- - - - - - - - - - - -

Also Today

For a full list of today's Salon News stories, go to the News home page.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

"I am not made of plastic and wiring, but blood and flesh and feeling," he told the media attack dogs, who were poised to snap outside his home. "In the course of a lifetime, these things happen. I can't be sorry for life." Almost instantly, it seemed, Cisneros had neutralized the negative publicity, killing the story with kindness.

Actually, it had only gone into remission.

Almost 11 years later, this September, Cisneros will stand trial for more errors of "blood and flesh and feeling." The former Housing and Urban Development secretary stands accused of 18 counts of conspiracy, lying to a law enforcement officer, concealment and obstruction of justice, related to payments he made to his former lover, Linda Jones (formerly Medlar). He lied about them to the FBI during a routine background check after his HUD appointment. He admitted the payments, mind you, but lied about their size, and encouraged Jones to lie, too. Jones later sued Cisneros for cutting off the payments, and gave tapes of their telephone conversations about the money to the independent counsel.

This week in Washington, at a pretrial hearing in U.S. District Court, Jones made her debut as the government's star witness and testified against Cisneros. For almost three years, she cooperated with independent counsel David Barrett -- although she, too, ran afoul of him for lying, and wound up in jail. Still, Jones provided the secret, selectively edited tapes that became the backbone of Barrett's prosecution of the former housing secretary for his alleged transgressions.

But exactly what were those transgressions, and how did the boy scout of the Clinton administration come to face more than 90 years in prison for them -- a fate worse than any of Kenneth Starr's victims were ever threatened with? Here we go again: Tales of sex and secretly taped conversations, a lawsuit by a woman named Jones and a zealous independent counsel. But instead of facing impeachment and acquittal, like President Clinton, Cisneros had his political career ruined, and he could spend the rest of his life in jail.

In a town filled with so-called experts eager to weigh in on the topic of government scandals, it's hard to find anyone who can explain what happened to Cisneros, and why. The trial of Henry Cisneros is likely to confirm only what we already knew: that Washington's investigative culture is out of control.

Next page | San Antonio's worst-kept secret