Thanks for your posts!
Please do us a favor and some time in the next few weeks post a thread with your important findings.
Then we can have that thread for all of us and those who monitor Free Republic.
Good Work!
In July 1995, Attorney General Reno issued formal procedures aimed at managing information sharing between Justice Department prosecutors and the FBI.They were developed in a working group led by the Justice Departments Executive Office of National Security, overseen by Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick.33 These procedureswhile requiring the sharing of intelligence information with prosecutorsregulated the manner in which such information could be shared from the intelligence side of the house to the criminal side.
These procedures were almost immediately misunderstood and misapplied. As a result, there was far less information sharing and coordination between the FBI and the Criminal Division in practice than was allowed under the departments procedures. Over time the procedures came to be referred to as the wall. The term the wall is misleading, however, because several factors led to a series of barriers to information sharing that developed.34
The Office of Intelligence Policy and Review became the sole gatekeeper for passing information to the Criminal Division.Though Attorney General Renos procedures did not include such a provision, the Office assumed the role anyway, arguing that its position reflected the concerns of Judge Royce Lamberth, then chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.The Office threatened that if it could not regulate the flow of information to criminal prosecutors, it would no longer present the FBIs warrant requests to the FISA Court.The information flow withered.35
The 1995 procedures dealt only with sharing between agents and criminal prosecutors, not between two kinds of FBI agents, those working on intelligence matters and those working on criminal matters. But pressure from the Office of Intelligence Policy Review, FBI leadership, and the FISA Court built barriers between agentseven agents serving on the same squads. FBI Deputy Director Bryant reinforced the Offices caution by informing agents that too much information sharing could be a career stopper.Agents in the field began to believeincorrectlythat no FISA information could be shared with agents working on criminal investigations.36
This perception evolved into the still more exaggerated belief that the FBI could not share any intelligence information with criminal investigators, even if no FISA procedures had been used. Thus, relevant information from the National Security Agency and the CIA often failed to make its way to criminal investigators. Separate reviews in 1999, 2000, and 2001 concluded independently that information sharing was not occurring, and that the intent of the 1995 procedures was ignored routinely.37 We will describe some of the unfortunate consequences of these accumulated institutional beliefs and practices in chapter 8.