ASHINGTON - In a memo kept secret for 21/2 years, FBI Director Louis Freeh warned that the Justice Department was ignoring ''reliable evidence'' that conflicted with Al Gore's accounts of his fund-raising activities.
Freeh sent the November 1997 memo, written by staff at his request, to Attorney General Janet Reno to urge appointment of an independent counsel to investigate Democratic fund-raising.
''In the face of compelling evidence that the vice president was a very active, sophisticated fund-raiser who knew exactly what he was doing, his own exculpatory statements must not be given undue weight,'' the Freeh memo said.
It preceded a better-known, and more scrutinized, memo by the case's chief prosecutor, Charles LaBella, who urged the same action and also accused his Justice Department superiors of contorting their investigation to avoid triggering an independent counsel.
The memos were released by a House committee yesterday as Republicans in both chambers of Congress examined why a special prosecutor was never appointed.
''Can you blame the American people or many in Congress for being cynical?'' asked House Government Reform Committee chairman Dan Burton.
In the memo, the FBI director said the Justice Department's preoccupation with bit players should be replaced by a top-down investigation starting with President Clinton and a ''core group'' of aides under the theory that ''most of the alleged campaign abuses flowed directly or indirectly from the all-out efforts by the White House and DNC (Democratic National Committee) to raise money.''
Freeh's memo focused in part on fund-raising phone calls Gore made from his government office. Gore denied that he intended to raise ''hard money,'' which is regulated by federal laws prohibiting solicitations on federal property.
The director's memo suggested the Justice Department was ''relying almost exclusively on the vice president's own statements to draw inferences favorable to him even where those statements are contradicted by other reliable evidence.''
''If the attorney general relied primarily'' on Gore's ''statements to end this investigation, she would be inviting intense and justified criticism,'' the memo said.
In a memo responding to that allegation, Lee Radek, the chief of the department's public integrity section who dealt with independent counsel issues, said the Justice Department didn't rely solely on Gore's word.
The conclusion that Gore's phone calls were to solicit ''soft money,'' outside the scope of the law, was based on ''hundreds of interviews with those who participated in the calls, and the examination of scores of documents,'' Radek wrote in a memo also released yesterday.
