Did Gonzalez Merely Lie... Or Did He Commit Perjury?

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

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.

Evidently, Attorney General Gonzales cannot tell the difference between the truth and an outright lie. If, however, he claims that he was unaware of these reports of wrongdoing by the FBI, then he convicts himself of being incompetent in his job. So the question we are left with is a choice between three alternatives:

1. Alberto Gonzales lied to congress, which is a felony even if it is not under oath, and punishable by up to 10 years in prison;
2. Alberto Gonzales committed perjury by lying underoath, which is a felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison;
3. Alberto Gonzales is a complete incompetent in his role as the top law enforcement officer and as an officer of the US government and our federal courts.

In either case, it is clear that Gonzales has executed specific malfeasance, conspiracy with others in our government to defraud the public and Congress, and is unfit to hold his office.

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.

Liar, Liar, Gonzales' pants should be on fire! Are we ever going to get a truthful answer about anything going on in our government under the direction of this president and his cabinet?

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.

If Gonzales failed to read these reports, or if those that processed them failed to alert him specifically about these violations of our laws, then he proves he is incapable of being our top law enforcement officer, who is supposed to be the primary person responsible for protecting our civil liberties and enforcing the US Constitution.

"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.

Bovine excrement in the extremis! Who are they kidding. A failure to observe civil rights and the proper procedure is both a civil and criminal breach of law under several laws, including the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, the Bill of Rights (a part of our Constitution), and several provisions of the USA PAtriot Act.

"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."

What kind of doubletalk is this statement? Most FBI agents are trained lawyers (almost 70% according to FBI statistics), most of whom are admitted to the bar in several states and allowed to appear on behalf of the government within the federal courts. Are we really expected to belief that the top law enforcement organization and its officers are so unfamiliar with our laws that they do not understand when a breach of that law has occurred?

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.

This seems clear and plain to me... The FBI recognized its own violation of the standards of law. The FBI followed the law and reported these breaches and our government, as represented by President Bush and Attorney General Gonzales, conspired to ignore these felonies and misdeeds.

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 an exigent circumstances letter.

These reports demonstrate the level of incompetence inherent in the process of covert and secret wiretaps that are not reviewed by a court PRIOR to instituting the tap or search. These reports demonstrate why it is imperative to provide for a full and complete adherence to the provisions of the Foruth Amendment standard of sworn testimony before a magistrtate or justice, and clear evidence of probable cause, before a search, seizure, arrest or wiretap is authorized. While we can all agree mistakes can happen, fewer mistakes will occur if the proper Fourth Amendment procedures are followed.

"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.

Convenient lies if ever there were any. Can we believe anything this man says? I think not.

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.

Yeah! We should all be supporting EFF!

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."

Gonzales has now joined Scooter Libby, Bill Clinton, and others from our government in the trend of lying to us and our congress. Nobody with a sound mind can argue that these lies are not intentional, leading us to the conclusion that there is an ongoing conspiracy on the part of Gonzales and his superiors to deliberately lie to us and mislead us.

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.

Should the FBI, or any agency of the government, be allowed to determine its own violations of law? Should we have a government that operates completely in the dark as the current leadership desires? This is wrong in so many ways... and it violates our very principles of freedom, justice, fairness and openness in government.

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.

This is further evidence of wrongdoing, conspiracy (a legal term in this case) and fraudulent acts on the part of our top law enforcement officials.

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."

Can a pattern of fraud, conspiracy and outright violation of the laws of our nation be considered "good faith" at any time? I think not.