Sunday, March 11, 2007
Political Scum, Justice Dept. Edition
First, please let me apologize for my lack of news lately. I've been working ungodly hours and have not been able to keep up with the normal scumminess coming out of our nation's capital.
As I was working last week, I happened upon a congressional hearing in which the Senate was trying to discover why 7 US prosecutors were fired. These prosecutors were never given any hint that their supervisors in Washington were unhappy with their work. They had all received good job reviews.
But, they were also being pressured by some in the Bush administration along with some Republican members of Congress about investigations they were doing of possible Democratic scandals. They just didn't seem to be moving quickly enough to influence last year's elections. Oops, not towing the political line is obviously justification for losing one's job if one is a prosecutor under the supervision of Alberto Gonzales. When working for W, there is no prosecutorial independence.
As I was investigating these happenings, I found even more ugliness. It seems that the Inspector General for the Justice department was actually allowed to do his job. In checking out the FBI, he has found that they have been collecting information on 50,000 US citizens without either proper authority or decent record-keeping. Not only were these items of information available to federal, state and local law enforcement agencies, but also some foreign governments. Our country is actually spying on us for other countries.
Also, this Justice Department has screwed up multiple prosecutions through pure incompetence.
What is the thread which runs through all these things (either than W)? It's Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. He has either mismanaged his department to the point of complete ineffectiveness, or his purely political slant on the law of the land has led his agency to be the worst since the Nixon years. On top of that, he was one of the main proponents of allowing torture of people who we capture and detain.
All of this leads me to one conclusion. Alberto Gonzales is Political Scum!
Please see just the tip of this particular iceberg from stories in the Washington Post.
Prosecutors Say They Felt Pressured, Threatened
Hill Republicans, Justice Dept. Cited
By Dan Eggen and Paul Kane
Washington Post Staff Writers Wednesday, March 7, 2007; Page A01
Six fired U.S. attorneys testified on Capitol Hill yesterday that they had separately been the target of complaints, improper telephone calls and thinly veiled threats from a high-ranking Justice Department official or members of Congress, both before and after they were abruptly removed from their jobs.
In back-to-back hearings in the Senate and House, former U.S. attorney David C. Iglesias of New Mexico and five other former prosecutors recounted specific instances in which some said they felt pressured by Republicans on corruption cases and one said a Justice Department official warned him to keep quiet or face retaliation.
Iglesias's allegations of congressional interference have prompted a Senate ethics committee inquiry. Yesterday he offered new details about telephone calls he received in October from Sen. Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.) and Rep. Heather A. Wilson (R-N.M.), saying he felt "leaned on" and "sickened" by the contacts seeking information about an investigation of a local Democrat.
Another former prosecutor, John McKay of Seattle, alleged for the first time that he received a call from the chief of staff to Rep. Doc Hastings (R-Wash.), asking about an inquiry into vote-fraud charges in the state's hotly contested 2004 gubernatorial election. McKay said he cut the call short.
Ed Cassidy, a former Hastings aide who now works for House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), said yesterday that the call was routine and did not violate "permissible limits" on contact with federal prosecutors. Hastings, the ranking Republican on the House ethics committee, also said that the exchange was "entirely appropriate."
In remarks after the hearings, McKay said that officials in the White House counsel's office, including then-counsel Harriet E. Miers, asked him to explain why he had "mishandled" the governor's race during an interview for a federal judgeship in September 2006. McKay was informed after his dismissal that he also was not a finalist for the federal bench.
White House spokesman Scott Stanzel declined last night to respond to McKay's comments.
Yesterday's testimony featured new allegations of threatened overt retaliation against the prosecutors, as former U.S. attorney Bud Cummins of Little Rock said a senior Justice Department official warned him on Feb. 20 that the fired prosecutors should remain quiet about their dismissals. Cummins recounted in an e-mail made public yesterday that the official cautioned that administration officials would "pull their gloves off and offer public criticisms to defend their actions more fully."
