Tuesday, April 13, 2004

Gorelick part 3

Attorney General John Ashcroft has just dealt Jamie Gorelick and the Clinton Justice Department a severe blow. Earlier today, former AG Reno stated that the wall preventing evidence sharing (this is a level-headed essay by former prosecutor Andy McCarthy, not a get-Reno/get-Gorelick hit piece) between intelligence investigations and criminal investigations was minimal to nonexistent. The wall is a major reason that FBI criminal investigators and FBI counter-intel agents did not coordinate their counterterrorism efforts in pre-9/11 times.

But then Ashcroft declassified this memorandum from Ms. Gorelick that boasts it exceeds the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act's requirements to separate intelligence and criminal investigations (despite their inherent overlap -- as McCarthy shows, any espionage act covered by FISA is also a criminal act under federal law).

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