Department of Justice

The Department of Justice, established in 1870 under the Attorney General, contains the FBI, the DEA, the Executive Office for United States Attorneys and the ninety-odd United States Attorneys, the Criminal, Civil and Civil Rights Divisions, the Office of Special Investigations, the Office of Legal Counsel, the Office of Professional Responsibility and, until 1982, the LEAA, whose grants funded the case-tracking software that became PROMIS.¹

INSLAW and PROMIS

In March 1982 the Executive Office for United States Attorneys contracted with INSLAW, the company of Bill Hamilton and Nancy Hamilton, to install PROMIS in the largest U.S. Attorneys' offices; within a month the department's project manager C. Madison Brewer and contracting officer Peter Videnieks were disputing INSLAW's proprietary claims, payments were withheld, and in 1985 the company entered Chapter 11. Deputy Attorney General Arnold Burns told the Office of Professional Responsibility in 1986 that INSLAW's claim was "legitimate" and that the government "would probably lose the case in court," yet the litigation continued. On September 28, 1987, Bankruptcy Judge George Bason found that the department had "taken, converted, stole, INSLAW's enhanced PROMIS by trickery, fraud, and deceit"; the district court affirmed in 1988 and the D.C. Circuit reversed on jurisdiction in 1991. Bason was not reappointed, the transcript of his ruling having reached the selection panel's chair, Judge Norma H. Johnson, from the U.S. Attorney's civil chief Royce Lamberth. Elliot Richardson, retained by INSLAW, called the affair "a high-tech Watergate." The House Committee on the Judiciary under Jack Brooks opened its investigation in 1989 and reported in September 1992 "strong evidence" that the department "acted willfully and fraudulently"; INSLAW alleged that Earl Brian, a friend of Attorney General Edwin Meese, had been given the software to sell to foreign intelligence services, and a document on department letterhead dated May 14, 1985, and signed by William Bradford Reynolds was later produced as a plan to distribute a modified PROMIS in the Middle East. Ronald LeGrand of the Senate Judiciary Committee relayed a career department source's judgment that INSLAW "is a lot dirtier for the Department of Justice, in its breadth and depth, than Watergate." Attorney General William Barr appointed Nicholas J. Bua special counsel in 1991; his report of March 1993 found no credible evidence of wrongdoing, and Attorney General Janet Reno's review of September 1994 concurred, after Associate Attorney General Webster Hubbell had announced a nationwide investigation of Danny Casolaro's death. The Senate referred INSLAW's claims to the United States Court of Federal Claims, where Judge Christine Odell Cook Miller ruled in July 1997 that every version of PROMIS was in the public domain. The writer Gordon Thomas and Ari Ben-Menashe said that Rafael Eitan of LAKAM acquired a copy through back-channel contacts with the department in the early 1980s, and the department's own successor system, the Integrated Case Management System, employed one of PROMIS's original designers, Dennis W. Wright.²

The CIA and Prosecution

In 1954 the CIA "pointed out to the Department of Justice that, in many cases involving CIA, prosecution would require public disclosure of sensitive Agency operations and procedures"; under the understanding that resulted, described in the Rockefeller Commission report, the agency's general counsel Lawrence Houston recorded that if prosecution "would be precluded by the need to reveal sensitive information, then the Agency should so indicate in its files and not refer the case to the Department of Justice." In early 1982 Director William J. Casey and Attorney General William French Smith signed a memorandum of understanding under which crimes by people "acting for" an intelligence agency no longer had to be reported, and drug offenses were specifically removed from the list; it remained in force until 1995, and the CIA inspector general Fred Hitz testified that in those years "there was no official requirement to report on allegations of drug trafficking with respect to non-employees of the agency." In that period the department reduced Danilo Blandón's sentence from life to about twenty-eight months, dropped the charges against his wife and released him as a "full-time paid informant" on the motions of Assistant U.S. Attorney LJ Oneale, who then prosecuted Ricky Ross in San Diego and moved to bar any mention of the CIA at trial: "This matter, if true, would be classified." A former assistant U.S. attorney, Eric Swenson, said Norwin Meneses's work with the Contras was known to the department because he had reported it himself. After 2002 the Office of Legal Counsel gave the CIA its authorizations for "enhanced interrogation techniques." Department lawyer Walter May told a court in the 1970s that Hal Hendrix of ITT had informed the CIA of his intent to withhold his agency contacts from a Senate committee; the department investigated Harold Geneen, Edward Gerrity and Robert Berrellez for perjury in 1977 and examined Edward Korry's charges of false testimony about Chile.³

BCCI and BNL

The Kerry-Brown report on the BCCI concluded that the department had obstructed the investigation. Charles Saphos, chief of the Criminal Division's narcotics section, wrote to Florida's comptroller Gerald Lewis asking that the bank be allowed to stay open; Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau accused federal authorities of hindering his inquiry; Customs Commissioner William von Raab testified that the department had denied knowledge of the Ali Mirza tapes; the criminal division under Robert Mueller indicted Swaleh Naqvi, Ghaith R. Pharaon and David L. Paul over CenTrust and the Independence Bank in 1991 and 1992. In the BNL Scandal, the Atlanta bank's officers believed in March 1990 that the department had taken the case away from the local U.S. Attorney; Attorney General Richard Thornburgh's legislative chief Lee Rawls advised him on "our best attempt to thwart any further congressional inquiry by the House Banking Committee" of Henry B. Gonzalez, and Judge Marvin Shoob publicly criticized the department's handling of the case.⁴

Letelier, The Finders and After

Assistant U.S. Attorney Eugene Propper prosecuted the Orlando Letelier murder, and the department sent Michael Townley's confessions to Chile with its request for the extradition of Manuel Contreras and Pedro Espinoza. Walter Sheridan had worked under Robert Kennedy at the department before his NBC assignment on Jim Garrison; Houston recorded of the agency's handling of the Clay Shaw trial that "the Department of Justice has seen and agrees." Michael Abbell, director of the Criminal Division's Office of International Affairs from 1979 to 1982, went on to represent the Cali Drug Cartel. In 1993 the department opened an inquiry into CIA involvement with The Finders after receiving the Customs memorandum of Special Agent Ramon J. Martinez on the 1987 raids; Marion Pettie's late wife Isabelle Pettie had worked for the agency, a son for Air America, and Future Enterprises had trained agency employees; the findings were never released in full. The Criminal Division's Mark M. Richard told the Bua inquiry that the Office of Special Investigations worked with intelligence agencies only to locate war criminals. In the 2020s the National Security Division returned no documents on Rinaldo Nazzaro's contracting, a State Department source called him a department "matter," and the department disclosed a payment to an informant in the 2023 Baltimore Power Grid Conspiracy six weeks after Brandon Russell's conviction.⁵