In March, 2000 or thereabouts; armed federal agents came to Orion Corporation to confiscate all data from Able Danger. Smith had some of the data in the trunk of his car (since it was unclassified) and that is the only reason it was preserved (presumably some of the charts, etc.)
Federal Agents!!! That would indicate the Justice Department was involvement, would it not?
I missed this detail. Do you have a source for more info? (No doubting you, just want to learn more).
Justice Department, Clinton's Justice Department
The following is from an anti-Bush site I found while Googling.. It references the WaPo, but I will not register. I have found several references to this, but I cannot confirm or deny the truthfulness of it.
March 2000 - An FBI agent, reportedly angry over a glitch in Carnivore that has somehow mixed innocent non-targeted emails with those belonging to Al Qaeda, destroys all of the FBI's Denver-based intercepts of bin Laden's colleagues in a terrorist investigation. [Source: The Washington Post, May 29, 2002]
BTW-found this article. A must read with our hindsight.
http://archives.cnn.com/2000/US/06/05/curbing.terrorism.02/
Looking at headlines for that time period, I found an interesting story: