LOS ANGELES TIMES INTERVIEW : Jamie Gorelick : The Pragmatist Who Runs the Justice Department

It was 9:30 p.m., and a senior aide to Deputy Atty. Gen. Jamie S. Gorelick was about to call it a day when a string of E-mail messages flashed across his computer screen. The messages were from his boss--who had left the office three hours earlier. Gorelick, it turned out, had gone home for supper with her husband and two young children; then, the kids tucked in for the night, she was putting in a couple more hours of work on her home computer.

The episode perfectly reflects the disciplined, workaholic attributes that have earned Gorelick a reputation as someone who can “make the trains run on time.” Her administrative abilities have been particularly important, because Atty. Gen. Janet Reno uses her office as a bully pulpit, traveling constantly to spread her views on crime and other issues, while leaving day-to-day management of the Justice Department and its 92,000 employees to Gorelick.

Gorelick, 44, draws strength from having had wide experience in Washington before she joined the government. When President Bill Clinton nominated Florida prosecutor Reno to be attorney general, after his first two choices had become embroiled in controversy, Administration officials turned to Gorelick--then a partner in one of Washington’s top white-collar crime and political-corruption law firms and the president of the 60,000-member District of Columbia Bar--to shepherd Reno through the confirmation gauntlet. The nomination was approved without a hitch. Though Gorelick then took a job as general counsel at the Pentagon, she was at the top of Reno’s list when the No. 2 job in the Justice Department came open.

Gorelick smiles a lot. In fact, she recently had difficulty complying when a photographer pressed her to look somber. But the grins don’t soften a flare of temper or scowl of dissatisfaction when a subordinate fails to deliver on time or produces material short of what Gorelick requested. And her determination to keep the wheels of government moving is so great that, if a meeting bogs down, the Army colonel she brought with her from the Pentagon as an aide sometimes announces that the allotted time for discussion has expired.

During her service at Defense and Justice, Gorelick has taken flack from the left and right. This is not surprising, a close associate maintains, because she brings no “ideological overlay” to the powerful post. Only a pragmatist’s commitment to finding workable answers.

Question: November’s election results surprised a good many people, including many here in the Justice Department. How will the outcome affect policies here?

Answer: The Department of Justice has always received bipartisan support for most of its mission. Law enforcement, in general, is not a Democrat or Republican bailiwick. I expect a great deal of support from a Republican Congress for law enforcement, law-enforcement initiatives, which is most of what we do.

I do expect there to be a lot of attention paid to immigration issues, but again, I expect there to be bipartisan support for most of our programs. There could be some differences at the margins. That leaves issues like civil rights and antitrust and environment. There may be some disagreements . . . but this is what the Department of Justice is about . . . .

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Q: Do you expect a battle over eliminating some of the crime-prevention money called for in the crime bill?

A: I think the disposition of the prevention money will come down to what law enforcement really says about how you attack crime in America. The cops whom I’ve talked to, the cops on the street, the hardest working, the most experienced among them, say to me that they know that the criminal sanction alone is not enough. For them to be truly effective, they have to have communities that offer alternatives to people hanging out on street corners and getting in trouble.

It doesn’t take much imagination to picture a community or a public-housing project with a Boys and Girls Club and one without, and that the one with it will have less crime because the kids will have some place to go after school. I grew up that way. I know that in my community there was plenty for us to do. I would dare say most members of Congress know that in their own communities, there need to be alternatives for kids going in the wrong direction, so we will see. Prevention rises or falls on its own merits, and that law enforcement in America--and, by that, I primarily mean local cops--are going to be asked for their views.

This was telling in the assault-weapons ban. When push came to shove on the assault-weapons ban, what all of us were saying to members of Congress who were on the fence is: Ask your local police. Does he want to be at the other end of these weapons? Does he believe that they should be on the street? The local cops, when asked by even the most conservative congressman or senator, always said, “No, we don’t want them.” That’s what produced that vote. We will see what happens with prevention . . . .

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Q: Back to immigration then--what about the division of resources there? Will that change now because of the election?

A: I don’t think so. Most of the money in our immigration initiative is focused on what I would call the rule of law. That means securing our borders, having an asylum process that works and is not just a giant loophole, having an infrastructure within INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) that allows us to really process people and admit the people who are to be admitted and exclude the people who are to be excluded. There is very little in our division of resources with regard to immigration to quarrel with.

