Democrat: Did Gonzales know of FBI violations?

WASHINGTON - Democrats raised new questions yesterday about whether Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales knew about FBI abuses of civil liberties when he told the Senate intelligence committee that no such problems occurred.

Lying to Congress is a crime, but it was unclear whether he knew about the violations when he made his statements to the committee.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D., N.Y.), a longtime critic of the USA Patriot Act, called for a special counsel to investigate. White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said President Bush "still has faith in the attorney general."

On April 27, 2005, while seeking renewal of the broad powers granted to law enforcement under the Patriot Act, Gonzales told the Senate committee that "there has not been one verified case of civil-liberties abuse" from the law, which was enacted after 9/11.

Six days earlier, the FBI had sent Gonzales a copy of a report saying its agents had obtained personal information they were not entitled to.

Several of the reported violations were referred to the President's Intelligence Oversight Board, and copies were sent to other officials. The heavily redacted documents, obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy advocacy group, under the Freedom of Information Act, include referrals to the board dating to 2004. Several referrals were sent to then-Attorney General John Ashcroft.

One was sent to Gonzales, dated April 21, 2005, less than a week before he testified to the committee.

It was unclear whether Gonzales ever saw the documents reporting the violations, and several Justice Department officials said yesterday that they could not remember discussing specific cases with him before an internal March report by inspector general Glenn A. Fine outlined the problems.

Jim Baker, director of the Justice Department's Office of Intelligence Policy and Review, said he had briefed Gonzales and predecessors about what he called "violations of law, regulation, policy by the FBI."

"They have happened in the past," Baker said. "I don't remember discussing these specific ones."

The new developments were first reported by the Washington Post, which said the violations included unauthorized surveillance and an illegal property search.

In a conference call yesterday, Assistant Attorney General Kenneth Wainstein described the violations outlined in the documents as mistakes, not intentional acts of abuse or misconduct.

"When intelligence investigations are done at the pace and the rapidity and the urgency that they're done now after 9/11, there are the possibilities of mistakes," he said.

The FBI documents released show that many of the possible violations were a result of wrong phone numbers or of Internet provider companies giving agents more information than was requested.

Each FBI violation 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 Post reported.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick J. Leahy (D., Vt.) pointed out what he said was another inconsistency: The Justice Department's accounting of when Gonzales became aware of the FBI's abuses of the National Security Letters, which let agents secretly obtain private information on ordinary Americans in terrorism investigations.

According to the department, Gonzales became aware of the abuses before March 9 of this year from a report by the Justice Department's inspector general on that date documenting them. Gonzales had been receiving reports of FBI abuses in terrorism investigations for months before that, according to the Post.

Gonzales is scheduled to testify before Leahy's committee July 24.