"It seemed clear that they would see that as a major escalation of the conflict meriting some kind of unspecified form of retaliation," Cummins wrote in the e-mail, which he sent as a cautionary note to fellow prosecutors.
The senior official, Michael J. Elston, chief of staff to Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty, wrote in a letter to the Senate that he never intended to send a threatening message in his talks with Cummins. Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said that "a private and collegial conversation" was "being twisted into a perceived threat by former disgruntled employees grandstanding before Congress."
The six U.S. attorneys who appeared yesterday had declined to testify voluntarily. They were subpoenaed by a House Judiciary subcommittee and threatened with subpoenas in the Senate. Their testimony marked the latest twist in the U.S. attorneys saga, which began quietly on Dec. 7 with a spate of firings, but has prompted concern among current and former federal prosecutors that the firings -- and the Justice Department's evasive and shifting explanations -- threaten to permanently damage the credibility of U.S. attorney's offices nationwide.
"The whole series of events has been remarkable and unprecedented," said Mary Jo White, who served for nine years as the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York during the Clinton and Bush administrations. "It's not a matter of whether they have the power to do it; it's a matter of the wisdom of the actions taken. It shows a total disregard for the institution of the U.S. attorney's offices and what they stand for."
Arlen Specter (Pa.), the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said during the testimony that "if the allegations are correct, there has been serious misconduct in what has occurred."
The Justice Department said initially that the prosecutors had "performance-related" problems, but more recently it asserted that they had not adequately carried out Bush administration priorities on immigration, the death penalty and other issues. The department has also acknowledged that Cummins, the Little Rock prosecutor, was asked to resign solely to provide a job for a former aide to presidential adviser Karl Rove.
"In hindsight, perhaps this situation could have been handled better," Assistant Attorney General William E. Moschella said in prepared testimony yesterday in the House. " . . . That said, the department stands by the decisions."
Moschella said Justice did not intend to evade Senate oversight of U.S. attorneys, who under a new law can be appointed on an interim basis indefinitely by Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales.
For the first time, Moschella detailed in public the department's rationale for each of the dismissals (although most of the claims had previously been aired through anonymous comments and documents leaked to reporters). All but one of the fired prosecutors had received positive job evaluations, but Justice officials say those reports do not include all possible performance problems.
Moschella also said it is "dangerous, baseless and irresponsible" to allege that the firings were linked to unhappiness over public corruption probes, as Iglesias and some Democrats have alleged.
In addition to Iglesias, four other fired prosecutors were conducting political corruption investigations of Republicans when they were dismissed. Carol S. Lam of San Diego, for example, oversaw the guilty plea of former Republican representative Randy "Duke" Cunningham, and brought related indictments against a former CIA official and a defense contractor.
Iglesias testified that Wilson called him while he was visiting Washington on Oct. 16 to quiz him about an investigation of a state Democrat related to kickbacks in a courthouse construction project.
"What can you tell me about sealed indictments?" Iglesias said Wilson asked him.
Iglesias said "red flags" immediately went up in his mind because it was unethical for him to talk about an ongoing criminal investigation, particularly on the timing of indictments.
"I was evasive and unresponsive," he said of his conversation with Wilson. She became upset, Iglesias testified, and ended the conversation.
"Well, I guess I'll have to take your word for it," she said, according to Iglesias.
About 10 days later, Iglesias said, Domenici's chief of staff, Steve Bell, called Iglesias at his home in New Mexico and "indicated there were some complaints by constituents." Domenici then got on the phone for a conversation that lasted "one to two minutes," Iglesias recalled.
"Are these going to be filed before November?" Domenici asked, Iglesias testified, referring to the kickback case. Unnerved by the call, Iglesias said he responded that they were not.
"I'm sorry to hear that," Domenici replied, according to Iglesias, who added that the senator then hung up.
"I felt sick afterward," Iglesias said, acknowledging that he did not report the calls to Washington as required under Justice rules. "I felt leaned on. I felt pressured to get these matters moving."
