Today’s Must ReadAlberto Gonzales lied, the FBI spied.
In March, and again last month, the Justice Department’s inspector general and internal FBI reviews found that the bureau repeatedly misused its Patriot-Act power to subpoena e-mail or financial records without court orders. But years before the reviews were completed — and word of them became public — Attorney General Gonzales knew that the abuses surrounding so-called National Security Letters existed. And yet this is what he told Congress on April 27, 2005: “There has not been one verified case of civil liberties abuse.”
Reports the Washington Post:
The acts recounted in the FBI reports included unauthorized surveillance, an illegal property search and a case in which an Internet firm improperly turned over a compact disc with data that the FBI was not entitled to collect, the documents show. Gonzales was copied on each report that said administrative rules or laws protecting civil liberties and privacy had been violated.
The reports also alerted Gonzales in 2005 to problems with the FBI’s use of an anti-terrorism tool known as a national security letter (NSL), well before the Justice Department’s inspector general brought widespread abuse of the letters in 2004 and 2005 to light in a stinging report this past March.
Some of the mistakes sent to Gonzales’s attention were egregious. In May 2005, an NSL containing an incorrect phone number allowed the FBI to wiretap a U.S. citizen that had nothing to do with the target of the bureau’s investigation. An earlier slip-up authorized surveillance on a phone line after a court ordered the wiretapping stopped. In June 2006, the FBI sought to cover-up an “over-collection”: when a superior agent learned of the mistake, he recommended going to bureau lawyers to see if there wasn’t language in the NSL “that would cover the extra material.” Many of the reports were serious enough to be sent as well to President Bush’s Intelligence Oversight Board, which monitors civil-liberties abuses. (Some the FBI decided it was best the board didn’t know about.)
Yet when DOJ Inspector General Glenn Fine released his March report into NSL abuses, Gonzales was shocked, shocked to learn that there was gambling with the counterterrorism rules in his fine establishment. Spokeswoman Tasia Scalinos told the Post in March that the AG “has ordered the FBI and the department to restore accountability and to put in place safeguards to ensure greater oversight and controls over the use of national security letters.” An unnamed official described Gonzales as “incensed” to hear of the abuses. Again, this is years after Gonzales begin receiving alerts about FBI mistakes with Patriot and other counterterrorism powers — alerts he appears to have received with some frequency. And not until March did Gonzales order FBI Director Bob Mueller to put new safeguards over NSLs in place.
So what’s Gonzales’s explanation? According to spokesman Brian Roehrkasse, “when Gonzales testified, he was speaking “in the context” of reports by the department’s inspector general before this year that found no misconduct or specific civil liberties abuses related to the Patriot Act.”
That context, it’s now clear, was misleading. Other unnamed Justice officials used the tried-and-true standby that it’s unclear if Gonzales ever read the repeated reports about abuse that he received. Roehrkasse bolstered the AG’s case by saying that even if Gonzales messed up, so did his subordinates, as his assurances to Congress were “consistent with statements from other officials at the FBI and the department.” Think that’ll satisfy Patrick Leahy and John Conyers?
