My column of June 24, embarrassingly headlined "Why We Should All Be Grateful to Janet Reno," seems to have been overtaken by events. It commended the Attorney General for having twice (in late 1997 and again in late 1998) spurned subordinates’ advice that she unleash an outside investigator on Vice President Al Gore. Hours after it went to press, the news broke that yet another subordinate had recently done the same. Oops.

The latest recommendation came from prosecutor Robert Conrad, the fourth head of the task force investigating (still!) the campaign finance abuses of 1995 and 1996. Conrad reportedly suspected that Gore may have lied (or at least fibbed) under oath on April 18 by telling Conrad that he had regarded neither the now-notorious White House coffees nor his April 29, 1996, visit to a Buddhist temple as "fund-raising events." Gore sought to show that "the truth is my friend in this" by releasing the 123-page transcript of his April 18 testimony.

Gore has a point. As purported proof of perjury, the transcript looks like a dud. It tells us little about Gore’s conduct that was not known before and contains no compelling evidence that he lied to investigators. In short, it leaves one wondering what Conrad thinks is such a big deal. As an unidentified law enforcement official told U.S. News & World Report: "We are not talking blatant lies. We are not talking about lies about big things. We are not talking about new evidence. We are not talking about smoking guns. We are talking about itsy-bitty, nitty-gritty-type bull. And over nothing really."

Gore’s "bull" is not in the same category as President Clinton’s unambiguous lying under oath. When Clinton falsely swore during his Jan. 17, 1998, deposition in the Paula Jones lawsuit that he had no recollection of ever having been "alone" with Monica Lewinsky, his clear purpose was to deceive Jones’ attorneys and Judge Susan Webber Wright into believing that he and Lewinsky had not had the type of sexual relationship that the judge had ordered Clinton to disclose. This lie cannot be erased by Clinton’s effort to retroactively redefine the word alone in a preposterous way.

When Gore explained his insistence on April 18 that the White House coffees were not "fund-raising events" by telling Conrad that he defined "the term `raising’ [as] events at which money was raised," he was not deceiving anybody. He was quibbling about how to "wordsmith" activities the particulars of which were largely undisputed. Clintonesque? Perhaps. But that kind of semantic jousting is not perjury. Nor has Conrad or anyone else suggested otherwise.

So it still seems that Reno did the right thing in refusing to trigger the now-defunct independent counsel statute. Barring some new smoking gun, she should probably reject Conrad’s advice to name a special counsel at this late date. Nor do the new developments provide much basis for questioning the integrity of her own investigation. To the contrary, if Reno is trying to mastermind a cover-up, why does she keep siccing such hard-charging prosecutors as Conrad and his predecessor Charles G. LaBella on Gore?

On the other hand, Gore’s April 18 testimony does illustrate how slippery and disingenuous (if not perjurious) he can be even when under oath. Typical is Gore’s righteous declaration that he would have been "shocked"-shocked!-to hear it suggested that it cost people $50,000 apiece to attend one of the White House coffees. Such talk would have been "wildly inappropriate," Gore insisted. Methinks the gentleman doth protest too much. And Gore’s own characterization of the coffees, although not literally false, sure sounds like sly sugarcoating of a sleazy process: "I thought they were events that allowed the President to spend time with influential people who wanted to talk about policy, who would at some later time possibly be asked to financially support" the Democratic National Committee. Possibly, indeed.

Other recently released Justice Department documents also show how Gore’s fund-raising phone calls sometimes produced a chain reaction not unlike a shakedown operation. Consider the memo summarizing one Kenneth Smith’s account of a meeting at which Charles Uribe, the chairman and CEO of AJ Contracting Co., of New York City, took a call from Gore: "Smith was only able to hear Uribe’s side of the conversation, which consisted primarily of `yes, sirs’ and `no, sirs.’ … According to Smith, after Uribe hung up the telephone, Uribe told the others at the meeting that the Vice President had just requested that Uribe `raise money for the campaign.’ … Uribe then told the AJ executives that `we’ needed to raise $50,000…. Uribe instructed each AJ employee present and able to legally contribute to make a specific dollar contribution to the Clinton-Gore campaign, ensuring that each employee contributed up to $5,000."

It seems unlikely that Gore was as peremptory in demanding money as Uribe supposedly was. But it also seems unlikely that a man of Gore’s experience could have been unaware that this is the sort of thing that happens when a Vice President goes dialing for dollars.

The new twists in the Gore fund-raising saga and some now-public 1996 campaign documents recently brought to my attention (by my colleague James A. Barnes) also raise questions about the competence-although not the good faith-of the Justice Department’s investigation. Indeed, Gore’s slipperiness in answering questions is mitigated by his interrogators’ insistence on pressing him to parse such morally inconsequential technicalities as whether he intended to raise only "soft" or "hard" money (or both) in his phone calls. This is a bit like trying to determine whether your kid violated your rule against eating ice cream by grilling her about whether the frozen yogurt she ate was vanilla or chocolate.

This singularly silly soft-vs.-hard question has been a primary focus of Reno’s investigation for two reasons: (1) As a technical matter, the obscure 1883 statute that bars soliciting campaign contributions "in" federal offices clearly (albeit nonsensically) exempts solicitations of soft money; and (2) Reno has lacked the fortitude or the self-confidence to resolve the more fundamental question of whether the 1883 statute applies to any fund-raising phone calls.

Gore has never said that the soft-hard distinction was his own basis for assuming in 1995 and 1996 that his fund-raising phone calls were legal. Rather, he has plausibly asserted that he considered the calls legal even if he had been seeking hard money. That is also the view of LaBella. Despite his repeated calls for seeking an independent counsel, LaBella argued in two November 1997 memos that the 1883 statute "was never intended to reach the conduct involved in [Gore’s] situation: calls from the federal workplace to nonfederal locations."

This seems right. Soliciting people (especially government employees) in federal offices is inherently coercive. Soliciting private citizens by phone from federal offices may be sleazy-especially when the caller is the Vice President-but is no more coercive than doing it from (say) Gore’s bedroom, or a Holiday Inn, which would indisputably be legal. In addition, as LaBella pointed out, adopting the "legally correct" interpretation would have "the incidental benefit of obviating the need to scrutinize and second-guess every act and word of the Vice President."

Instead of stepping up to the plate and saying that the 1883 statute does not apply to such phone calls, Reno sent her investigators to scrutinize and second-guess Gore’s claim that he had intended-serendipitously, in light of the strange technicality upon which the investigation had come to focus-to seek only soft money. If Gore saw this as a stupid exercise, who could blame him? And while this would not justify lying about his intent, as I suspect Gore may have done, that kind of lie might well be too trivial to be a crime. It would also be almost impossible to prove beyond a reasonable doubt.

Not that Reno’s investigators did a very good job of trying. They apparently did remarkably little to follow up on some of the most telling evidence: three May 15, 1995, "call sheets" urging Gore to secure "commitment[s]" from three people to raise $50,000 apiece in hard money, together with other evidence suggesting that Gore had in fact made these calls from his White House office, and that all three people had made $1,000 hard-money contributions (the legal maximum for an individual) shortly thereafter.

In short, the hard-soft investigation may not have been conducted very efficiently. But it would be better had it not been undertaken at all. And the evidence brought to light by the Gore investigation as a whole would be more appropriately left for the voters to assess, not prosecutors, judges, and jurors.