LEGAL TENDER

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But at week's end Reno was instead left struggling to explain that the problem was not how the laws had been broken but how they had been written in the first place. The rules covering fund raising on federal property, as amended over the years, are now so elastic that they are virtually impossible to break. The biggest loophole of all was the one nearly everyone missed--not that Gore was using a Clinton-Gore campaign credit card when he went dialing for dollars; not that the Hatch Act's limits on fund raising don't apply to Presidents and Vice Presidents; not that there is no case law (no "controlling legal authority," in the phrase Gore invoked seven times in 24 minutes) to proscribe his behavior. It was a loophole big enough to drive Air Force One, the Lincoln Bedroom, Johnny Chung and most of Gore's telephone logs through.

For days Reno had been meeting privately with her top lawyers to figure out if she had grounds to appoint an independent counsel. The fact that everyone from editorial-page editors to Trent Lott to Common Cause reformers was hollering for one meant little to her. Reno's critics were reading the independent-counsel statute; she was reading the criminal code. And she saw a big, fat exception to the law making it a crime to raise money on federal property. The loophole opened in 1979, when Congress inadvertently tightened the definition of "contribution" from money donated for "any political purpose" to the much narrower one of money donated "for the purpose of influencing any election for federal office." That retooling essentially made it a crime only to raise on federal property the small amounts of "hard money" that go straight to the candidates ($1,000 or less per donor) and exempted the huge amounts of "soft money" funneled to the parties.

Nothing sinister was at work. Soft money had hardly been minted in those days; lawmakers simply wanted to reconcile the wording in two different statutes. "They weren't trying to do anything sneaky," says Fred Wertheimer, former head of Common Cause. But even if the loophole was opened by accident, Reno and her lawyers concluded, the restrictions did not apply to the hundreds of millions of dollars in unregulated, soft-money contributions.

Reno didn't want to come right out and say so, for fear of looking like the President's personal defense lawyer. So she resorted to smoke signals at her press conference last week and hoped someone would get it.

"As you know," she said, "I've made it a practice not to comment on pending investigations, and I'm not going to do that now. But I think it's very important that as you make these allegations and as you portray them in television or on your headlines, you try to clarify just what the issues are." Then she proceeded to read the "significant" passages aloud in an effort, a Reno aide later explained, to say, "There is no crime here." Or at least not so far. "The plain fact of the matter," the aide says, "is that Congress changed this law and made it very easy to do a lot of fund raising at those buildings."