I’ll just let Diane say it:

Last week I posted on FBI Director Robert Mueller’s attempt to defuse the impact of a pending Inspector General’s report on the agency’s improper use of “national security letters” to obtain records. He pointed out in testimony to Congress that the report covers a period before the FBI instituted reforms to stop the improprieties. Well, the report is now out, and I can see why Mr. Mueller made the effort. From an AP report published in today’s NY Times:

Top-level FBI counterterrorism executives issued improper blanket demands in 2006 for records of 3,860 telephone lines to justify the fact that agents already had obtained the data using an illegal procedure that is now prohibited, the Justice Department inspector general reported Thursday.

Glenn A. Fine also reported that in one case FBI anti-terrorism agents circumvented a federal court which twice had refused a warrant for personal records because the judges believed the agents were investigating conduct protected by the First Amendment. Fine said the agents got the records using national security letters, which do not require a judge’s approval, without altering or re-examining the basis of their suspicions — the target’s association with others under investigation. [Emphasis added]

While Mr. Mueller may be correct in his pointing to the fact that since the period under review in the report, the FBI has instituted changes which make such “mistakes” harder to make, I’m still sceptical about the FBI’s intentions. The two examples listed in the lede to the article point more to a mind-set, a culture, if you will, than they do to mere procedural gaffes. That senior officials within the FBI signed off on each of those attempts to circumvent the Constitutional guarantees only heightens my suspicions.

The only way I can see to avoid any expansion of this illegal domestic spying is for Congress to do more than simply hold hearings and bloviate endlessly on sloppy information gathering. Some detailed laws prohibiting the use of the national security letters in lieu of a court-approved subpoena would be a nice start. Of course, that would nullify a rather wide section of the Patriot Act, so maybe consideration should also be given to the repeal of all the iterations of that abomination.

Clearly this Congress isn’t up to that task. Maybe the next one will be, especially if the voters who have turned out in uncharacteristically large numbers so far continue their interests beyond January 19, 2009.

Sarah and others were talking about this, and it needs to be repeated, re Spitzer and “how did this case get opened, anyway?”

(1) The prosecutors handling the case came from the Public Integrity Section.

(2) The prosecution is opened under the White-Slave Traffic Act of 1910. You read that correctly. The statute itself is highly disreputable, and most of the high-profile cases brought under it were politically motivated and grossly abusive. Here are a few:

Heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson was the first man prosecuted under the act — for having an affair with Lucille Cameron, whom he later married. The prosecution was manifestly an effort “to get” Johnson, who at the time was the most famous African-American. (All of this is developed well in Ken Burns’s film “Unforgiveable Blackness”).

University of Chicago sociologist William I. Thomas was prosecuted for having an affair with an officer’s wife in France. Thomas was targeted because of his Bohemian social and his radical political views.

In 1944 Charles Chaplin was prosecuted for having an affair with actress Joan Barry. The prosecution again provided cover for a politically motivated effort to drive Chaplin out of the country.

Canadian author Elizabeth Smart was arrested and charged in 1940 while crossing the border with the British poet George Barker.

From the must read Harper’s piece.

Wake up, Dems.