Domenici stressed in a statement issued yesterday that Iglesias "confirmed" that the senator never mentioned the November election and that he had no idea why the prosecutor felt "violated." In a separate statement, Wilson said she was only passing on complaints from unidentified constituents and apologized for any "confusion" about the call.
In the e-mail released yesterday, Cummins wrote that Elston called him after a Feb. 18 Washington Post article, which quoted Cummins as criticizing Justice officials for blaming the firings on performance problems. He said that he defended his remarks, and that he made a point of noting that the prosecutors had declined invitations to testify before Congress.
"He reacted quite a bit to the idea of anyone voluntarily testifying," Cummins wrote, adding later: "I don't want to stir you up . . . or overstate the threatening undercurrent in the call, but the message was clearly there and you should be aware before you speak to the press again if you choose to do that."
Cummins testified that he did not feel threatened by the conversation, but others, including Iglesias and McKay, said they took it as such.
Former U.S. attorneys Daniel Bogden of Las Vegas and Paul Charlton of Phoenix also testified.
Report Details Missteps in Data Collection
By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer Saturday, March 10, 2007; Page A01
Over a three-year period ending in 2005, the FBI collected intimate information about the lives of a population roughly the size of Bethesda's -- 52,000 -- and stored it in an intelligence database accessible to about 12,000 federal, state and local law enforcement authorities and to certain foreign governments.
The FBI did so without systematically retaining evidence that its data collection was legal, without ensuring that all the data it obtained matched its needs or requests, without correctly tallying and reporting its efforts to Congress, and without ferreting out all of its abuses and reporting them to an intelligence oversight board.
These are the conclusions of the Justice Department's uncontested examination of one of the most sensitive and widely used intelligence-gathering tools of the post-Sept. 11 era -- the national security letter (NSL). A report released yesterday by the department's Office of the Inspector General offers the first official glimpse into the use of that impressive tool, and the results, according to the report, are not pretty.
"We believe," the inspector general's office said in a summary of whether and how often the tool might have jeopardized the privacy of U.S. residents, "that a significant number of NSL-related violations are not being identified or reported by the FBI."
The 199-page report, which Congress ordered the inspector general's office to produce over the Justice Department's objections, does not accuse the FBI of deliberate lawbreaking. But it depicts the bureau's 56 field offices and headquarters as paying little heed to the rules, and misunderstanding them, as they used the USA Patriot Act and three other laws to request the telephone records, e-mail addresses, and employment and credit histories of people deemed relevant to terrorism or espionage investigations.
Congress significantly lowered the threshold for the government to obtain such information after the 2001 terrorism attacks, producing what the FBI itself reported as at least a fivefold increase in annual requests. Its tally cited 39,000 requests in 2003, 56,000 in 2004 and 47,000 in 2005 -- involving a total of 24,937 "U.S. persons" (including citizens and green-card holders) and 27,262 foreigners in the United States. In 2004, nine letters alone requested telephone-subscriber information on 11,100 phone numbers.
The inspector general's report discloses, however, that these numbers understated the FBI's use of national security letters to collect data. After checking 77 investigative case files at four FBI field offices, investigators found that those offices had "significantly" underreported the number of requests they had made and that, in this small subset alone, the real number was 22 percent higher.
The FBI also did not keep correct records of the investigations to which these requests were linked, according to the inspector general's report. Its agents did not always obtain the correct, internal authorization for those requests; they made typographical errors in listing key telephone numbers and e-mail addresses; they sought information the laws did not permit them to have; and they were given little to no policy guidance on what they could request or when to report mistakes and abuses, the report said.
"I think it shows that the bureau has failed to comply with the very minimal requirements that the law imposes on the use of this authority, and underscores the problem that arises when an investigative agency can unilaterally exercise such an invasive power," said David Sobel, senior counsel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit advocacy group.
Although the FBI's tally throughout the period studied understated the proportion of U.S. persons targeted by the letters, a trend was evident: National security letters -- which are not subject to judicial review or public disclosure and were initially conceived as useful tools against suspicious foreign nationals -- were used increasingly by the FBI to collect data on U.S. citizens and green-card holders, the report said.
