Not for commercial use. Solely to be used for the educational purposes of research and open discussion.
The Washington Times
October 29, 1996, Tuesday
After delay, FBI turns over documents; New citizens' past crimes listed
Ruth Larson; THE WASHINGTON TIMES
The Justice Department yesterday agreed to allow the FBI to give Congress 52 boxes of criminal records on newly naturalized citizens after intense, daylong efforts to prevent their release.
Justice Department spokeswoman Carole Florman said the delay was caused by "concern about the use of the files" and fears that people could be identified, even though names and Social Security numbers were deleted from the documents.
Rep. Bill Zeliff, New Hampshire Republican, refused to accept new conditions and insisted on delivery as promised.
FBI Director Louis J. Freeh said Friday that Attorney General Janet Reno had authorized him to turn over the records, which were subpoenaed last week by a House Government Reform and Oversight subcommittee probing abuses of the citizenship process.
But shortly before the truck was scheduled to deliver the boxes to Capitol Hill yesterday afternoon, Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick balked at the deal.
The boxes were delivered to the Rayburn House Office Building in the evening.
They are thought to contain 38,246 criminal records found by the FBI last week in its initial review of an Immigration and Naturalization Service computer tape of recent citizenship applicants.
"He feels it's absolutely wrong to prevent the public from learning what it absolutely has a right to know," said a member of Mr. Zeliff's staff.
A congressional investigator said of Mrs. Gorelick's tactics, "This is just outrageous, for her to be weighing in at the last minute."
He added: "They're scared to death that the rap sheets are going to get out. In every major city - in Chicago, say - they're afraid they're going to have to put out fires on all the murderers they let in."
Rosemary Jenks, director of policy analysis for the Center for Immigration Studies, said: "It's ridiculous. The INS is still trying to stonewall this investigation, when the evidence is clear that criminals were naturalized."
For months, INS employees have expressed concerns about criminal immigrants. In May, an INS employee wrote: "I suggest we keep the current [file] six months, or we'll be naturalizing ax murderers . . . and Nazi war criminals."
Miss Jenks said, "It's interesting that the No. 2 official in the Justice Department was also implicated in the political pressure that came from the White House."
Mrs. Gorelick's name turns up several times in internal White House memos. For example, Doug Farbrother, a staffer in Vice President Al Gore's office, wrote in March about Mrs. Gorelick and INS Deputy Commissioner Chris Sales: "I favor drastic measures. I am meeting with Jamie G and Chris S Friday at 1:30. If I don't get what we need, I will call for heavy artillery."
A subsequent memo outlined the results of that meeting and noted, "Jamie said she would deliver by Tuesday."
The number of convicted criminals granted citizenship has become a hot issue in recent days. Republican Govs. Pete Wilson of California, George W. Bush of Texas, Christine Todd Whitman of New Jersey, Jim Edgar of Illinois and David Beasley of South Carolina have demanded that Miss Reno disclose the number of criminals naturalized.
The FBI has not reviewed a second INS computer tape but estimated that as many as 100,000 of the more than 1 million new citizens have criminal records.
INS Commissioner Doris Meissner defended her agency's screening procedures. "INS deports criminal aliens; we do not naturalize them," she said. "INS is removing criminal aliens from the country at record levels," more than 100,000 the past three years.
Mr. Zeliff also has subpoenaed INS documents on possible criminal aliens. Mrs. Meissner has not said when those records will be turned over, only that the INS has "initiated the necessary process to produce the full range of information requested" in Mr. Zeliff's Sept. 17 and Oct. 16 letters.
Mrs. Meissner said the INS has just completed work on a rule change, begun in 1994, enabling the agency to dramatically speed up the process for revoking citizenship "in the small number of cases in which it has been inappropriately granted."
"Swift action in this limited number of cases should not sully, as the recent misinterpretation of our Citizenship USA program does, the reputations of more than one million new American citizens," she wrote.
