Joseph I. Lieberman

The 1978 Ethics in Government Act, passed four years after the Watergate scandal, authorized the use of special prosecutors appointed by a panel of federal judges to investigate allegations of misconduct by the president and other high government officials. Over the next two decades at least twenty investigations were performed by such special prosecutors, renamed independent counsels in 1983. Some of the investigations were highly controversial—including Kenneth W. Starr’s probe on President Bill Clinton that began in 1994— and have led some observers to conclude that the independent counsel statute was fatally flawed. In the following viewpoint, written several months before the law authorizing independent counsels was to expire in June 1999, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Delaware argues that while the statute may need to be changed in minor ways, such...