Blackley also says, in response to what you just said, "but for anybody to say that I misused the public's trust is absolutely wrong and they have had nobody, nobody in the original allegations, go on the stand and say, well, we know he did or we think he did or whatever."

So far as Mr. Blackley's claim, as I understand it from you, that he didn't abuse the public trust, it seems to me there was ample evidence in the trial that we just concluded that in connection with some of the money that he received from these entities that he had previously represented and who USDA was regulating, he actually interfered with the decision making process and contacted the officials in an effort to get them to change their decision. That to me is a very very serious criminal act and it deserves swift and complete prosecution....

Blackley's trivialization of his conduct fails really to recognize how serious it is. He wouldn't have gotten 27 months in prison unless the court believed that those offenses and his lies were significant and deserved that kind of a sentence. So apparently Mr. Blackley is still in self-denial.

One of the commonly heard criticisms of all independent counsels, at least these days, is of their prosecutorial tactics, the excessive zeal.... One case in particular I'm thinking of is the case of the Mitchells in Mississippi. Family farmers, 5M farms. You all go down to Mississippi. This farmer, Keith Mitchell, works the farm, the family place, with his two sons, and [you], it seems on the surface anyway, just absolutely put the squeeze on him.... You have one agent in the father's parlor and another in the son's living room in Jackson, Mississippi. Bringing the old man to tears until finally he reaches the point where he says, "I give up. I'll plead guilty." That does seem, to the layman's eye, to be a harsh approach, to put it mildly; especially given the fact that the United States Department of Justice has decided not to pursue that case at all.

Well, I don't think it was harsh.... But let me tell you why Mr. Mitchell was of interest to us. Mitchell was intimately involved with Blackley. He was also involved with Secretary Espy. We had evidence that placed Mitchell, Espy and others at a particular meeting in which certain regulations were discussed, and how [these regulations] might be changed or how they might be avoided, to give some of these farmers benefits that they were not otherwise entitled to.

It turned out that Mitchell was, as a result of a business plan that was prepared by Blackley [which] was fraudulent in a variety of particulars, obtaining seven hundred thousand dollars in subsidies that he was not entitled to. There's a term called a "Mississippi Christmas tree," and it has to do with a scheme that apparently was founded somewhere in the Mississippi Delta whereby agri-businesses, in an effort to expand the number of subsidies that they would be entitled to, break themselves down into very small separate units and claim each unit as a separate entity from the others.

So instead of being eligible for one subsidy, they can break themselves down into five components and claim that they're eligible for five subsidies. And that runs into a lot of money.

And our sense was that the application forms prepared and submitted by Mitchell were knowingly false. Blackley was a part of that. And Espy was also involved with Mitchell. So in an effort to work our way up the chain, a time honored prosecutorial tactic, we began to look to see whether or not we believe criminal prosecution was appropriate against both Blackley and 5M Farming and Keith Mitchell, Sr., and anyone else who made fraudulent representations and, as a result of those representations, received government funds they were not otherwise entitled to.

The Mississippi Christmas tree was something that had plagued the Department of Agriculture for years. In fact, about four or five years earlier, "60-Minutes" did an expose on the Mississippi Christmas tree. And it showed how farmhands, who were working for this huge farming industry, were given forms to sign that suggested that they were operating a series of sub-units; and therefore, they were qualifying for subsidies that they were not otherwise entitled to. This is what you call a program fraud, because it was a type of fraud that was designed to illegally extract money from these program subsidies that the U.S.D.A. had been making available for years.

The problem is: nobody prosecuted it. And I'm not sure why U.S. attorneys didn't prosecute it. But because these matters deserve prosecution, I talked to agents from the Inspector General's office of the U.S.D.A., and they felt very strongly that these matters should be prosecuted. So we did have simultaneous interviews of Mitchell and his son, and some other people; because in my judgment that was the only way to ensure they were going to get at least that individual's story or version of events, unencumbered by what anybody else thought the situation was. So you would sometimes interview people simultaneously. Or sometimes you'd interview four people at once. If they're dispersed and you've got the agent power, you can do that.

In the case of the Mitchells, was it an effective approach?

It was, because neither could tell the same story.... The result was: we ultimately indicted 5M Farming, Keith Mitchell and Keith Mitchell, Jr., one of the sons. And 5M Farming and Keith Mitchell, Sr. pleaded guilty.

