Bush’s Justice Department is clearly feeling the heat of the prosecutor-purge scandal, but let’s also not forget that the agency is still in hot water over misuse of “national security letters” (NSLs).<\/p>\n
The letters were originally created in the 1970s for espionage and terrorism investigations, but were expanded under Bush, through the Patriot Act, to apply to almost anyone. The WaPo had a very helpful article<\/a> on NSLs in November 2005, which explained that the law now empowers the FBI 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 in total secrecy, literally forever. This information can be collected without the consent, or even knowledge, of a judge. And these letters are issued routinely, tens of thousands of times a year in the post-9\/11 era.<\/p>\n There are, however, some laws and internal Justice Department regulations to regulate how the NSLs are obtained by law enforcement officials. And as we learned two weeks ago, the FBI has been violating<\/a> these laws, too.<\/p>\n Naturally, new revelations have emerged that make the controversy look even worse. This month, DoJ officials claimed they didn’t realize the agency was ignoring the NSL safeguards. As it turns out, their own lawyers were warning them about abuse<\/a>, but officials ignored the concerns.<\/p>\n Almost two years before the Federal Bureau of Investigation publicly admitted this month that it had ignored its own rules when demanding telephone and financial records about private citizens, a top official in that program warned the bureau about widespread lapses, his lawyer said on Sunday.<\/p>\n The official, Bassem Youssef, who is in charge of the bureau’s Communications Analysis Unit, said he discovered frequent legal lapses and raised concerns with superiors soon after he was assigned to the unit in early 2005.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Youssef became unit chief in 2005 and identified the problem, but according to his lawyer, “was met with apathy and resistance.” What a shock.<\/p>\n Wait, it gets worse. The Washington Post switches up its Justice Department scandal coverage … leading with news that the FBI used an illegal procedure to get thousands of phone records — then tried to retroactively legalize its actions, botching that too.<\/p>\n A Justice Department investigation turned up “uncontrolled” binge usage of “exigent circumstance” letters by the FBI. The letters “circumvented” the law by asking for call records from phone companies, now<\/i>, and indicating that all the legal mumbo-jumbo would be set straight later. In many cases, it never was. Recently the FBI tried to “clean up” the problem by quickly scribbling requests for the information they had already requisitioned, screwing up the law again in the process.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n It’s quite a tight ship Alberto Gonzales is running over there, isn’t it?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Bush’s Justice Department is clearly feeling the heat of the prosecutor-purge scandal, but let’s also not forget that the agency is still in hot water over misuse of “national security letters” (NSLs). The letters were originally created in the 1970s for espionage and terrorism investigations, but were expanded under Bush, through the Patriot Act, to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10245","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10245","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10245"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10245\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\nCiting a report<\/a> in the Washington Post, Slate’s Barron YoungSmith explained<\/a> just how badly the Justice Department botched the follow-up.<\/p>\n