Politics

Grand Jury Declines Condit Case

September 10, 2001 / 10:23 PM EDT / AP

A county grand jury has rejected flight attendant Anne Marie Smith's complaint that Rep. Gary Condit obstructed justice when he asked her to sign an affidavit stating they didn't have an affair.

Stanislaus County's 19-member civil grand jury reached its secret decision Thursday night and sent it by mail to Smith's lawyer, James Robinson. The letter arrived Monday at his Seattle office.

Panel foreman Robert E. Johnson said in the letter that the jury voted to take no action because it was filed in the wrong jurisdiction

In her complaint, Smith claimed that Condit, his chief of staff, Mike Lynch, and Don Thornton, an investigator who worked for one of Condit's lawyers, conspired to obstruct justice by encouraging her to commit perjury.

Smith, 40, said she and Condit had a 10-month romance and that his intermediaries tried to get her to sign a false affidavit denying the affair.

Condit, D-Calif., has denied asking anybody to lie, and he disputes Smith's characterization of their association. His attorney, Abbe Lowell, said Smith and the congressman apparently have different definitions of the word "relationship."

Robinson took the unusual tactic of filing the complaint with the civil grand jury instead of letting the district attorney investigate and forward it to the county's criminal grand jury.

The strategy appeared to backfire because the civil grand jury serves as a watchdog of local government and is not authorized to indict crime suspects.

Robinson and Judicial Watch, a conservative legal group, specifically chose that legal avenue to circumvent District Attorney James Brazelton because they said they don't trust him. Judicial Watch filed the complaint for Smith because Robinson is not a member of the California bar.

Prosecutors have said the complaint does not allege that any state law was broken, said Carol Shipley, assistant district attorney.

Robinson said in a statement that there was no legal basis for the grand jury's decision. And he said there was clear evidence that a crime was committed in California by Condit and his intermediaries.

"To speciously claim that a California State Court lacks jurisdiction in this matter is preposterous," Robinson said in a written statement.

Shipley said there were other jurisdiction problems with the complaint because it has only a tangential connection to Stanislaus County.