And Keith Mitchell, Jr., his prosecution was diverted because he went into a program for a year; and as a result of successfully completing that program, the prosecution was dismissed.

Ron Blackley, of course, contends that what you were doing there with the Mitchells -- going after the father and the son -- was basically getting in his, Ron Blackley's, face. Dangling these indictments of the Mitchells, father and son, in the face of Ron Blackley, in the hope of getting him, as he would put it, to cop to what you wanted him to say. To lie...

We never asked, we never desired, we never hinted, we never wanted anyone to do anything other than tell the truth. We prosecute people for lying. We don't prosecute them for telling the truth. And we don't ask them to lie.... That's a false accusation, I can tell you that.

I mean, we prosecuted Mitchell because Mitchell [and] his family... stole almost three-quarters of a million dollars. Mitchell refused to cooperate when we sought his assistance early on. Mitchell and his family were linked to Blackley. And Blackley was joined at the hip with Espy. And Mitchell got prosecuted. Even if he, Mitchell, hadn't been linked with Blackley and linked with Espy, Mitchell still deserved to be prosecuted. We wouldn't have brought that prosecution, but he still deserved [it]. I mean, if people think they can rip off this government for three-quarters of a million dollars, and they're entitled to get away with it, then we need to seriously re-examine our values.

Our job is to obtain the facts and follow where they lead. 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. But we want, and we're entitled to as a government law enforcement agency, true and correct answers to questions that we ask. And if we don't get them, and people lie to us, they can expect, and should expect, to be prosecuted. Blackley's charge that we somehow wanted him to lie, is absolutely outrageous.

In the case, though, of Mitchell, this was a case of a sort that the federal government had not prosecuted. And his lawyer says that his client would never have been prosecuted had there not been a special prosecutor.

I don't think the question is: His client would never have been prosecuted but for the special prosecutors. I think 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. They've admitted to ripping off the government for three-quarters of a million dollars. Why should they expect not to be prosecuted?

But is there not a sort of unfair randomness to the very fact of an independent counsel? That if you happen to be doing something that you could have gotten away with had you not happened to land in the spotlight of an independent counsel?

Is it unfairness? I don't perceive any unfairness in that. I mean, if you violate the law, and it's a significant violation, you should expect to be prosecuted....

You end up indicting and getting a plea conviction on the Mitchell piece of it, indicted the son subsequently.... There are those who would say, "You know, this is an unfair fight. The full force of an independent counsel representing the United States government, unlimited resources, going after what amount to" - the words that have been used are - "nickel and dime, you know, picky and small-time charges, against some farmer who really isn't, you know, the full profile of a crook." Your response to that would be?

Well, in the case of Mr. Mitchell and Five-M Farming, we're talking about $700,000 worth of subsidies from USDA, that he was claiming illegally. I don't call that an unfair fight. That's a program fraud case. And we brought that case because of Mitchell's involvement with Blackley and Mitchell's involvement with Secretary Espy. There is no evidence that Secretary Espy had anything to do with that $700,000 or the applications, but there is certainly evidence that Blackley did.... And we thought it was important, since we had the evidence and since Mitchell appeared to be key in some allegations involving other people under investigation, that he be prosecuted. It was appropriate that he was. And he was prosecuted and he's guilty of that offense.

There's a feeling I have, as I've listened to your story and as I've talked to them, of this division in the society between the moral absolutists and the moral relativists... And I can listen to a Tom Green justify $12,000 as small potatoes compared to Watergate or small potatoes compared to almost any crime. That's almost what you hear about the President and Monica Lewinsky, "Come on. What kind of behavior is this? How does it justify Don Smaltz, three years, all this money? We are more grown up than that now. We don't need moral absolutists showing us the way of seeking truth..." What do you say?

Now, more than ever, there's a need for the search for truth. Now, more than ever, we need some moral sense about our government. You can't expect this country to function and you can't expect a democracy to succeed unless the people have confidence in their leaders their government. And when the leaders in government don't have the moral fiber to give the people confidence, then you're headed down the road, in my judgment, towards anarchy because disrespect for the law by those in power breeds disrespect for the law in those who are not in power.

