not to talk to him, and he welcomed him and do his own freely.
At some point, my understanding is that that conversation went from Mike Espy, and at some
point during their questioning, turned to Keith Mitchell.
At the same time, Mr. Mitchell was being interviewed at his home by the two agents.
His son, Brooke Keith Mitchell, Jr., was approached by federal agents in Jackson.
It scared the hell out of him, I mean, without that, that should go without saying, and he
called his father and called him at home, and actually the agents were still there in
his home when he called, told him there's two agents here wanting to talk to me, you
know, what's this about, basically, and then he became extremely distraught, emotionally
upset.
I think he even broke down in tears a number of times during that visit.
He prosecuted Mitchell because Mitchell used his family, because his family participated
willingly, because his family and their business profited, I mean, they stole almost three
quarters of a million dollars, Mitchell was linked to Blackley, Blackley was joined at
the hip with Espy, and Mitchell got prosecuted.
I don't think the significance of his wrongdoing in any way could justify the pain that he's
been forced to endure.
The question should be, did his client violate the law?
Did his client really rip off the government?
Was the farm plan fraudulent?
The answer to those questions is yes, because Mitchell pleaded guilty to that, 5M pleaded
guilty to the charges, okay, so they've admitted to ripping off the government for three quarters
of a million dollars, why should they expect not to be prosecuted?
Smaltz got a guilty plea from Mitchell, now he could use it like a stick against Blackley.
I always felt that I would be indicted just to squeeze me to come up with a lie on Espy.
And did they squeeze you?
Yeah, they squeezed me.
My son was taken before the grand jury twice, was told that he was subject to perjury, you
know, I sit here today and not knowing whether they're going to file an indictment on him
on perjury or not, but they would use that to pressure me consistently to cooperate,
and for them, cooperate is black.
Espy's charge that we somehow wanted him to lie is absolutely outrageous, we prosecute
people for lying, we're not in the business of unlawfully convicting people, and we sure
as hell aren't in the business of manufacturing false testimony, we follow the facts wherever
they take us.
Why was Don Smaltz working so hard to get Ron Blackley?
Well, Espy and Blackley took over at agriculture at a crucial moment for Tyson Foods, the department
had been preparing tough new regulations for handling poultry.
The planned regulations would cost Tyson Foods nearly 40 million dollars a year to implement.
Then something happened.
One day, Tyson's lobbyist paid a visit to Mike Espy.
The next day, agriculture staffers say they were told by Ron Blackley to shelve the proposed
new poultry regulations.
The message was very clear, that we were to stop working on development of any new poultry
regulations.
Horn said the order came directly from Espy's then chief of staff.
Did you think he was talking for the secretary?
Oh yes, absolutely.
Was there a connection between Espy's meeting with Tyson's envoy and the killing of the
new regulations?
In Smaltz's view, one man might know, and that's why Don Smaltz needed Ron Blackley
to talk.
There was an allegation that is untrue.
After it was known to me who had made the allegation, my attorney wrote a letter to
this person, said, if you make this statement again, expect us to file a libel suit against
you.
Smaltz had deep doubts about Blackley's denial, but without him, Smaltz would have trouble
making the big case on poultry regulations.
So Smaltz turned to the next chapter of the prosecutor's playbook, make your case on
charges that will stick, and hope that the prospect of prison will loosen mute tongues.
It's known as flipping the witness.
And so Smaltz convicted Blackley of making false statements.
If you'd had the goods, Ron Blackley said you would have prosecuted on that.
You plainly didn't have the goods, so you'd get him on some technicality.
He didn't even know about false statements.
Lying to the government on three separate occasions to three different entities is hardly
a technicality.
It's a very serious offense.
And lying by government officials is doubly serious.
These are people who are given the public trust.
These are people who are given millions of dollars of programs to administer.
These are people who are supposed to be absolutely beyond reproach.
For Donald Smaltz, it is a reckoning day.
Mike Espy has just been indicted.
This morning, a District of Columbia grand jury returned a 39-count indictment against
former Secretary of Agriculture Michael Alfonso Espy.
Smaltz indicted Espy on the very charges he was sent out to investigate nearly four years
ago, accepting gifts.
Don Tyson Foods finally admitted giving gifts.
Don Tyson admitted unequivocally that his company, during his tenure, committed federal
felonies.
Okay?
And he admitted that they gave at least that $12,000.
And it's not the amount of money, it's the corruption in the system.
The fact that it was given in express violation of the law with the intent to curry favor
and favored treatment, that is the vice.
Tyson Foods ultimately pled guilty to one count of making a gratuity because there was
no prospect that this investigation was going to end anytime soon.
And we should not lose sight of the fact that Tyson Foods is a major, major corporation.
Its business is to conduct business.
And I think management felt very strongly that if it could get the proper concessions
in return for a guilty plea, they'd be willing to do it.
And so the company agreed to enter a plea, as I said, to one count of giving a gratuity.
