As the leakage of internal Justice Department documents has swollen to a flood, Attorney General Janet Reno has been weathering a new round of attacks for "protecting" Vice President Al Gore and President Clinton by repeatedly refusing to trigger judicial appointment of an independent counsel to investigate the two men’s roles in various campaign finance abuses of 1996.

The latest (June 14) blast from The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page is representative: "Newly released documents from the Justice Department make it clear that Ms. Reno became Mr. Gore’s guardian angel, standing between her man and his accusers at every turn, even against senior members of her own staff. Mr. Gore was clearly on the brink of big legal trouble, but Ms. Reno single-handedly rescued his political career from the mire on the eve of his presidential bid." The New York Times accused her in March of an "incompetent and politically biased" approach designed "to protect … Gore and other senior officials from a thorough, independent investigation into their fund-raising activities."

The documents, more than 1,000 pages of which were released on June 6 by a House committee, detail the bitter disputes between Reno, FBI Director Louis J. Freeh, and their various subordinates over how to deal with campaign finance abuses. The papers include several long memoranda by Freeh and Charles G. LaBella, the veteran prosecutor whom Reno chose to run the task force on campaign finance, which argue that the Attorney General was legally obliged to seek an independent counsel.

There are also colorful touches, such as LaBella’s complaints that some of Reno’s subordinates had used "gamesmanship," "distortions of fact and contortions of law," and "intellectually dishonest" double standards to protect Clinton, Gore, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Harold M. Ickes from scrutiny.

Despite all the publicity, one might fail to notice that not a single FBI or Justice Department official has suggested that the evidence against Gore ever came close to warranting criminal prosecution. One might fail to notice the consensus was-even among those arguing most forcefully that the now-discredited, now-defunct independent-counsel statute’s "hair trigger" required Reno to seek an independent counsel for Gore-that any good lawyer would quickly conclude the evidence did not justify prosecution.

Nor would one guess that if Reno (and any independent counsel) had treated as criminal offenses the abuses deemed by the FBI to be at the heart of the Gore scandal-the arguably illegal use of huge "soft-money" contributions by both of the 1996 presidential campaigns to supplement their public funding and to pay for ads designed to win votes for Clinton and Bob Dole-the logical outcome would have been criminal prosecutions of Dole (yes, Dole) and the top echelons of both political parties, as well as Clinton, Gore, and Ickes.

Janet Reno knew all of these things. According to former Reno aides (whom I trust), she worked diligently through thousands of pages of legal memoranda, debates over evidence, and briefs for and against seeking an independent counsel for various campaign finance matters. She called in contending factions to thrash out disagreements. She asked good questions. She thought long and hard about whether the law required an independent counsel at various junctures. She came close to seeking one to investigate Gore in late 1998. But in the end, Reno said no.

The Justice Department and FBI documents fortify my sense that she did the right thing. They also enhance my respect for the integrity (although not the efficiency) of the agonizingly slow and painstaking process over which Reno presided. And they convince me that the issues were exhaustively thrashed out on their merits, with no hint (at least in writing) of partisan political calculation, by smart, hard-working public servants whose motives seem honorable even when they are accusing one another of intellectual dishonesty and hotheadedness.

The closest call for Reno, in late 1998, was determining whether the statute required an independent counsel for Gore. The Vice President’s initial problem was his March 1997 admission (confirming news reports) that he had made fund-raising phone calls from his White House office to various fat cats in 1995 and 1996. An obscure 1883 law makes it a crime to solicit or receive what we now call hard money "in" any federal office. It’s doubtful that this law should be read as barring telephone solicitations from federal offices. But the Justice Department usually construes criminal laws as broadly as possible. So the focus of the 1997 debate was on whether the evidence supported Gore’s claim to investigators that even though some of the money he raised had ended up in hard-money accounts, he had intended to solicit only soft money.

LaBella recommended referring this legally relevant, but rather ridiculous, question to an independent counsel. He also stressed, however, that "it is absolutely clear to me that any prosecutor reviewing this fact pattern would conclude that a further investigation is not warranted," and quickly dismiss the matter. Others stressed that most of the evidence supported Gore’s claim that he had not intended to raise any hard money. Reno agreed.

But in 1998, more evidence came to light: Some notes jotted by a Gore aide during a Nov. 21, 1995, meeting attended by the Vice President indicated that some of the money to be raised would be hard. Former White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta and another man told investigators that they thought Gore had been present and paying attention during the hard-moneysoft-money discussion.

This evidence suggested that Gore may have lied to investigators about what kind of money he had thought he was raising. Other evidence made it seem more likely that the Vice President had paid no attention to (or had forgotten) the hard-money discussion. LaBella and others pressed for an independent counsel. But nobody suggested that the evidence came close to proving Gore’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

Reno’s critics stress that "even" then-Associate Deputy Attorney General Robert S. Litt, a high-level political appointee, had recommended referring the did-Gore-lie question to an independent counsel. True. But Litt, who says he believes Gore was probably not lying, never thought that Gore should be prosecuted. Rather, he thought Reno was probably hog-tied by an ill-considered provision arguably mandating appointment of an independent counsel to make that decision unless the Attorney General could find that "clear and convincing evidence" established Gore’s truthfulness.

To be sure, not only Litt but also most other key Reno advisers recommended at one point or another that she refer at least some aspect of the sprawling White House scandal to an independent counsel. And every time, Reno said no. This may suggest that she was straining for ways to avoid unleashing another independent counsel. But that does not mean that she violated the statute-let alone that she did so for political reasons. Straining to read the law narrowly would be consistent with the logic of the 1988 Supreme Court ruling that the statute did not (quite) violate the constitutional prerogatives of the executive branch: The Court held that it was saved in part by a provision giving the Attorney General "unreviewable discretion" to decide whether to have an independent counsel.

Is it likely that Reno was swayed by reluctance to inflict a frenzy of new scandal publicity on Gore about conduct that nobody considered prosecutable? Of course it is. No Attorney General should casually cast an unwarranted shadow over a presidential candidate of either party.

She may also have been swayed by the excesses of the independent counsels who had been appointed in 1994 and 1995 to investigate two rather trivial (albeit technically criminal) matters: former Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy’s foolish acceptance of gifts from regulated companies, and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros’s pathetic lies to the FBI about how much money he had given his former mistress. Both counsels found ways to launch vast, multiyear, multimillion-dollar muckraking operations. And both brought some extremely weak prosecutions.

If those spectacles made Reno more wary of setting in motion still another investigation-one that could brand both 1996 presidential nominees as criminals and mushroom into a long-running national nightmare-good for her. She wasn’t just protecting Gore, Clinton, and Bob Dole. She was protecting the country.