I'm very bothered by this notion that you see that it's okay to lie, that it's okay to ask other people to lie, that there's some sort of shades of defense between asking a witness to lie about testimony they're going to give in a sexual harassment case or asking them to lie about testimony they're going to give in a bank robbery case. I don't see any difference at all....

But there's a few things that you need to remember and need to know, if you don't know them already. First of all, it was at the insistence of the government - that's us - that we required Don Tyson to come into court and personally enter the plea of guilty. Secondly, he 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 dollars, and here's where I think that we're beginning to go awry. It's not the amount of money, it's the corruption or the potential for corruption in the system. Just imagine. What if some time in 1995 there had been an E. coli outbreak, but it had been not from whatever the source of it was in 1994, but it had been from a plant that Tyson owned. What do you think the mood of the country would have been, all right? I mean, it's not the amount of dollars here, it's 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.

How did [the Blackley] case turn out?

That case turned out with Blackley being convicted of lying, three counts, and being sentenced to prison for 27 months.

And the Tyson piece of it?

We pursued a portion of the Tyson matter. And, ultimately, Tyson pleaded guilty to a gratuities charge of giving the secretary $12,000 worth of gratuities on account of official acts to be performed by Secretary Espy, and paid a $6 million total fine and penalties. A $4 million fine and $2 million costs of investigation. And also Tyson is on probation for four years and has to revamp its compliance program and is under the joint supervision of the USDA and a probation officer of the US Court here in Washington, DC.

And so you got not only indictments, but convictions.... Your sense, given all the impediments along the way, is, what? Vindication? Triumph?

Well, I hesitate to use the word "vindication" or even "triumph". What we've done is we proved the statute can work, we've done our job, we've exposed corruption, we called an individual, in the instance of Blackley, a corporation, in the instance of Tyson's, we called them to account, and we move on. I'm not the archangel Gabriel. I'm not here to work retribution on everyone. I've done that piece and we move on to another piece. The sooner I'm done, the sooner I can go home....

And the importance of Blackley's conviction and of the Tyson guilty plea?

I think that they're very important in terms of sending a message. First of all, let me deal with Blackley. Blackley occupied a very high position. chief of staff to a Cabinet-ranking officer is a very significant position. And the obligation to make truthful disclosures is a fundamental one. No public citizen who answers the call to government service should think otherwise. And when that occurs, when they're called to government service, and they're not truthful, or they don't obey the rules that say they can't take money from outside sources, then you have a very, very bad situation. And I think when you have people like Blackley, who are convicted from time to time, it's a wake-up call to other people similarly situated.

Not only that, for the little guy down who occupies a very, very low position, those individuals are very often sought out, because they're relatively easy targets, they don't have anybody to speak for them, they can't hire the best lawyers, and there's no voice for those people. Yet they're often the ones who are prosecuted first and sometimes the only one. My sense is, if you're going to really make a statement, you have to reach up to the higher levels.

Tyson's attorney said, "We went to war with Smaltz. We won, but the war had no end in sight, so we negotiated a settlement. It was no big deal to plead guilty. $6 million is nothing to us..." What do you think?

Well, that's certainly one take on it, but to me, and I think to the majority of Americans, for a defendant that started off by saying, "We didn't do anything wrong. All we gave him is a couple football tickets," it turns out all they gave him was not a couple football tickets. This was not a question just about hospitality, this was about $12,000 of gifts given because of official acts to the senior executive responsible for regulating their industry in the federal government, the Secretary of Agriculture.

Tyson's knew it was wrong. Six million dollars is a lot of money to me, and if they want to litigate it all over again, we'll revoke the plea agreement, and maybe we should start all over again....

They say they really did win, they beat the hell out of you in the press, in the courts, at the Justice Department, "Don Smaltz is a beaten man now, three years later."

Well, that's the old story. You can say anything you wish. But I considered the Tyson victory a significant victory. I mean, we vindicated our charter. We were set out to investigate agribusinesses, to see whether they gave gifts to the Secretary or not, and if so, with what intent. We did that. We did that with Tyson's and it's resolved....

Mr. Smaltz.. why you have chosen to speak out now.

