The gridlock symbolized by ever-mounting budget deficits is not the only noxious legacy of decades of divided government that the Clinton administration will inherit.

There is also the scandal syndrome: the corrosive atmosphere of mutual mistrust that poisons public discourse whenever any suspicion of official misconduct arises. As illustrated by the latest round of mud-slinging in the "Iraqgate" affair, the executive branch, Congress, and the press are all too quick to presume bad faith by one another in dealing with such matters. The result is to compound public cynicism about all of these vital institutions.

Maybe Bill Clinton can do something to break this destructive syndrome. He should at least try. It would be nice to avoid repetition of the spectacle that unfolded last week.

In his Dec. 9 press conference exonerating the Justice Department of cover-up charges, former federal judge and prosecutor Frederick Lacey-a Republican handpicked by Attorney General William Barr to pre-empt demands for a court-appointed independent counsel to probe Iraqgate-came across as intemperate, injudicious, closed-minded, and arrogant to the point of egomania.

Lacey’s two-hour tirade was characterized by blunderbuss attacks on the press and Democrats in Congress for "arrant nonsense"; unresponsive, rambling, and combative answers to entirely reasonable questions; revealing admissions of gaps in his hasty inquiry; uncritical acceptance of officials’ protestations of pure motives; and insistent self-promotion as the world’s toughest investigator.

Congressional Democrats compounded the spectacle that same afternoon by faxing out press releases trashing Lacey’s 190-page public report as a whitewash before they could possibly have read it.

In fact, although Lacey’s air of self-righteous certitude undermined his credibility, his core conclusion seems entirely plausible: There is no credible evidence that anyone in the Justice Department has acted criminally or corruptly in the Iraqgate affair or, more particularly, in the prosecutions arising from the billions in illegal loans to Iraq made by the Atlanta office of the Italian government’s Banco Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL).

Lacey also had a point-although he overstated it-in criticizing those in the press and Congress who have accused Barr and several career Justice Department prosecutors, without proof, of a criminal cover-up.

While Lacey seemed unduly anxious to dismiss the entire Iraqgate affair as a concoction of liars in Congress and scandalmongers in the press, he could not rule out the possibility that officials at the White House, the Central Intelligence Agency, or other agencies sought improperly to influence the BNL prosecution, or to conceal from Congress or Justice evidence pointing toward the Bush administration’s prewar appeasement of Saddam Hussein.

But Lacey’s focus was alleged misconduct at Justice, and his report is reasonably persuasive in explaining the various suspicion-provoking aspects of the BNL prosecution as reflecting not a cover-up but rather a combination of more pedestrian forces: good-faith disputes between prosecutors in Atlanta who thought BNL’s Rome headquarters was a victim of the illegal loans" and prosecutors at Justice who suspected BNL-Rome might have had guilty knowledge; understandable high-level interest in a case affecting U.S. relations with Italy and Iraq; bungled communications between the CIA and Justice that prevented timely disclosure to the judge and prosecutors in Atlanta of CIA cables suggesting BNL-Rome involvement; bureaucratic ineptitude and posterior-covering.

Iraqgate is of course, only the latest in a seemingly endless succession of Washington scandals. Some, like Iran-Contra, involve real criminality. Some, like the flap about the House Bank a few months ago, are largely phony media feeding frenzies. What we have lost is the ability to resolve such allegations in a way that avoids partisan recriminations and inspires public confidence.

The Watergate scandal, which exposed a White House being run as a kind of continuing criminal enterprise and led to convictions of two successive attorneys general, shook our faith in whether a Justice Department run by political appointees could be trusted to expose and prosecute criminal activity at high levels of the executive branch. This mistrust has been exacerbated by years of partisan warfare between a Republican executive branch addicted to concealment and a Democratic Congress too quick to make unsubstantiated charges.

Nor has there been much basis for confidence that a presidential crony like Edwin Meese III, or a politico-on-the-make like Richard Thornburgh, or an executive-power loyalist like William Barr, would aggressively pursue his fellow political appointees for the kind of lying to Congress that characterized Iran-Contra and (perhaps) Iraqgate. It seems extremely doubtful, for example, that the Justice Department would ever have brought charges against Clair George, the former CIA official who was convicted Dec. 9 on two felony counts of lying to Congress, to keep Iran-Contra secrets.

But even the independent-counsel law has fallen short of its goal of restoring confidence that such allegations can be disposed of honestly and fairly. That’s one of the reasons the statute was not re-enacted this year and will expire on Dec. 15.

The statute has come to be symbolized by the 81-year-old Lawrence Walsh, whom Republicans accuse of persecuting dedicated public servants for peccadilloes. Walsh is driven by an honorable determination to get to the bottom of the Iran-Contra cover-up and deter executive-branch officials from lying to Congress. But the partisans who attack him so hyperbolically are not the only ones who think he may have stayed too long (six years as of Dec. 19), spent too much (more than $34 million), and brought arguably tenuous charges against people (including George and former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger) whose culpability was not that great.

As for the statute itself, many Republicans have denounced it as a weapon used by the Democrat Congress to batter the Republican executive branch with bogus charges of criminality. While shared by many thoughtful lawyers, is that the statute may create undue incentives to investigate endlessly and bring marginal cases, because it assigns a prosecutor to probe a single case, under a public spotlight, with unlimited resources and no competing demands on his or her time.

Despite Bill Clinton’s vow last week to support re-enactment next year, it is unclear whether this system of ad hoc, court-appointed independent counsel will be revived. The Democratic takeover of the White House will diminish both the Democrats’ enthusiasm for the statute and the Republicans’ antipathy for it; pressure to extend coverage to Congress will complicate the picture. Besides, there is a better way to police high-level criminality: Set up a full-time, quasi-independent public prosecutor’s office outside the Justice Department, with jurisdiction over crimes by federal officials, members of Congress, and federal judges. It should be headed by a professional prosecutor of distinction with no political ties to the president, who should be presidentially appointed, confirmed by the Senate, and given a presumptive term of five years. (This proposal is more fully developed in my "Who Handles the Next Scandal?" in The American Lawyer’s September issue.)

But the best way to get beyond partisan bickering and restore public trust in investigations of official misconduct is to restore the stature of the Justice Department by filling its top ranks with professionals who will act not as loyal political apparatchiks but as impartial ministers of justice. To be convincing, such an effort to break the scandal syndrome will require more than lip service; the new attorney general will need to keep the White House and its political agenda at arm’s length, to comedown hard on administration officials who flout the law, and treat Congress and the opposition with respect.

An early test of the new administration’s sense of fairness will be its response to the clamor for yet another special investigator to probe Iraqgate. Clinton’s attorney general should, no doubt, choose a respected lawyer to comb through the existing record, to do whatever further probing is necessary, and to recommend any prosecutions that may be warranted. But she should resist the temptation to search endlessly for something to justify the Democrats’ scandal charges; should close up shop in short order if evidence of official criminality is lacking; and should make a full report to the nation without Lacey-esque grandstanding.