Moreover, these requests were frequently the leading edge of even more intense federal scrutiny, according to the report. Many FBI officials told investigators that an important use of the collected data was to support court "applications for electronic surveillance, physical searches, pen register/trap and trace orders."
"Many FBI personnel used terms to describe NSLs such as 'indispensable' and 'our bread and butter,' " the report said. "Once information is obtained in response to a national security letter, it is indefinitely retained and retrievable" by authorized personnel, the report noted.
The tens of thousands of data-collection requests have produced few criminal charges directly related to terrorism or espionage, according to the inspector general's report. About half of the FBI's field offices did not refer any of those targeted by such requests to prosecutors, the report said, and the most common charges cited by others were fraud, immigration violations and money laundering.
Commercial firms and institutions, which face court action and contempt fines if they do not comply with data-collection requests, were generally exceptionally eager to do so, the report said.
In 19 of the 26 instances in which the FBI itself found a possible violation of the rules during this period, the recipient of such letters "provided more information than was requested or provided information on the wrong person," according to the report. In other instances of abuse discovered by the office of the inspector general, the FBI received "unauthorized information," such as unrequested telephone billing records or e-mail information for longer periods than the bureau sought, the report said.
But the field office errors were small compared with what the report described as major abuses by counterterrorism officials at FBI headquarters.
For example, the FBI on 739 occasions used secret contracts with three telephone companies to obtain records related to 3,000 phone numbers after asserting -- in most instances -- that the records were needed because of "exigent circumstances" and promising that requests for subpoenas had already been sent to U.S. attorney's offices.
In fact, many of these claims were false, according to the report: The letters were mostly used in "non-emergency circumstances"; no documentation existed of a connection to "pending national security investigations"; and "subpoenas requesting the information had not been provided to the U.S. Attorney's Office before the letters were sent."
In a second abuse, the headquarters staff sent 300 requests for data "in connection with a classified special project" without tying the requests to specific investigations, a violation of internal FBI rules, the inspector general's report said.
Staff researcher Madonna Lebling contributed to this report.
As I was working last week, I happened upon a congressional hearing in which the Senate was trying to discover why 7 US prosecutors were fired. These prosecutors were never given any hint that their supervisors in Washington were unhappy with their work. They had all received good job reviews.
But, they were also being pressured by some in the Bush administration along with some Republican members of Congress about investigations they were doing of possible Democratic scandals. They just didn't seem to be moving quickly enough to influence last year's elections. Oops, not towing the political line is obviously justification for losing one's job if one is a prosecutor under the supervision of Alberto Gonzales. When working for W, there is no prosecutorial independence.
As I was investigating these happenings, I found even more ugliness. It seems that the Inspector General for the Justice department was actually allowed to do his job. In checking out the FBI, he has found that they have been collecting information on 50,000 US citizens without either proper authority or decent record-keeping. Not only were these items of information available to federal, state and local law enforcement agencies, but also some foreign governments. Our country is actually spying on us for other countries.
Also, this Justice Department has screwed up multiple prosecutions through pure incompetence.
What is the thread which runs through all these things (either than W)? It's Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. He has either mismanaged his department to the point of complete ineffectiveness, or his purely political slant on the law of the land has led his agency to be the worst since the Nixon years. On top of that, he was one of the main proponents of allowing torture of people who we capture and detain.
All of this leads me to one conclusion. Alberto Gonzales is Political Scum!
Please see just the tip of this particular iceberg from stories in the Washington Post.
Prosecutors Say They Felt Pressured, Threatened
Hill Republicans, Justice Dept. Cited
By Dan Eggen and Paul Kane
Washington Post Staff Writers Wednesday, March 7, 2007; Page A01
Six fired U.S. attorneys testified on Capitol Hill yesterday that they had separately been the target of complaints, improper telephone calls and thinly veiled threats from a high-ranking Justice Department official or members of Congress, both before and after they were abruptly removed from their jobs.
