It seems to me the "new Justice Department surveillance rules " do not adequately guard against influence and direction by prosecutors concerned with the criminal investigation when there is both a foreign intelligence and a criminal investigation of a suspect foreign agent.
IMO the purpose of allowing FISA when a 'significant' instead of only purpose of an investigation is foreign intelligence was only to allow more cases to be investigated that way - not to change the way the FISA investigation was done or the info handled.
However, it's good to read this artcle for the administration's side. That has been sorely missed in the reporting!
After the court's temper tantrum, the Justice Department went into shock and hunkered down completely. The Wall went even higher. Surveillance requests were strangled under miles of red tape.
Fast forward to August 2001. Coleen Rowley and her FBI agents in Minneapolis were furiously banging their fists against the Wall. They desperately sought permission from FBI headquarters to request a search warrant for one Zacarias Moussaoui, an incompetent and highly suspicious flight student associated with Islamic fundamentalists. FBI bureaucrats, however, still petrified by the Lamberth outburst, quashed the warrant inquiry on grounds far more stringent than FISA itself requires.
HAD the Minneapolis agents searched Moussaoui's effects, they would have found leads to two of the 9/11 hijackers and the Hamburg cell that planned the 9/11 attacks.
A day after shutting down the Moussaoui investigation, the same bureaucrats rejected a New York FBI agent's frantic plea to join an 11th-hour search for Khalid Almihdar, an al Qaeda operative at loose in the country.
The agent and his men were on the wrong side of the Wall: They were anti-terror criminal investigators, and Almihdar was not yet under investigation for a crime. Almihdar was never found. Thirteen days later, he commandeered American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon.
Royce Lamberth... isn't he Larry Klayman's favorite judge?