But the company received some substantial concessions in return.
Such as?
All of these various avenues that the smold still had open and that were just hanging
out there in which he or any of his colleagues could elect to pursue for the next four years
were wrapped up, closed down, terminated without action, ended over with the end, final act.
The final act for Donald Smaltz and Mike Espy will play out in a Washington courtroom.
Smaltz is still hoping that Ron Blackley, facing 27 months in federal prison, will by
that time decide to become a witness for the prosecution.
Donald Smaltz's culminating act as an independent counsel will be to prosecute Mike Espy for
accepting a few football tickets and some airplane rides and, of course, making false
statements.
Smaltz sees no diminishment in that.
The gratuity statute and its vigorous enforcement is something that is very fundamental to the
integrity of the government process.
I mean, to the extent that the public perceives that these huge agribusinesses or huge corporations
can dole out gifts to the regulators and the legislators, with impunity, they're going
to lack any confidence in the government process and it's going to be after a while the public
will perceive that government is at for sale to the highest giver.
There was a philosophical difference here about the kinds of contact that businessmen
or Americans can have with, you know, elected officials.
You can't have a country where, you know, the public figures and the public office holders
are just simply walled off from society.
I mean, that makes no sense at all.
I mean, if someone calls you up and says, can I go to the ball game, and you go to the
ball game with a bunch of other people and you don't discuss business, you know, and
the biggest thing that happens is the guy gets a hot dog with some mustard on it and
then you all go home.
If you feel that has to be punished, ultimately, do you have to bring an independent counsel
in with a baseball bat and crank up the criminal law and, you know, hang the guy?
I mean, really, that's what we're talking about.
Donald Smaltz's reading of his commission allows for no wiggle room.
He sees his job clearly.
Seek the truth, follow the law, prosecute the guilty, regardless of the consequences.
But our current political culture is not exactly a bull market for rigid insistence on moral
absolutes.
Donald Smaltz may be a man out of his time, embodying an institution that is out of its
time.
It's true, the independent counsel statute will probably not be reenacted, and that's
unfortunate for the republic, because who now will investigate the allegations of public
corruption?
And if not the independent counsel, then who, I ask you, then who?
Janet Reno once worried about the inherent conflict of the Justice Department investigating
her fellow cabinet members, or even her boss, the president, seven times in her tenure.
Most recently, last week, the independent counsel law resolved that conflict by allowing
her to seek the appointment of an outside prosecutor.
In one notable exception, the presidential campaign finance scandal, she has resisted
the call for an independent counsel, leaving the matter in the hands of the Department
of Justice.
That investigation has lurched along for nearly 18 months, and there is doubt as to whether
exoneration from such an in-house inquiry would ever quite ring true.
If you don't have an independent counsel, what's the alternative?
There have been a number of cases that have shown that if the attorney general did in
fact or assigned somebody to do it out of justice and cleared the president, practically
every newspaper in the country would have an editorial about a whitewash or cover-up.
No one would accept it.
There would be screeching all over this country about cover-up and whitewash.
And so the value of the independent counsel statute, with all its flaws, no statute is
perfect.
It's a well-made piece of law, but with all its flaws, is the only way and the only alternative
when serious charges are brought against the president or a high executive official for
it to be investigated and still get the confidence of the public.
But public confidence is precisely what the office of the independent counsel is desperately
lacking just now.
After existing more or less unnoticed for two decades, the office has now been exposed
to public view in a manner contrived to feature its flaws.
Such practices as squeezing the witness by indicting a son or a wife makes the independent
counsel seem just another combatant in the unending war that has become the Washington
norm.
And if the office is undone next year, it may not be so much the measure of a failed
idea, but a judgment of our uncivil times.
Examine more of this report on Frontline Online.
You'll find more of the interviews with key figures, a look at the prosecutorial decisions
of the independent counsels, links to important writings and documents, experts' arguments
pro and con on the value of the institution at Frontline Online at www.pbs.org.
Next time on Frontline, he was a poet, a family man, a doctor.
Then Radovan Karacic became leader of the Bosnian Serbs.
Now he stands accused as the world's most notorious war criminal.
So why hasn't he been brought to justice?
Watch The World's Most Wanted Man next time on Frontline.
our program on mandatory sentencing for marijuana offenses, an expert on the infrared
photography used by law enforcement sent us a video letter.
Carlos Gigliotti demonstrated how, he alleges, authorities adjust their cameras, in effect
fabricating evidence against suspected marijuana growers.
Here's another comment about the program, and here's a program update.
On April 29th, the day after this program's broadcast, Doug Keenan, who in the program
had admitted growing marijuana for his own medical use, was arrested.
He was charged with misdemeanor possession and a felony, maintaining a public nuisance.
Indiana's Hamilton County prosecutor, Jeffrey Weymuller, said, although there may be some
people who would like to see marijuana legalized, until that happens, it's still illegal.
Let us know what you thought about tonight's program.
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