In some ways, it was the scandal that got away. In March, we learned that Bush Justice Department, more specifically the FBI, was engaged in widespread, illegal misuse of “national security letters” (NSLs).
Using NSLs, the FBI has the power to obtain secret information about Americans — including phone calls, internet visits, even credit ratings — whether they’re suspected of wrongdoing or not. Officials can probe personal information without the consent, or even knowledge, of a judge.
There are, however, some laws and internal Justice Department regulations to regulate how the NSLs are obtained by law enforcement officials. As it turns out, the FBI violated these laws. What’s more, while DoJ officials claimed they didn’t realize the agency was ignoring the NSL safeguards, the truth was that their own lawyers had been warning them about abuse, but officials ignored the concerns. And just for added fun, the FBI tried to retroactively legalize its actions, and screwed that up too.
Today, however, the WaPo has a front-page piece explaining that the illegal abuse at the FBI is bigger, more widespread, and more scandalous than anyone outside the DoJ realized.
An internal FBI audit has found that the bureau potentially violated the law or agency rules more than 1,000 times while collecting data about domestic phone calls, e-mails and financial transactions in recent years, far more than was documented in a Justice Department report in March that ignited bipartisan congressional criticism.
The new audit covers just 10 percent of the bureau’s national security investigations since 2002, and so the mistakes in the FBI’s domestic surveillance efforts probably number several thousand, bureau officials said in interviews. The earlier report found 22 violations in a much smaller sampling. […]
[T]wo dozen of the newly-discovered violations involved agents’ requests for information that U.S. law did not allow them to have, according to the audit results provided to The Washington Post. Only two such examples were identified earlier in the smaller sample.
In other words, the FBI has been breaking the law. Frequently.
Pay particular attention to the numbers listed in the Post. An internal audit found 1,000 abuses while reviewing 10% of NSL investigations since 2002. If the statistical sample is representative, we’re looking maybe 10,000 instances of FBI agents obtaining information about Americans that they could not legally receive.
When this story first emerged in March, it drew bi-partisan criticism, but was quickly forgotten. Even after FBI Director Robert Mueller conceded that the bureau had been breaking the law, there was far more interest in the scandal surrounding purged U.S. Attorneys, and the FBI mess was quickly brushed off the front page (and the political world’s radar).
But as TNR’s Eve Fairbanks explained at the time, the FBI mess is practically as serious.
The FBI’s misuse of the Patriot Act doesn’t really have anything to do with these other little fires. In fact, the withering report that implicates various FBI field offices in years-long abuses of power–failing to save copies of national security letters, omitting 20 percent of the letters in their reports to headquarters, making up emergencies to bypass court approval for warrants, and saving inappropriately gathered private information that should have been purged–suggests the FBI affair is, arguably, just as serious as the U.S. attorneys scandal and the others. At the very least, it’s worth a lengthy, focused, and hard-hitting inquisition of the agency’s chief.
It’s the inherent problem of watching the Bush administration — it’s so corrupt, and has so little regard for the rule of law, that the scandals pile up too quickly. It’s hard to keep track of them all and focus the necessary attention on each.
Let this be a lesson to all future presidential administrations — if you’re going to engage in unethical and illegal behavior, do it a lot. It keeps the media distracted and your political rivals off-balance.