As hard as he tried, FBI Director Mueller’s press conference the other day in no way absolved Attorney General Gonzalez of guilt. Once again, it looks like another patsy will lose his job to deflect attention off another Bush crony. Mueller’s orders had to come from somewhere, and you can bet the Justice Department was the source. So far, Mueller’s been taking the heat but for how long?
How soon will the breadth and scope of the Bush/Cheney crime syndicate be revealed?
According to documents and senior FBI and Justice Department officials, during a two-year period, bureau lawyers and managers expressed escalating concerns about flawed, potentially illegal procedures utilized to obtain thousands of U.S. telephone records.
FBI attorneys raised concerns as early as late October 2004, but failed to examine the dubious procedures closer until last year, FBI spokesmen acknowledged. They also underestimated the overall problem until the Justice Department opened an investigation.
Last year, counterterrorism agents wrote new letters to phone companies demanding information the bureau already possessed. Under greater pressure to provide stronger legal footing, at least one unnamed senior official at FBI headquarters signed the national security letters without providing proof that the letters were commensurate with investigations regarding FBI counterterrorism or espionage, an FBI official stated.
Emergency demands for records served on three major phone companies by FBI officials involved the use of exigent circumstance letters along with the ill-conceived national security letters.
From Sunday’s Washington Post:
Referring to the exigent circumstance letters, Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) wrote in a letter Friday to Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine: "It is . . . difficult to imagine why there should not have been swift and severe consequences for anyone who knowingly signed . . . a letter containing false statements. Anyone at the FBI who knew about that kind of wrongdoing had an obligation to put a stop to it and report it immediately."
A March 9 report by Fine bluntly stated that the FBI's use of the exigency letters "circumvented" the law that governs the FBI's access to personal information about U.S. residents.
The exigency letters, created by the FBI's New York office after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, told telephone providers that the FBI needed information immediately and would follow up with subpoenas later. There is no basis in the law to compel phone companies to turn over information using such letters, Fine found, and in many cases, agents never followed up with the promised subpoenas, he said.
Apparently, General Fine’s report failed to state the FBI’s subsequent efforts to legalize those actions by using national security letters last year. Fine’s report prompted a storm of criticism on the bureau, and a news conference at which Director Robert S. Mueller III took responsibility for the whole thing. A number of lawmakers proposed an immediate curtailing of the Patriot Act’s expansive anti-terrorism powers.
After acknowledging in a letter to Fine released with the March 9 report about bureau use of the questionable shortcuts, violation of internal policies, and additional mistakes in their use of the exigent circumstance letters, Mueller added that he had banned the use of exigent circumstance letters in the future. Mueller defended the letter’s value and denied the agency intentionally violated the law.
Other FBI officials acknowledged endemic procedural and documentation problems but didn’t include the intentional gathering of American citizen’s phone records. Director Mueller has subsequently ordered a nationwide audit to determine if inappropriate use of the exigency letters went beyond one unit at headquarters. The audit started Friday.
More from the article:
"We wish, in retrospect, that we had learned about this sooner, corrections had been made and the process was more transparent," FBI Assistant Director John Miller said yesterday.
Fine's report said the bureau's counterterrorism office used the exigency letters at least 739 times between 2003 and 2005 to obtain records related to 3,000 separate phone numbers. FBI officials acknowledged that the process was so flawed that they may have to destroy some phone records to keep them from being used in the future, if the bureau does not find proof they were gathered in connection with an authorized investigation.
Disciplinary action may be taken when the bureau completes an internal audit, a senior FBI official said in an interview at headquarters Friday.
An attorney for the ACLU, Ann Beeson, has sued the FBI to block some of its information requests. She said that if the bureau cannot prove a link between the letters and an ongoing investigation, the requests are nothing but "... a total fishing expedition."
Lawmakers on Capitol Hill have begun to investigate just who knew about the use of the letters and why they didn’t act quicker to stop the practice. Senator Grassley asked Fine to turn over copies of all FBI emails related to the letters of demand, as well as transcripts of interviews conducted by Fine to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy scheduled a hearing for Wednesday with Director Mueller as its primary witness, Fine and FBI general counsel Valerie Caproni.
FBI and Justice Department officials said most of the letters at issue were drafted by the Communications Analysis Unit (CAU), which comprises about a dozen people assigned to analyze telephone records and other communications for counterterrorism investigators. They sent the secret requests to three companies -- AT&T, Verizon and a third firm whose identity could not be learned. Since the 2001 terrorist attacks, the FBI has been paying the companies' cost of supplying such records almost instantaneously in a form that its agents can readily examine, according to the report and the senior FBI official.
In each letter, the FBI asserted that "due to exigent circumstances, it is requested that records for the attached list of telephone numbers be provided." The bureau promised in most of the letters that subpoenas for the same information "have been submitted to the U.S. Attorney's office who will process and serve them formally."
But the inspector general's probe concluded that many of the letters were "not sent in exigent circumstances" and that "there sometimes were no open or pending national security investigations tied to the request," contrary to what U.S. law requires. No subpoenas had actually been requested before the letters were sent. The phone companies nonetheless promptly turned over the information, in anticipation of getting a more legally viable document later, FBI officials said.
According to one FBI official, the use of such letters was virtually "uncontrolled." And, by autumn 2005, agents were creating spreadsheets to track phone records that had been collected for over a year but not covered by the appropriate documents.
As for the recipients of the letters, a spokesman for AT&T declined to discuss the subject, instead, referring all inquiries to the FBI. Verizon representative Peter Thonis who neither confirmed nor denied the existence of any contract with the FBI said "... every day Verizon subpoena units respond to emergency requests from federal, state and local law enforcement for select calling records. After 9-11, of course, Verizon responded to FBI emergency requests in terrorist matters, and we had every reason to believe they were legitimate emergency situations."
There’s no doubt that this program has been an egregious ongoing violation of the privacy rights of all Americans. It looks to me like the present day program was simply a perverted progression after 9-11 of a managed process that began well within the law and was compatible with the civil liberties, and then morphed into some kind of criminal enterprise of data-mining.
The sooner Senator Leahy and the others on the Senate Judiciary Committee get to the bottom of this program, the quicker they can end it.
Myself, I’m hoping it leads straight back to good ol’ Abu Gonzalez.
There’s much more in the Post article:
Washington Post