SEE NO RENO
REES, MATTHEW
SEE NO RENO by Matthew Rees JANET RENO FACED A DILEMMA in August 1997. A senior FBI official named John Lewis informed her that her Office of Intelligence Policy and Review had rejected three FBI...
...Even though Lee had been identified to the department as a prime suspect in a criminal espionage investigation one year earlier and his classified-computer privileges had been revoked, Justice's Office of Intelligence Policy and Review still decided not to ask the judicial panel to consider the FBI's warrant request...
...Seikaly read the request, as well as the statute governing such matters, and ruled against the FBI...
...Lee had already signed a waiver allowing the government to "audit or access" his computer at any time without his knowledge...
...ESPIONAGE HAS NEVER BEEN A RENO PRIORITY...
...In March, FBI officials resorted to simply asking Lee if they could search his computer...
...Through it all, Reno maintains that while the matter "should have been brought to my attention . . . the decision [to deny the warrant] was correct...
...Reno's May 27 briefing with reporters may have been a sign of things to come...
...In 1996, this panel had approved every one of the 839 warrant requests it had received from Justice...
...But at the end of the week, Reno announced she'd spoken to Charles Ruff, the White House counsel, who told her she had the White House's confidence...
...Aware by now he was a target of the espionage investigation, Lee agreed to the search...
...As Victoria Toens-ing, a former chief counsel to the Senate Intelligence Committee, points out, the investigation "was treated as a criminal matter in which the goal was convicting someone, when it should have been treated as a national security matter in which the goal was protecting America's nuclear secrets...
...Reno is now under pressure to explain her department's obstinacy...
...The FBI, though still without a warrant, was able to administer a polygraph on Lee...
...And second, under private questioning from senators on May 20, Seikaly acknowledged that the Lee case was the first and last warrant request he ever ruled on...
...But according to John Browne, the director at Los Alamos, Justice officials told lab officials they should back off, as any information gathered wouldn't be admissible in court...
...The Cox report, for example, describes how the department stymied congressional investigators' efforts to obtain information about the transfer of sensitive technology to China by companies like Loral and Hughes...
...She distanced herself from the issue and delegated to the wrong people...
...One explanation for this resistance is that Justice didn't want its bungling of the espionage investigation to be revealed...
...Justice's actions under Reno won't be easy to defend...
...Either way, much will be made of the fact that Justice was denying the warrant at the very time Congress was investigating Bill Clinton's use of Chinese money in the 1996 presidential campaign and Republicans were agitating for the appointment of an independent counsel...
...It didn't take the FBI long to find material transferred from classified files and to recreate the deleted files...
...What followed raised even more questions about Justice's judgment...
...Even Norm Dicks, the committee's senior Democrat, admitted at the hearing, "We got very good cooperation overall, and the Justice Department was the one area where we had some difficulty...
...nuclear secrets in history...
...Consider: In 1996, officials of the Los Alamos labs, where Lee worked, wanted to search his computer for classified files...
...What is painfully obvious is that in the investigation of Lee, Justice operated from a flawed position...
...Will this latest controversy be the straw that breaks Reno...
...Some, however, would regard it as more urgent to know why the wrong decision was made...
...Matthew Rees is a staff writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...attorney...
...Washington was buzzing last week that the White House wanted to offer up her scalp so as to protect that of Sandy Berger, the national security adviser whose actions in the espionage case are even more suspicious...
...Justice's denial of repeated FBI warrant requests in 1997 rested on equally dubious reasoning...
...It was beginning to look like she'd survive...
...He didn't perform well, and according to the New York Times, he deleted as many as 2,000 files from his computer two days later...
...On March 8, Lee was fired...
...FBI agents wanted to search Lee's home, but Justice still refused to provide a warrant...
...This is but one of many issues Reno will be asked about in coming weeks...
...At a May 26 Senate hearing, Christopher Cox, chairman of the select committee looking into the issue, said Justice officials "took the view they could interpose themselves between us and all the other parts of the executive branch...
...She's also formed a task force to provide an "administrative" review of the decision-making process that led to the denial of the warrants...
...First, the request for a warrant was aimed at Wen Ho Lee, who now stands accused of masterminding the greatest theft of U.S...
...A senior FBI official named John Lewis informed her that her Office of Intelligence Policy and Review had rejected three FBI requests to tap the phone and computer of a government scientist accused of nuclear espionage...
...So while the file transfers were confirmed in March, the FBI didn't win permission to search Lee's home until April 10...
...In the meantime, her suggestion last week that Louis Freeh, the FBI director, should have personally brought the warrant requests to her attention signals she's not prepared to shoulder all the blame...
...Fast forward to February 1999...
...With good reason...
...Indeed, the current head of Justice's Office of Intelligence Policy and Review, Frances Fragos Townsend, is viewed within the department as a Reno crony who's light on substance...
...The lab complied...
...She may wish she hadn't...
...The matter landed in the lap of Daniel Seikaly, a former assistant U.S...
...This time, she referred it to a Justice Department national security office, which, if it deemed the matter worthy, would forward it to a panel of judges for a final decision...
...As Congress investigates the espionage, there's sure to be a laser beam on Reno, with people asking whether aides kept her in the dark about the spying probe or she remained willfully ignorant...
...Reno knew little about the case, but given the FBI's persistence and her respect for Lewis, she agreed the request merited further review...
...THIS IS HER WACO IN THE INTELLIGENCE AREA," SAYS A FORMER CLINTON JUSTICE OFFICIAL...
...This wouldn't be attracting any attention, except for two facts that came out later...
...This is her Waco in the counterintelligence area," says a former Clinton Justice official, adding that espionage has never been a Reno priority...
...Sixty-four questions were asked, and 63 of them related to Justice's handling of the espionage...
...The chairman of the Senate Intelligence committee has said she should resign, a Democratic senator has said almost as much, and there's been criticism from both parties of Justice's decision not to put the warrant request before the judges...
...The question, she says, is whether "everything was done right...
Vol. 4 • June 1999 • No. 36