I am sure there will be a tremendous impetus to add to the Border Patrol. What we will be saying is, here’s how you most effectively deploy a border patrol to secure the border from California to Texas. We all want the same thing. Piling up the Border Patrol, so that it’s linked arm-in-arm, is not anybody’s answer. I haven’t heard anybody suggesting that. We are not going to be resisting having adequate resources for the border . . . .

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Q: What did the overwhelming support for the adoption of 187 in California tell you about what people think about immigration right now?

A: It told me people want respect for the rule of law. I think there was just an overwhelming fear of being literally overrun. That was a vote of anxiety--an anxiety about our schools, an anxiety of a realization of limited resources in a state that has always felt boundless in its ability to absorb and grow.

I think that’s why it’s so important that we do what we can do--which is a great deal--to secure the border. Because if people feel secure, and if we can make the Border Patrol our cops and not our children our cops, I think all Americans would prefer that as a solution. I think it’s because that--and I don’t blame this on Republicans or Democrats; this is everybody at fault here--for decades, we as a country did not put the resources in place to enforce the law as it was written. And we’ve only just gotten those resources. Once people start to feel a sense of security about our borders, they will not necessarily feel the need to use these other mechanisms which have consequences that may not be the right ones for our society.

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Q: Is it clear yet what role the federal government will take in that 187 litigation in California?

A: No, it is not. That is something that’s under discussion.

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Q: How far along are you on shutting down or severely limiting crossings on the California-Mexican border and east?

A: We are still in the data-collection process. As you may recall, we shut down the internal checkpoint and put resources at the border, and now we put back up the internal checkpoint and kept the resources at the border, and we’re in a test period. I believe that we will bring the border under control--that we will have the resources to do it; that it may take us a while to properly deploy. As you know, we have classes of Border Patrol coming on every month or so, and being moved to different places on the border. It will take a while to know how successful this is.

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Q: This department backed resurrection of the independent-counsel statute, and it’s in use in a number of matters. Are there any second thoughts about how it has been applied and whether you think there is any need for fine-tuning the statute?

A: I think having an independent counsel available as a mechanism for ensuring the American people that even those matters that are closely related to an Administration are being pursued aggressively is a very good thing. It enhances the trust of the American people in our government. It frees this department from the buffeting of claims that it is behaving in a way that is politically influenced. In all, the independent-counsel statute is a good thing.

My personal view was that I would have liked to have seen a greater ability and flexibility on the part of the independent counsel to utilize the standing offices of our investigative and prosecutive agencies. One of the criticisms that I think was valid involving independent counsels is that they took too long to get started, they utilized too many part-time people and, therefore, took too long to resolve questions which were quite pressing and needed to be resolved.

Both the (Robert B.) Fiske investigation and the (Kenneth W.) Starr investigation have moved out quickly and have not wasted a lot of time in establishing infrastructure and in hiring, and I think that’s a tribute in the first instance to Fiske, and Ken Starr has followed that mode. And both have utilized FBI and DOJ resources, which the new statute permits to a greater extent than the old statute did.

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Q: With regard to former Associate Atty. Gen. Webster Hubbell’s guilty plea to two felonies--what kind of impact is that going to have on the department?

A: Inasmuch as he is no longer in the department, and wasn’t in the department when the actions that are the subject of these charges occurred, I don’t see an impact on the Department of Justice. Webb Hubbell, with whom I did not have the opportunity to serve, was very well liked by career people here, who have expressed shock and dismay. But that’s more personal than institutional.

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Q: Is it going to be a hard sell to people to invest U.S. dollars in the battle against international crime at a time when people seem most keyed up about violent crime on the streets here in the United States?

A: This is a misconception that I will try my very best to address. We are not fighting crimes abroad. We are fighting crime in the United States being visited upon us here from abroad. It is foolish for us merely to prosecute the perpetrator here in the United States without going after the person who is directing him in some other country. And that’s what the internationalization of crime is about.

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Q: This is the first time there has been a woman as attorney general, and now the high command at Justice is largely made up of women. Doesn’t that make any difference in what crimes are emphasized, what directions the department takes, how it negotiates on Capitol Hill?

A: I have to tell you I haven’t seen it. We have a career prosecutor as attorney general, we have a longtime litigator as deputy, we have a career prosecutor as head of the criminal division. I believe we make decisions in the same way as our male predecessors, and I believe that we are received in the same way by the people with whom we deal. On the other hand, since I’ve never been a man, I can’t tell you how people would react to me if my gender were otherwise. But I don’t see any substantive difference in the management of this department or in the direction it is taking because the attorney general is a woman, and I am.