Nothing provides a tone-setter for today’s confrontational Senate Judiciary Committee showdown with Attorney General Alberto Gonzales like a bracing denial of the facts. And that’s what Gonzales gave to chairman Pat Leahy when Leahy asked about Gonzales’s repeated statements to Congress that there weren’t any problems with the way the FBI used their National Security Letter authorities to gain personal or financial information on U.S. citizens without warrants. In fact, the AG received repeated and timely notification about NSL abuse precisely when he was telling Congress that nothing was wrong.
Leahy started by asking, simply, if Gonzales wished to change his earlier testimony:
On the strict question of whether Gonzales, you know, lied, he pled context: he was speaking earlier about broader problems with the Patriot Act. But that’s obviously wrong, since the FBI’s NSL authority for intelligence investigations derives from the Patriot Act. So then he sought to redefine what we should mean by “abuse.” Just because a problem with a National Security Letter is serious enough to require notification of the president’s Intelligence Oversight Board (IOB), he said, doesn’t mean it’s a big deal.
IOB violations, which is what I want to refer to these as — is IOB violations — referrals or violations made to the Intelligence Oversight Board. These do not reflect, as a general matter, intentional abuses of the Patriot Act.
But the issue isn’t intentionality. It’s whether the process allowing FBI agents to obtain information on American citizens without court orders is sufficiently rigorous to ensure that the wrong people don’t find themselves mistakenly ensnared in an investigation. That’s exactly what happened with these “IOB violations” — something Gonzales was informed about, and something he didn’t tell the Senate, nor deal with, until a March report by the Department of Justice’s Inspector General disclosed the problem.
The “good news,” Gonzales states, is that under just-issued rules to correct the problem that Gonzales didn’t tell the Senate existed, he’ll be notified in a “semi-annual report” after the Justice Department’s National Security Division studies IOB referrals. Of course, Gonzales’s notification of NSL blunders hasn’t been the problem over the last three years — getting him to do anything about it has. Leahy called it an “Alice in Wonderland” situation.
