First, I did not invent the "wall," which is not a wall but a set of procedures implementing a 1978 statute (the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA) and federal court decisions interpreting it. In a nutshell, that law, as the courts read it, said intelligence investigators could conduct electronic surveillance in the United States against foreign targets under a more lenient standard than is required in ordinary criminal cases, but only if the "primary purpose" of the surveillance were foreign intelligence rather than a criminal prosecution.”
-Jamie GORElick, Washington Post 4/2004
Yeah, and Gorelick's little whitewash op-ed was thoroughly refuted within a matter of days, as I recall. The issue was not the existence of the 1978 FISA law (though in itself that law was too restrictive for counter-terrorism cases), but that the Gorelick/Reno regime had shackled the FBI with much tighter restrictions than even that law required. Gorelick's own memo noted that she was doing "more than the law requires" and the most experienced prosecutor of terrorists in the USA at that time, Mary Jo White in NYC, protested (June 13, 1995) that Gorelick's wall would hinder work on counter-terrorism cases. Gorelick is GUILTY as charged.