Beverley Lumpkin: Halls of Justice

W A S H I N G T O N, July 28 --

PR NEEDS A LITTLE BRUSH-UP

The San Francisco Daily Journal, has discovered that a number of federal prosecutors are refusing to attend training sessions at Justice’s National Advocacy Center in South Carolina, in sympathy with the NAACP’s boycott of that state for continuing to fly the Confederate battle flag on state capitol grounds.

Enterprising reporter David Houston called several U.S. attorney’s offices around the country and discovered that most were leaving the decision whether to travel to South Carolina for training up to prosecutors’ individual consciences.

But the spokeswoman for the office in Jackson, Miss., was quoted as responding: “We don’t have many black [assistant U.S. attorneys] and the white ones probably just don’t care.”

CLINTON AND RENO ON WACO REGRETS

In his own April interview with campaign finance prosecutors, sneakily released by the White House the same night the Mideast talks collapsed and George W. Bush’s V.P. choice of Dick Cheney became known, President Clinton in passing seemed critical — in a way he never had before — of Justice’s handling of the Waco catastrophe.

The president explained he didn’t remember a reported meeting with Indonesian businessman James Riady on April 19, 1993, because he was “totally preoccupied” with Waco, adding: “And I gave in to the people in the Justice Department who were pleading to go in early, and I felt personally responsible for what had happened, and I still do. I made a terrible mistake.”

Reno seemed unperturbed by his remarks, however: “I think everybody who has been touched by Waco would like to be able to undo it. But the real issue is we don’t know what he [David Koresh] would have done on his own in the long run. And so I think all of us, the president, I am sure, and others, think, ‘What could we have done to have prevented the tragedy?’”