Drama to Hearings By Jeff Gannon
Talon News
April 13, 2004
WASHINGTON (Talon News) -- The American Spectator reported Monday that Republican staffers on the 9/11 Commission are "looking for a way to place commission member Jamie Gorelick before the body she sits on to explain the Clinton Justice Department's seeming lack of interest in counterterrorism activities." Gorelick, a former deputy attorney general under Janet Reno was a significant participant in making policies that directly affected counterterrorism efforts during the 1990s.
In May 1995, the Washington Post reported, "Deputy Attorney General Jamie S. Gorelick yesterday said the Clinton administration planned to drop its proposal to give the president absolute power to designate groups as terrorist organizations."
At issue was the Clinton administration's proposed counterterrorism legislation that would prohibit Americans from raising funds to support groups classified by the president as terrorist organizations. The original bill would not have allowed court challenges to the president's designations.
In her testimony before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime Gorelick said, "We will recommend deletion of the assertions in that bill that the president's designations are unreviewable or conclusive."
Gorelick told reporters at the time that criticism from civil liberties groups convinced administration officials that the ban on court challenges was not necessary.
Former FBI Director Louis Freeh appears before the commission Tuesday, and will likely face questions from Gorelick.
Freeh may have some questions of his own for her. He wrote an op-ed piece published in Monday's Wall Street Journal where he points out that in September 1994, he "recommended to Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick that the DoJ strengthen investigative powers against suspected 'undesirable aliens,' accelerating deportation appeal proceedings and limiting U.S. participation in a visa waiver pilot program under which 9.5 million foreigners entered the U.S. in 1994. I also recommended that we include provisions for the detention and removal of undesirable aliens, under a special, closed-court procedure."
Freeh also said that he criticized alien deportation appeal procedures that often took years to conclude and recommended legislation to provide the FBI with roving wiretap authority to investigate terrorist activities in the U.S. one of his recommendations to Gorelick were acted upon.
Instead the deputy attorney general was assigned to Clinton's Citizenship USA program. Former Justice Department investigator David Schippers wrote in his 1999 book, "Sell Out" that it was Gorelick's task to expedite new rules under which criminal background checks were suspended for new immigrants.
The apparent conflict of interest will take on a deeper sense of irony when former Attorney General Janet Reno appears before the panel the same day as Freeh. Few would suggest that she would press her former boss to explain the failures of the department of which she herself played a key role.
In 1994, Reno's Justice Department adopted new rules that prohibited the FBI or the CIA from contacting prosecutors in the Internal Security Section of the DoJ. FBI agent Colleen Rowley called these rules a "bureaucratic roadblock" that hampered the investigation of Zaccarias Moussaoui prior to September 11, 2001.
According to The American Spectator, Republican staffers who say that several commissioners are outraged at the continued leaks by its Democratic members will scrutinize Gorelick's performance. They believe the leaks are being coordinated to embarrass upcoming members of the Bush administration set to testify before the commission.
The staffers point out that their Democratic counterparts leaked a memo last week that showed the Bush Justice Department did not have terrorism on its list of seven top priorities, which included corporate fraud prosecutions and civil rights protections. But what was not disclosed is that outgoing Attorney General Janet Reno set those priorities. The list reflected priorities that were put in place by Gorelick in her time at the Department.
The American Spectator quotes a Republican staffer saying, "[Gorelick] knows better than anyone about what was going on at Justice in the later days of the Clinton Administration. She had close ties there."
The staffer added, "In closed-door meetings, she has defended the Clinton people. How can they claim that Ashcroft and his people could do much of anything six weeks into moving into the building?"
"Gorelick should be testifying during these hearings; she should not be up there creating the appearance she played no role in what happened on 9/11, because she definitely did," says the staffer. "The Clinton folks had eight years to do something about Bin Laden. They did nothing. The Bush people had eight months. You'd think judging by the hearings that it was the other way around."<.B>
Copyright © 2004 Talon News -- All rights reserved.