Chairman Leahy, thank you for calling this hearing today. Oversight of the FBI’s operations has never been more important than today. The FBI’s budget has grown exponentially since 9/11, and it is struggling to reorganize into an effective domestic intelligence agency while preserving its fundamental and historical mission as the federal government’s primary law enforcement agency.
Progress in this transformation has been uneven and disappointing. The FBI computer system is on the path to modernization, but it has a long way to go. The FBI is collecting more intelligence than it can analyze, creating backlogs of audio and documents that haven’t been reviewed, translated, or analyzed but merely warehoused. And, a Lebanese-born former FBI agent named Nada Prouty was recently charged with unauthorized access to the FBI computer system after searching through Hezbollah case information. Shockingly, the FBI hired Prouty even though she overstayed a student visa and entered a sham marriage to obtain U.S. citizenship. Her father-in-law is now an indicted fugitive and suspected terrorist financier. These types of problems cannot be allowed to continue.
Congress recently appropriated $20 million for the FBI to reduce its backlog of name checks on aliens applying for adjustment in the U.S., but what has the FBI done with this money? Well, a plan was recently announced to just postpone the background checks and process the applications anyway. The potential national security risks from shoddy or incomplete background checks are obvious from the Prouty case. Yet, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security would apparently rather have the applications rubber-stamped and just hope for the best. The FBI needs to get the checks done now, and they need to present a plan on how they’re going to use the $20 million that the taxpayers provided for this national security endeavor.
The FBI continues to stonewall this Committee on requests for documents. For example, last March we requested internal FBI emails on their issuance of “exigent letters.” These letters were criticized by the Justice Department’s Inspector General as an inappropriate way to obtain phone records without any legal process and said the letters contained false statements promising that a subpoena would be forthcoming, when there was no intent to issue a subpoena. Here we are a year later, and the FBI has only produced 15 heavily redacted pages.
The GAO is about to begin work on my request to audit the FBI’s aviation program. I made the request following reports that the FBI was using luxury executive jets for travel of senior officials rather than for counterterrorism operations. However, the GAO expressed concerns about whether the FBI will provide access to the aircraft flight logs, and FBI’s initial responses to my request suggest that the GAO’s concerns may be well-founded.
The FBI failed to respond to half of the questions for the record posed in writing by members of this Committee a year ago. This is unacceptable. Even worse, the FBI implicitly refused to answer many of my questions about a botched terrorism case in Florida reported by FBI whistleblower Michael German. In an apparent attempt to keep their lack of responsiveness from public scrutiny, the FBI provided answers under separate cover to the Office of Senate Security, even though the answers were not classified.
Meanwhile, we have been waiting two years for documents in the case of whistleblower Cecilia Woods. Woods came to my office to report that she was retaliated against for reporting that her supervisor had an inappropriate intimate relationship with a paid informant and that her supervisor was inexplicably not fired despite overwhelming evidence of his misconduct.
Lastly, there is still no public indication of progress in the investigation of the Anthrax attacks. The only development is that a former journalist is being fined for failure to disclose her sources, despite press accounts stating the sources were unnamed FBI officials. Further, it is still a mystery whether anyone in the Justice Department has taken any serious steps to determine who in the Bureau was leaking case information about Stephen Hatfill to the press.
Mr. Chairman, the need for FBI oversight hearings is a great as ever. I hope this will be the beginning of a renewed effort to get to the bottom of these important issues.
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