[Infowarrior] - Gonzales Was Told of FBI Violations

[Richard Forno]

Gonzales Was Told of FBI Violations
After Bureau Sent Reports, Attorney General Said He Knew of No Wrongdoing

By John Solomon
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 10, 2007; A01

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/09/AR2007070902
065_pf.html

As he sought to renew the USA Patriot Act two years ago, Attorney General
Alberto R. Gonzales assured lawmakers that the FBI had not abused its potent
new terrorism-fighting powers. "There has not been one verified case of
civil liberties abuse," Gonzales told senators on April 27, 2005.

Six days earlier, the FBI sent Gonzales a copy of a report that said its
agents had obtained personal information that they were not entitled to
have. It was one of at least half a dozen reports of legal or procedural
violations that Gonzales received in the three months before he made his
statement to the Senate intelligence committee, according to internal FBI
documents released under the Freedom of Information Act.

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 national security letters (NSLs), 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.

Justice officials said they could not immediately determine whether Gonzales
read any of the FBI reports in 2005 and 2006 because the officials who
processed them were not available yesterday. But department spokesman Brian
Roehrkasse said that 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.

"The statements from the attorney general are consistent with statements
from other officials at the FBI and the department," Roehrkasse said. He
added that many of the violations the FBI disclosed were not legal
violations and instead involved procedural safeguards or even typographical
errors.

Each of the violations cited in the reports copied to Gonzales was serious
enough to require notification of the President's Intelligence Oversight
Board, which helps police the government's surveillance activities. The
format of each memo was similar, and none minced words.

"This enclosure sets forth details of investigative activity which the FBI
has determined was conducted contrary to the attorney general's guidelines
for FBI National Security Investigations and Foreign Intelligence Collection
and/or laws, executive orders and presidential directives," said the April
21, 2005, letter to the Intelligence Oversight Board.

The oversight board, staffed with intelligence experts from inside and
outside government, was established to report to the attorney general and
president about civil liberties abuses or intelligence lapses. But
Roehrkasse said the fact that a violation is reported to the board "does not
mean that a USA Patriot violation exists or that an individual's civil
liberties have been abused."

Two of the earliest reports sent to Gonzales, during his first month on the
job, in February 2005, involved the FBI's surveillance and search powers. In
one case, the bureau reported a violation involving an "unconsented physical
search" in a counterintelligence case. The details were redacted in the
released memo, but it cited violations of safeguards "that shall protect
constitutional and other legal rights." The second violation involved
electronic surveillance on phone lines that was reinitiated after the
expiration deadline set by a court in a counterterrorism case.

The report sent to Gonzales on April 21, 2005, concerned a violation of the
rules governing NSLs, which allow agents in counterterrorism and
counterintelligence investigations to secretly gather Americans' phone, bank
and Internet records without a court order or a grand jury subpoena. In the
report -- also heavily redacted before being released -- the FBI said its
agents had received a compact disc containing information they did not
request. It was viewed before being sealed in an envelope.

Gonzales received another report of an NSL-related violation a few weeks
later. "A national security letter . . . contained an incorrect phone
number" that resulted in agents collecting phone information that "belonged
to a different U.S. person" than the suspect under investigation, stated a
letter copied to the attorney general on May 6, 2005.

At least two other reports of NSL-related violations were sent to Gonzales,
according to the new documents. In letters copied to him on Dec. 11, 2006,
and Feb. 26, 2007, the FBI reported to the oversight board that agents had
requested and obtained phone data on the wrong people.

Nonetheless, Gonzales reacted with surprise when the Justice Department
inspector general reported this March that there were pervasive problems
with the FBI's handling of NSLs and another investigative tool known as
exigent circumstances letters.

"I was upset when I learned this, as was Director Mueller. To say that I am
concerned about what has been revealed in this report would be an enormous
understatement," Gonzales said in a speech March 9, referring to FBI
Director Robert S. Mueller. The attorney general added that he believed back
in 2005, before the Patriot Act was renewed, that there were no problems
with NSLs. "I've come to learn that I was wrong," he said, making no mention
of the FBI reports sent to him.

Marcia Hofmann, a lawyer for the nonpartisan Electronic Frontier Foundation,
said, "I think these documents raise some very serious questions about how
much the attorney general knew about the FBI's misuse of surveillance powers
and when he knew it." A lawsuit by Hofmann's group seeking internal FBI
documents about NSLs prompted the release of the reports.

Caroline Fredrickson, a lobbyist for the American Civil Liberties Union,
said the new documents raise questions about whether Gonzales misled
Congress at a moment when lawmakers were poised to renew the Patriot Act and
keenly sought assurances that there were no abuses. "It was extremely
important," she said of Gonzales's 2005 testimony. "The attorney general
said there are no problems with the Patriot Act, and there was no
counterevidence at the time."

Some of the reports describe rules violations that the FBI decided not to
report to the intelligence board. In February 2006, for example, FBI
officials wrote that agents sent a person's phone records, which they had
obtained from a provider under a national security letter, to an outside
party. The mistake was blamed on "an error in the mail handling." When the
third party sent the material back, the bureau decided not to report the
mistake as a violation.

The memos also detail instances in which the FBI wrote out new NSLs to cover
evidence that had been mistakenly collected. In a June 30, 2006, e-mail, for
instance, an FBI supervisor asked an agent who had "overcollected" evidence
under a national security letter to forward his original request to lawyers.
"We would like to check the specific language to see if there is anything in
the body that would cover the extra material they gave," the supervisor
wrote.

Sometimes the FBI reached seemingly contradictory conclusions about the
gravity of its errors. On May 6, 2005, the bureau decided that it needed to
report a violation when agents made an "inadvertent" request for data for
the wrong phone number. But on June 1, 2006, in a similar wrong-number case,
the bureau concluded that a violation did not need to be reported because
the agent acted "in good faith."