Janet Reno has not been a good Attorney General, in my view. But congressional Republicans keep attacking her so indiscriminately — and for the wrong reasons — that their demands for her head have a suspiciously partisan smell.

The current Republican brief against Reno stresses three main points:

1) The revelation last month that the FBI fired pyrotechnic tear gas grenades during its 1993 assault on the Branch Davidians at Waco — contrary to Reno’s repeated assurances that incendiaries were never used — shows her to be an incompetent, if not a cover-upper.

2) Reno has bungled the investigation into Chinese nuclear spying.

3) Her stubborn refusal to hand over to an independent counsel the investigation into her boss’s 1996 campaign finance scandals was a politically motivated effort to curry favor with the White House.

In fact, Reno’s conduct on these specific fronts is quite defensible, if not always persuasively defended.

Waco. For six years, Reno and her aides assured Congress and the public that the FBI had not used incendiary devices on April 19, 1993, when FBI agents in armored vehicles punched holes and pumped tear gas into the Branch Davidians’ compound, beginning a chain of events that ended with the incineration of about 80 people, including 25 children.

After years of denials, the FBI has been forced to admit that it did fire pyrotechnic tear gas grenades that morning at a concrete bunker 40 yards in front of the wooden compound. While there’s no reason to think that these grenades started the fire — which occurred four hours later — the new evidence raises the possibility of a broader cover-up inside the FBI.

But what does this tell us about Janet Reno? Nobody has contradicted her claims that the FBI had assured her that no incendiary devices would be, or had been, used. And while low- level Justice Department lawyers (and a congressional committee) years ago had received FBI documents showing that "military" tear gas canisters had been used, it’s unclear whether they understood that the canisters were incendiary.

It seems far-fetched to suspect Reno of involvement in any cover-up. The more serious question is whether she was misled so easily, for so long, as to suggest incompetence, or a disinclination to dig deeply for the truth. That’s among the issues that special investigator (and former Senator) John C. Danforth, R-Mo., should explore. But it’s premature to leap to conclusions.

It’s not premature, of course, to fault Reno’s actions in 1993. She showed disastrous judgment in approving an armored- vehicle tear gas assault against the apocalyptic cult members. It was foreseeable that this might endanger the lives of those inside the compound, including the children Reno said she’d been told were being molested and abused. (Reno later admitted to being mistaken about that.) While famously proclaiming herself "accountable" for the disaster, Reno admitted no error. And she presided over an internal investigation that found no fault with anyone at Justice or at the FBI — a conclusion irreconcilable with the facts presented in the same report.

Perhaps Reno should have resigned in 1993. But, in fairness, she was pressed by the supposed experts, the FBI, to approve the operation; she was new to her job; and she had briefed the President and he had approved.

More to the point here, although Waco is an extremely serious blot on Reno’s record, it’s a bit late to be trashing her for what we’ve known since 1993. And it’s a bit early to be trashing her for what we’ve learned only last month.

Chinese spying. The main basis for the attacks on this front is the Justice Department’s rejection of FBI requests in 1997 to seek permission from a special foreign intelligence court to wiretap Wen Ho Lee.

Lee is the Los Alamos National Laboratory nuclear weapons scientist who was fired in March, amid widely publicized suspicions of spying, and who has since admitted downloading nuclear secrets to an unsecure desktop computer in his office.

But the refusal to apply for a wiretap is looking more and more justifiable. Career department lawyers have argued plausibly that the FBI had never come close to meeting the legal standard for a wiretap. The FBI request was reportedly based on little more than Lee’s access to allegedly stolen secrets and his meetings with scientists in China. Even now, prosecutors apparently don’t have enough evidence to charge the Taiwan-born Lee with spying; some people say he came under suspicion in part because of his ethnicity. And it’s unclear whether he will (or should) be charged with mishandling classified secrets — a fairly common, rarely prosecuted offense.

As Reno’s critics emphasize, it’s highly unusual for Justice or the courts to reject FBI requests for wiretaps on suspected spies. But when the requests are unsupported by evidence, Justice should reject them.

Campaign finance. No issue has generated more criticism of Reno than her rejection of recommendations by FBI Director Louis J. Freeh and Charles LaBella, Reno’s hand-picked campaign finance investigator, that she seek an independent counsel to investigate the campaign finance scandals of 1996. Liberal editorialists have joined Republicans in the Reno-bashing.

Reno’s wounds here are partly self-inflicted. Her statements that she had no legal basis for seeking an independent counsel — despite a provision giving her discretion to do so in any case in which she had a "political conflict of interest" — were poorly reasoned and unpersuasive.

A better explanation might go like this: The statute required appointment of an independent counsel only if there is "specific" and "credible" evidence of a possible crime by the President or some other high-level official. And there wasn’t.

In particular, none of the evidence of illegal foreign campaign contributions has ever pointed to guilty knowledge — as distinguished from noncriminal negligence — at the highest levels.

There was, of course, ample evidence of President Clinton’s involvement in a massive assault on the spirit of the campaign finance laws: the raising and spending of millions in "soft money" for Democratic National Committee "issue advertisements" supporting the Clinton campaign. But the Dole campaign did much the same thing. And this was apparently not a crime. Indeed, in December the Federal Election Commission ruled 6-0 that it was not even a civil violation of the nightmarishly complex, loophole-riddled campaign finance laws.

While the Attorney General could still have invoked the discretionary provision to pass the buck to an independent counsel, she was probably wise not to do so.

That’s because an independent-counsel investigation might well have become an endless, costly, wasteful, distracting exercise in futility, as have some others under the much- criticized statute, which Congress allowed to expire this summer.

To ensure consistency and fairness, an independent counsel would have needed jurisdiction to conduct wide-ranging investigations of the entire top echelons of both the Clinton and the Dole campaigns. This could have gone on for years and years, with dozens and dozens of prosecutors and FBI agents looking endlessly for probably nonexistent crimes.

Independent Counsel David Barrett spent four years and $9 million extracting a misdemeanor plea and a $10,000 fine from former HUD Secretary Henry G. Cisneros for misleading the FBI about how much money he had given his former mistress. Imagine such a man turned loose on the campaign finance mess.

So Reno was right — some even say courageous — in resisting the clamor for an independent counsel.

She has been neither right nor courageous, however, in other matters that have gotten less attention than they deserved. Among them:

• Since 1993, Reno has been craven in yielding to pressure from White House politicos to back Clinton’s tough-on- crime posture — and to abandon her own previously avowed principles — by supporting such law-enforcement excesses as the grotesquely draconian mandatory minimum prison sentences for nonviolent, small-time drug offenders.
   
• Reno embraced an Orwellian view of the Constitution in approving a Justice Department brief in 1997, arguing (unsuccessfully) that when California’s voters prohibited the state from using racial preferences, they violated "the equal protection of the laws."
   
• By her silence, Reno condoned the demagogic White House attacks — including Hillary Rodham Clinton’s "vast right-wing conspiracy" claim — on an independent counsel (Kenneth Starr) whose appointment to investigate the Monica Lewinsky matter Reno had sought, and whose prosecutors were on loan from Reno’s own Justice Deparment.

  So it seems Reno gets trashed when she’s least at fault; and when she’s most at fault, she gets little criticism. A fitting pattern, perhaps, for an Attorney General whose popularity soared in 1993 when she took responsibility (but no blame) for Waco, the deadliest disaster in U.S. law enforcement history.