Grin and Barrett: The Cisneros independent counsel is still on the case!

Remember Henry Cisneros? Of course; he was the once-rising Democratic star who became Bill Clinton's first secretary of housing and urban development. Here's a tougher one: Remember Linda Medlar? In case you've forgotten, she was Cisneros's mistress -- the woman at the center of the scandal that brought him down.

Now the bonus question. Remember David Barrett? Unless you follow such things very, very closely, you probably won't be able to recall that he was the independent counsel appointed to investigate the Cisneros case. Barrett was sworn in on May 24, 1995, to investigate allegations that Cisneros lied to the FBI about payments he had made to Medlar. The Barrett investigation reached its peak over four years later, on September 7, 1999, when Cisneros pled guilty to a misdemeanor and agreed to pay a $10,000 fine.

What few people realize is that, nearly four years after achieving the main objective of his investigation, Barrett is still in business today. Now writing his final report, Barrett was still working on live, investigative matters until only a few months ago. His report will likely be finished by the end of the year, a testament either to the corruption of the Clinton administration or to the lunacy of the independent-counsel law. Or, perhaps, both.

The only notice the public has had that Barrett is still going has been a series of audits by the General Accounting Office. These audits are required by the independent-counsel statute (which has, of course, expired, though existing investigations like Barrett's were allowed to continue). The most recent audit, covering the six-month period that ended on September 30, 2002, showed that Barrett's office spent $1,019,438 during those months -- $502,696 for salaries and benefits, $266,450 for rent and utilities, $146,695 for investigators and expert consultants, $82,970 for "administrative services" (a fee the independent counsel pays to the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts), $18,643 for travel, and $1,984 for office supplies.

In papers filed at the time with the three-judge panel that oversees his office, Barrett estimated that he would spend another $1 million in the next six months, the period ending on March 31 of this year. That means his investigation is spending money at a rate of $2 million per year; the total cost for his eight years of work is estimated at $19 million.

All of which inevitably raises the question of whether Barrett's work is worth the expense. What is he investigating? And why has he done it for so many years?

The answers are cloaked in prosecutorial secrecy. But we know that Barrett, originally assigned to examine the Cisneros/Medlar payoffs, twice received permission from the panel to expand his investigation. By March 1997, Barrett was conducting -- in the words of one of the judges overseeing independent counsels -- "an apparently wide-ranging probe of government officials who might, in [Barrett's] view, have sought to shield Mr. Cisneros."