In back-to-back hearings in the Senate and House, former U.S. attorney David C. Iglesias of New Mexico and five other former prosecutors recounted specific instances in which some said they felt pressured by Republicans on corruption cases and one said a Justice Department official warned him to keep quiet or face retaliation.
Iglesias's allegations of congressional interference have prompted a Senate ethics committee inquiry. Yesterday he offered new details about telephone calls he received in October from Sen. Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.) and Rep. Heather A. Wilson (R-N.M.), saying he felt "leaned on" and "sickened" by the contacts seeking information about an investigation of a local Democrat.
Another former prosecutor, John McKay of Seattle, alleged for the first time that he received a call from the chief of staff to Rep. Doc Hastings (R-Wash.), asking about an inquiry into vote-fraud charges in the state's hotly contested 2004 gubernatorial election. McKay said he cut the call short.
Ed Cassidy, a former Hastings aide who now works for House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), said yesterday that the call was routine and did not violate "permissible limits" on contact with federal prosecutors. Hastings, the ranking Republican on the House ethics committee, also said that the exchange was "entirely appropriate."
In remarks after the hearings, McKay said that officials in the White House counsel's office, including then-counsel Harriet E. Miers, asked him to explain why he had "mishandled" the governor's race during an interview for a federal judgeship in September 2006. McKay was informed after his dismissal that he also was not a finalist for the federal bench.
White House spokesman Scott Stanzel declined last night to respond to McKay's comments.
Yesterday's testimony featured new allegations of threatened overt retaliation against the prosecutors, as former U.S. attorney Bud Cummins of Little Rock said a senior Justice Department official warned him on Feb. 20 that the fired prosecutors should remain quiet about their dismissals. Cummins recounted in an e-mail made public yesterday that the official cautioned that administration officials would "pull their gloves off and offer public criticisms to defend their actions more fully."
"It seemed clear that they would see that as a major escalation of the conflict meriting some kind of unspecified form of retaliation," Cummins wrote in the e-mail, which he sent as a cautionary note to fellow prosecutors.
The senior official, Michael J. Elston, chief of staff to Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty, wrote in a letter to the Senate that he never intended to send a threatening message in his talks with Cummins. Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said that "a private and collegial conversation" was "being twisted into a perceived threat by former disgruntled employees grandstanding before Congress."
The six U.S. attorneys who appeared yesterday had declined to testify voluntarily. They were subpoenaed by a House Judiciary subcommittee and threatened with subpoenas in the Senate. Their testimony marked the latest twist in the U.S. attorneys saga, which began quietly on Dec. 7 with a spate of firings, but has prompted concern among current and former federal prosecutors that the firings -- and the Justice Department's evasive and shifting explanations -- threaten to permanently damage the credibility of U.S. attorney's offices nationwide.
"The whole series of events has been remarkable and unprecedented," said Mary Jo White, who served for nine years as the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York during the Clinton and Bush administrations. "It's not a matter of whether they have the power to do it; it's a matter of the wisdom of the actions taken. It shows a total disregard for the institution of the U.S. attorney's offices and what they stand for."
Arlen Specter (Pa.), the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said during the testimony that "if the allegations are correct, there has been serious misconduct in what has occurred."
The Justice Department said initially that the prosecutors had "performance-related" problems, but more recently it asserted that they had not adequately carried out Bush administration priorities on immigration, the death penalty and other issues. The department has also acknowledged that Cummins, the Little Rock prosecutor, was asked to resign solely to provide a job for a former aide to presidential adviser Karl Rove.
"In hindsight, perhaps this situation could have been handled better," Assistant Attorney General William E. Moschella said in prepared testimony yesterday in the House. " . . . That said, the department stands by the decisions."
Moschella said Justice did not intend to evade Senate oversight of U.S. attorneys, who under a new law can be appointed on an interim basis indefinitely by Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales.
For the first time, Moschella detailed in public the department's rationale for each of the dismissals (although most of the claims had previously been aired through anonymous comments and documents leaked to reporters). All but one of the fired prosecutors had received positive job evaluations, but Justice officials say those reports do not include all possible performance problems.
