Prosecutor Who Raised Questions About Waco Cover-Up Removed

By Michelle Mittelstadt
September 14, 1999

Associated Press

WASHINGTON--The federal prosecutor who raised questions about a possible Justice Department cover-up in the Waco standoff was abruptly removed from the case along with his boss, according to a court filing made public Tuesday.

Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder recused U.S. Attorney James W. Blagg in San Antonio and assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Johnston in Waco, Texas, from any further dealings in criminal or civil proceedings related to the siege.

Holder appointed the U.S. attorney in a neighboring district as a "special attorney to the U.S. attorney general."

The court filing in Waco provides no explanation for the decision to recuse the U.S. attorneys' office for the Western District of Texas, to which Blagg and Johnston are assigned, but said the action took effect last Friday.

Meanwhile on Capitol Hill, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott told reporters Tuesday that the Senate investigation should go beyond Waco to the Justice Department's forthrightness on other matters, such as allegations of campaign finance violations by the 1996 Clinton campaign.

"I think it's going to have to be broader than just Waco itself," said Lott, R-Miss. "I think we have a bigger focus here. ... There are a number of investigations that they are basically either not doing or they have stiffed us on. So we need to find out what's going on."

The recusal of the U.S. attorney's office isn't the first in the Waco case. Attorney General Janet Reno last week recused herself, saying she will be a witness in the independent inquiry she ordered into the fiery end of the 1993 siege.

Johnston, in a letter made public Monday, wrote Reno recently warning that aides within her own department were misleading her about federal agents' roles.

"I have formed the belief that facts may have been kept from you and quite possibly are being kept from you even now by components of the department," Johnston wrote in an Aug. 30 letter.

Johnston also has been at odds with Blagg, his superior, and other Justice officials over the investigation of the government's actions during the standoff with the Davidians at their compound outside Waco. It was Johnston who pressed Justice Department officials to allow independent filmmakers to review evidence sifted from the charred ruins of the Davidians' compound--evidence that led to the FBI's recent admission that potentially incendiary tear gas canisters were fired on April 19, 1993.

That disclosure, after six years of denials, sparked a furor on Capitol Hill and has led to congressional inquiries and Reno's appointment of an independent investigator.

Blagg, Johnston and the Justice Department provided no immediate comment.

The action came a day after a key House Democrat released evidence provided four years ago to Congress showing that the Justice Department did notify lawmakers about the FBI's use of potentially incendiary tear gas.

That evidence, Rep. Henry Waxman said Monday, was overlooked by Rep. Dan Burton, the House Republican who is leading a new inquiry into the government's deadly standoff with the Branch Davidians--and who has accused Reno and the Justice Department of possibly concealing the truth from Congress and the public.

"There is no indication that Chairman Burton or his staff thought to review these documents before accusing the attorney general of a cover-up," Waxman, D-Calif., wrote in a letter to the special counsel investigating the recently revived Waco controversy.

"Contrary to the allegations of cover-up, substantial evidence of the use of military tear gas rounds was, in fact, provided to Congress in 1995," said Waxman, who is top Democrat on the House Government Reform Committee.

Burton, who chairs the committee, said the Justice Department buried the panel in an avalanche of documents shortly before the 1995 hearings began, and congressional investigators depended on a Justice summary to guide them.

"The Justice Department dumped 100,000 documents on the committee three days before the hearings, knowing that they couldn't possibly go through them," the Indiana Republican said in an interview. Although Burton was on the Government Reform Committee in 1995, he was not on the subcommittee that led the investigation.

Burton also noted that the Justice Department was forced to acknowledge last week that it failed in 1995 to give Congress the key page from a 1993 FBI lab report mentioning the use of military tear gas. The final page of that 49-page report, with the key tear gas mention, was missing, he noted.

"I don't think that's a coincidence," he said.

Almost six out of 10 Americans believe the FBI has been intentionally trying to cover up its actions at Waco, an ABC News poll released Monday indicated. Only one out of five polled said they thought Reno should resign, based on what they now know. The poll of 1,008 adults was taken Sept. 8-12 and has an error margin of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

The records Waxman cited, discovered among more than 40 boxes of material compiled during the earlier House hearings, include an FBI pilot's 1993 statement recalling a radio transmission in which agents had a conversation "relative to the utilization of some sort of military round ... on a concrete bunker." And post-raid interview summaries include an unnamed FBI agent's explanation that smoke captured on film "came from (an) attempt to penetrate bunker with one military and two (non-incendiary) rounds."