House Committee on the Judiciary

The House of Representatives established a standing committee on the judiciary on June 3, 1813; its jurisdiction includes oversight of the Department of Justice.¹

The INSLAW Investigation

Under its chairman, Jack Brooks of Texas, the committee investigated whether high officials of the Justice Department had stolen INSLAW's Enhanced PROMIS software, the matter known as the PROMIS Software Scandal, and tried to put the company out of business, and whether Attorney General Edwin Meese, Deputy Attorney General Lowell Jensen and others had conspired to distribute it to other agencies and foreign governments. The Hamiltons of INSLAW and Elliot Richardson testified before its subcommittee on December 5, 1990, at a hearing on the department's refusal to give the committee its documents.³ On July 25, 1991, the Subcommittee on Economic and Commercial Law voted 10 to 6 to subpoena the department; when it produced the INSLAW files on July 31, it said that 51 documents or files were missing and could not be found.² The department's liaison in the dispute was Lee Rawls.⁴ The committee also pursued the claim that Canadian agencies were running PROMIS; it called a letter of December 4, 1991, from the Canadian ambassador "conclusory" and wrote that "without direct access to RCMP, CSIS and other Canadian officials, the committee has been effectively thwarted."²

After the Martinsburg police concluded in January 1992 that Danny Casolaro had killed himself, Brooks had committee investigators take sworn statements from the former Los Angeles strike force prosecutors Richard Stavin and Marvin Rudnick on March 13 and 14, 1992, and, "after initial resistance from the Bureau," from FBI Special Agent Thomas Gates on March 25 and 26.²

The committee adopted its report, The INSLAW Affair, on August 11, 1992, over the dissent of ten Republican members. It found "strong evidence, as indicated by the findings in two Federal court proceedings as well as by the committee investigation, that the Department of Justice 'acted willfully and fraudulently' and 'took, converted and stole' INSLAW's Enhanced PROMIS by 'trickery, fraud and deceit.'" It recommended that Attorney General William Barr settle INSLAW's claims at once and "strongly" recommended an independent counsel to investigate "a high level conspiracy within the Department to steal Enhanced PROMIS software to benefit friends and associates of former Attorney General Meese, including Dr. Earl Brian," the death of Casolaro, possible perjury and obstruction by department officials, and whether the missing documents "were stolen or illegally destroyed."² Barr had appointed Nicholas J. Bua special counsel in November 1991; the committee noted that at the time Bua had not been empowered to subpoena witnesses, convene a grand jury or compel the department to produce key documents.²⁵