Moschella also said it is "dangerous, baseless and irresponsible" to allege that the firings were linked to unhappiness over public corruption probes, as Iglesias and some Democrats have alleged.
In addition to Iglesias, four other fired prosecutors were conducting political corruption investigations of Republicans when they were dismissed. Carol S. Lam of San Diego, for example, oversaw the guilty plea of former Republican representative Randy "Duke" Cunningham, and brought related indictments against a former CIA official and a defense contractor.
Iglesias testified that Wilson called him while he was visiting Washington on Oct. 16 to quiz him about an investigation of a state Democrat related to kickbacks in a courthouse construction project.
"What can you tell me about sealed indictments?" Iglesias said Wilson asked him.
Iglesias said "red flags" immediately went up in his mind because it was unethical for him to talk about an ongoing criminal investigation, particularly on the timing of indictments.
"I was evasive and unresponsive," he said of his conversation with Wilson. She became upset, Iglesias testified, and ended the conversation.
"Well, I guess I'll have to take your word for it," she said, according to Iglesias.
About 10 days later, Iglesias said, Domenici's chief of staff, Steve Bell, called Iglesias at his home in New Mexico and "indicated there were some complaints by constituents." Domenici then got on the phone for a conversation that lasted "one to two minutes," Iglesias recalled.
"Are these going to be filed before November?" Domenici asked, Iglesias testified, referring to the kickback case. Unnerved by the call, Iglesias said he responded that they were not.
"I'm sorry to hear that," Domenici replied, according to Iglesias, who added that the senator then hung up.
"I felt sick afterward," Iglesias said, acknowledging that he did not report the calls to Washington as required under Justice rules. "I felt leaned on. I felt pressured to get these matters moving."
Domenici stressed in a statement issued yesterday that Iglesias "confirmed" that the senator never mentioned the November election and that he had no idea why the prosecutor felt "violated." In a separate statement, Wilson said she was only passing on complaints from unidentified constituents and apologized for any "confusion" about the call.
In the e-mail released yesterday, Cummins wrote that Elston called him after a Feb. 18 Washington Post article, which quoted Cummins as criticizing Justice officials for blaming the firings on performance problems. He said that he defended his remarks, and that he made a point of noting that the prosecutors had declined invitations to testify before Congress.
"He reacted quite a bit to the idea of anyone voluntarily testifying," Cummins wrote, adding later: "I don't want to stir you up . . . or overstate the threatening undercurrent in the call, but the message was clearly there and you should be aware before you speak to the press again if you choose to do that."
Cummins testified that he did not feel threatened by the conversation, but others, including Iglesias and McKay, said they took it as such.
Former U.S. attorneys Daniel Bogden of Las Vegas and Paul Charlton of Phoenix also testified.
Report Details Missteps in Data Collection
By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer Saturday, March 10, 2007; Page A01
Over a three-year period ending in 2005, the FBI collected intimate information about the lives of a population roughly the size of Bethesda's -- 52,000 -- and stored it in an intelligence database accessible to about 12,000 federal, state and local law enforcement authorities and to certain foreign governments.
The FBI did so without systematically retaining evidence that its data collection was legal, without ensuring that all the data it obtained matched its needs or requests, without correctly tallying and reporting its efforts to Congress, and without ferreting out all of its abuses and reporting them to an intelligence oversight board.
These are the conclusions of the Justice Department's uncontested examination of one of the most sensitive and widely used intelligence-gathering tools of the post-Sept. 11 era -- the national security letter (NSL). A report released yesterday by the department's Office of the Inspector General offers the first official glimpse into the use of that impressive tool, and the results, according to the report, are not pretty.
"We believe," the inspector general's office said in a summary of whether and how often the tool might have jeopardized the privacy of U.S. residents, "that a significant number of NSL-related violations are not being identified or reported by the FBI."