There are a couple of reasons. The first is that the only sense that the public has of the independent counsel statutes is what they get from the talking heads or commentators, in dribbles and drabs and snatches of info here, info there. A lot of that information is just plain wrong. Secondly, the institution of independent counsel, I think, is in severe jeopardy. It is under attack. It is under attack from a very powerful source, the most powerful source in the world, in my judgment, and that is the Chief Executive of the United States. The President has chosen to publicly attack, condemn, criticize or ridicule, trivilize the independent counsel statute.

That is very unfortunate. That statute is one of the laws of our country that [acts as] a mechanism for enforcing the criminal law. As Chief Executive of this nation, the President is sworn to uphold that law and it is shocking that he now has chosen the avenue of publicly attacking it....

There are condemnations from the Attorney General that we have seen. The Attorney General in fact has authorized her surrogates to publicly condemn the independent counsel as incompetent, as a bunch of raving lunatics, related somehow with very partisan right wing politics, which is very untrue. And it is unfair. The statute doesn't seem to have any real spokespersons for it and there is a very compelling case to be made for it. I don't think I am the person to make that case, but certainly I am a voice, 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.

This assault of which you speak and which sometimes seems omnipresent, why do we, the political culture... countenance this attack on the independent counsel from the White House and from the top echelons of power?

I don't know the answer to that question. I wish I did. But I think there are a couple of factors going now that didn't exist back when the independent counsel statute was born, which was right after Watergate.... Back in the time the statute was born, when Nixon was in office and his alleged crimes were being contemplated or discussed publicly, there were a lot of things that galvanized public opinion against the President. The country was in a great deal of turmoil. We had Vietnam. We had a lot of social unrest. That social unrest doesn't exist today to the same extent. There are no major issues. There appear to be almost no major political issues that sharply divide the country like Vietnam. I think because the economy is a good as it is, the people just aren't that interested as long they are making a relatively good living, as Voltaire said, as long their bellies are full, the people aren't apt to revolt.

Also I think the President has done an excellent job here of shifting the focus away from crimes that were being investigated by each one of the independent counsel. But, in the President's case, the crimes that the independent counsel there is investigating relate to obstruction of justice and subornation of perjury and lying in connection with what happened in Casa Grande or Whitewater. Somehow the public perception is that now the independent counsel, Kenneth Starr, is investigating the President's sex life. Well, that is not it all. He seems to be investigating the offenses of subornation of perjury and whether anyone was asked to lie, obstruction of justice, whether anyone deliberately destroyed documents and things like that. But the whole thrust of his investigation and to a lesser extent, other independent counsels' investigations, gets sort of lost in the mix. The effort is always to confuse the issue, to trivialize it, to condemn it, to hope that you are going to make it go away. And thus far, they have been pretty successful.

I want to ask you two questions about the intensity of the criticism, "the war," as James Carville put it, on the independent counsel. Is it unprecedented in its ferocity?

To my knowledge it is. You saw a lot of politicization of the independent counsel office charges particularly after Judge Walsh indicted Caspar Weinberger two or three days before the '92 election. There were charges [that] the independent counsel was acting as a political entity.... But that politicization of the independent counsel, if it was raised to a new high with regard to Judge Walsh, has been ratcheted up many, many notches by the current administration, where the efforts appear to be directed by the White House..., sending [Carville] out there to criticize, publicly chastise, and do everything possible to demean the efforts and the personality [of Ken Starr]. If you can't discredit the investigation because of where it's headed or the results it has, you attack the character of the person in control.

Is it working?

Ken Starr's got an impeccable reputation, he had that before he took this job. He was Mr. Clean in Washington, DC. He was a fellow who both parties selected to review Bob Packwood's diaries, a very, very sensitive thing that the Senate had to face. And they looked around for the fairest person. He was recognized throughout the country as being an outstanding Solicitor General. He was known in this area as being a very, very fine judge. He gets this job and suddenly you have public opinion polls who are telling us he only has a public approval rating of 11 percent. It's below Saddam Hussein's.

Now, look, there's something wrong with this picture; we are not running for political office, independent counsel. What are people doing taking public opinion polls? I mean, why is that relevant? But that's the way the opponents of the investigation have been able to focus and frame the issues.

And so, what is the effect of that?

Well, the effect of that, in addition to chilling the investigation, is to cause the institution of independent counsel to be discredited. And that's an unfortunate day, I mean, I think, for the country. This institution was designed to investigate corruption, to ensure that full and thorough investigation would be made of the facts. And if there was no basis to indict, say so. If there was a basis to indict, indict.

