"By the way, Janet Reno still walks the face of the earth. It's not too late to tell whatever truth she may have suppressed to keep her job."

I wrote that on April 15, 2014, and I'm digging through my archive this morning, looking for Janet Reno, because I see that Janet Reno has died. She was 78 and had been suffering from Parkinson's disease since 1995, when she was the Attorney General of the United States. Her name is associated with 2 painful events in the Bill Clinton administration, Waco and Elian Gonzales. Reno was also the person under the now-defunct Ethics in Government law who determined when an independent counsel would be appointed and when that person should be removed for misconduct, so she was connected to the Bill Clinton impeachment, since she caused the independent Whitewater investigation to begin and she allowed Kenneth Starr to complete his mission.

From the NYT obituary:

Mr. Clinton, committed to naming a woman as attorney general, settled on Ms. Reno after his first choices — the corporate lawyer Zoe Baird and the federal judge Kimba Wood — withdrew their names in the face of criticism after it was revealed that they had employed undocumented immigrants as nannies....

Two months later, she gained the nation’s full attention in a dramatic televised news conference in which she took full responsibility for a botched federal raid of the Waco compound of an offshoot of the Seventh-day Adventists, the Branch Davidians.

The assault, after a long siege involving close to 900 military and law-enforcement personnel and a dozen tanks, left the compound in flames and the group’s charismatic leader, David Koresh, as well as about 75 others, dead, one-third of whom were children....

Questions about her handling of the Waco raid resurfaced in 1999, when new evidence suggested that the F.B.I. might have started the fire that destroyed the compound....

... Elián González, the 6-year-old Cuban boy who was found floating on an inner tube off the coast of Florida after his mother and 10 others drowned in a failed crossing from Cuba by small boat... became a unifying figure among Cuban exiles in South Florida, who were determined to see him remain in the United States in defiance of the Cuban leader, Fidel Castro.

Ms. Reno favored returning Elián to his father in Cuba, and she became immersed in negotiations over his fate because of her ties to Miami.

Ms. Reno was on the phone almost up to the moment agents of the Immigration and Naturalization Service burst into the Miami home of Elián’s relatives and took him away at gunpoint.....

Waco was the subject of that 2014 post of mine, quoted above. That old post was titled "Dick Morris says Bill Clinton 'hated' Janet Reno but wouldn't oust her because he feared 'she would tell the truth about what happened in Waco.'"

"Reno threatened the president with telling the truth about Waco, and that caused the president to back down."

"Then he went into a meeting with her, and he told me that she begged and pleaded, saying that . . . she didn't want to be fired because if she were fired it would look like he was firing her over Waco... And I knew that what that meant was that she would tell the truth about what happened in Waco.

"Now, to be fair, that's my supposition. I don't know what went on in Waco, but that was the cause. But I do know that she told him that if you fire me, I'm going to talk about Waco."

Morris was on TV to discuss the Cliven Bundy incident. What bad luck for Hillary: It has people needing to talk about Waco again....

By the way, Janet Reno still walks the face of the earth. It's not too late to tell whatever truth she may have suppressed to keep her job. What is Morris saying? First, the point seems to be that Reno convinced Clinton that to oust her would give rise to inferences that he believed his administration had done something wrong in Waco. Then Morris adds his inference of what he "knew" it "mean": that there was some "truth" that had been suppressed that would come out.

But Reno's argument didn't require that there be anything more to tell, and Morris knows that, because he goes right to his "to be fair" remark. He doesn't know. And if there was some suppressed truth Reno could tell, why hasn't she told it yet? One answer is that she doesn't want to tell on herself, but that would have been true at the point when she was begging and pleading to keep her job.

Perhaps she left a note. More likely, we will never know.

Here are the names and ages of the 76 people who died at Waco, including Startle Summers, Hollywood Sylvia, Chanel Andrade, and Paiges Gent, who were only 1 year old. They would be 23 years old if they had lived. There were also four 2-year-olds, including one with the sad name Little One Jones.

As for Elian Gonzalez. He's 22, and he just graduated from University of Matanzas with a degree in  industrial engineering. He spoke at his graduation ceremony, promising Fidel Castro that he and the whole class would "fight from whatever trench the revolution demands."