The 199-page report, which Congress ordered the inspector general's office to produce over the Justice Department's objections, does not accuse the FBI of deliberate lawbreaking. But it depicts the bureau's 56 field offices and headquarters as paying little heed to the rules, and misunderstanding them, as they used the USA Patriot Act and three other laws to request the telephone records, e-mail addresses, and employment and credit histories of people deemed relevant to terrorism or espionage investigations.
Congress significantly lowered the threshold for the government to obtain such information after the 2001 terrorism attacks, producing what the FBI itself reported as at least a fivefold increase in annual requests. Its tally cited 39,000 requests in 2003, 56,000 in 2004 and 47,000 in 2005 -- involving a total of 24,937 "U.S. persons" (including citizens and green-card holders) and 27,262 foreigners in the United States. In 2004, nine letters alone requested telephone-subscriber information on 11,100 phone numbers.
The inspector general's report discloses, however, that these numbers understated the FBI's use of national security letters to collect data. After checking 77 investigative case files at four FBI field offices, investigators found that those offices had "significantly" underreported the number of requests they had made and that, in this small subset alone, the real number was 22 percent higher.
The FBI also did not keep correct records of the investigations to which these requests were linked, according to the inspector general's report. Its agents did not always obtain the correct, internal authorization for those requests; they made typographical errors in listing key telephone numbers and e-mail addresses; they sought information the laws did not permit them to have; and they were given little to no policy guidance on what they could request or when to report mistakes and abuses, the report said.
"I think it shows that the bureau has failed to comply with the very minimal requirements that the law imposes on the use of this authority, and underscores the problem that arises when an investigative agency can unilaterally exercise such an invasive power," said David Sobel, senior counsel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit advocacy group.
Although the FBI's tally throughout the period studied understated the proportion of U.S. persons targeted by the letters, a trend was evident: National security letters -- which are not subject to judicial review or public disclosure and were initially conceived as useful tools against suspicious foreign nationals -- were used increasingly by the FBI to collect data on U.S. citizens and green-card holders, the report said.
Moreover, these requests were frequently the leading edge of even more intense federal scrutiny, according to the report. Many FBI officials told investigators that an important use of the collected data was to support court "applications for electronic surveillance, physical searches, pen register/trap and trace orders."
"Many FBI personnel used terms to describe NSLs such as 'indispensable' and 'our bread and butter,' " the report said. "Once information is obtained in response to a national security letter, it is indefinitely retained and retrievable" by authorized personnel, the report noted.
The tens of thousands of data-collection requests have produced few criminal charges directly related to terrorism or espionage, according to the inspector general's report. About half of the FBI's field offices did not refer any of those targeted by such requests to prosecutors, the report said, and the most common charges cited by others were fraud, immigration violations and money laundering.
Commercial firms and institutions, which face court action and contempt fines if they do not comply with data-collection requests, were generally exceptionally eager to do so, the report said.
In 19 of the 26 instances in which the FBI itself found a possible violation of the rules during this period, the recipient of such letters "provided more information than was requested or provided information on the wrong person," according to the report. In other instances of abuse discovered by the office of the inspector general, the FBI received "unauthorized information," such as unrequested telephone billing records or e-mail information for longer periods than the bureau sought, the report said.
But the field office errors were small compared with what the report described as major abuses by counterterrorism officials at FBI headquarters.
For example, the FBI on 739 occasions used secret contracts with three telephone companies to obtain records related to 3,000 phone numbers after asserting -- in most instances -- that the records were needed because of "exigent circumstances" and promising that requests for subpoenas had already been sent to U.S. attorney's offices.
In fact, many of these claims were false, according to the report: The letters were mostly used in "non-emergency circumstances"; no documentation existed of a connection to "pending national security investigations"; and "subpoenas requesting the information had not been provided to the U.S. Attorney's Office before the letters were sent."
In a second abuse, the headquarters staff sent 300 requests for data "in connection with a classified special project" without tying the requests to specific investigations, a violation of internal FBI rules, the inspector general's report said.
Staff researcher Madonna Lebling contributed to this report.
# posted by Kevin @ 10:00 PM 