Having effectively brought the institution of the independent counsel to a state of regard that ranks below, in the public view, that of Saddam Hussein, does that have an effect on an independent counsel's process?

I think it depends on the individual. But I think there's some influence in every individual. And the question is, to what extent? It may cause an independent counsel to want to close down his investigation sooner rather than later. It may cause an independent counsel to forego going down after a particular lead or not. It may foreclose an independent counsel from asking questions in the grand jury that he might have otherwise have asked. And so, does it have an inhibiting effect? I think it probably does. What's the extent of that effect? It depends on the individual counsel.

I'm just a kid from the sticks of Pennsylvania who got here via California, so I don't have the same sensitivity, I don't think, to some of this criticism. I think if you aspire to go on from this job to any other job, you'd be very conscious of your image. And I don't have any aspirations. I don't want to go on the bench. I just want to go back to Los Angeles with my family. But if I had wanted to go on the bench, it could torpedo that. I mean, look at Ken Starr. He was on the short list of, what, the last two Supreme Court appointments? Whether he could get on there now, I don't know....

But this relentless, sustained, ferocious attack on the independent counsel plainly has the effect of at least turning public opinion, which, in turn, has more than one obvious political consequence. The act itself may not be renewed when Congress considers it next year. And in the case of Ken Starr's inquiry, the political well has been poisoned a little bit when he does, if he does, present evidence of his undertaking to the House of Representatives. So what I'm asking you is whether this very public, very intense war on the independent counsel can be almost as effective as a Saturday Night Massacre?

Absolutely. Independent counsel is in no position to fight back. He doesn't have the ability to hire public relations people. He doesn't have the ability to go out and make statements. He is forbidden from disclosing what's happened during the course of his investigation, particularly if it's grand jury matters.... A person could get on the court house steps - and you very, very often see it here - and they say, "Ah, I've been before the grand jury and the prosecutor asked me X and Y and Z, here's what I told him." If that is the baldest-faced lie that that person is telling, the independent counsel can't do a darn thing. No federal prosecutor can, because what goes on before the grand jury is absolutely secret. The prosecutor's lips are sealed. The grand jurors' lips are sealed. The [stenographic] reporters' lips are sealed. The only person in the grand jury process whose lips aren't sealed is the witness. And the witness knows that....

You've said that a certain degree of politicization is inherent in the job.... I wonder, then, does not the Attorney General, who asked for the appointment of the independent counsel, have an obligation to address this criticism? For example, in the case of Judge Starr. Shouldn't Janet Reno have spoken up?

Well, the short answer to your question is, yes, I think she should. Whether or not she's permitted to, she may be subject to some constraints. I don't know that. I did note, about two weeks ago, that at least four former Attorneys General came forward and issued a statement which was reported in some of the press, to the effect that Ken Starr needs time to do his job and people should just back off at this point in time.

[There are some that say] that the main reason that the independent counsel is going to die, if it dies within the next year, is that this institution will go down because it has become a weapon of abuse.

It's true that the independent counsel statute will probably not be reenacted, but not because it's a failure. It's going to be because the Presidents have figured out how to defeat it. And I think that's unfortunate because the President is sworn to uphold the law and in these continual attacks that have occurred and are reoccurring in an effort to discredit the investigation and thus chill it, the public has lost confidence in the independent counsel's office as an institution, and that's unfortunate. It's unfortunate for the republic, because who now will investigate the allegations of public corruption?

Just imagine, had there been no independent counsel statute, what would the situation in the country be today? Stop and think. We've had the allegations against he President and then there's a whole variant of those that are within Mr. Starr's jurisdiction. Now, you had the allegations against Espy, you had the allegations against Cisneros, you had the allegations against Brown, you had the allegations against Hazel O'Leary. Who's going to investigate that? Stop and think a moment. What confidence should the public have in government...?

Most of the legislators today who are responsible for bringing the independent counsel statute into being back in 1978, they were all veterans of Watergate. But now in the current crop of legislators, very, very few have any real notions of Watergate except what they read in the history books, or maybe saw on the Internet or what have you. But they didn't live through it and they don't realize the significance of the statute. And it'll be an interesting time to see what's going to substitute for the independent counsel statute, if there is a substitute.