Griffin Bell

Griffin Boyette Bell (October 31, 1918 to January 5, 2009) was a Georgia lawyer, a partner of the Atlanta firm King & Spalding, a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit from 1961 to 1976, and Attorney General of the United States under President Jimmy Carter from January 26, 1977 to August 16, 1979.¹ As Attorney General he testified in support of the bill that became the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, countersigned the commutation of G. Gordon Liddy's sentence, and headed the Department of Justice when former FBI officials W. Mark Felt and Edward S. Miller and two ITT executives were charged. After leaving office he conducted an internal investigation for the brokerage E.F. Hutton and in 1992 was asked by President George H.W. Bush to assist in seeking release of Bush's Iran-Contra deposition.

Georgia Practice, the Vandiver Administration and the Fifth Circuit

Bell was born in Americus, Georgia, served in the Army from 1941 to 1946, attaining the rank of major, and was admitted to the Georgia bar in 1947. He practiced in Savannah and Rome and joined King & Spalding in Atlanta in 1953.¹ A biographical sketch placed in the Senate Judiciary Committee record in January 1977 lists him as chief of staff to Georgia Governor Ernest Vandiver, an honorary position, from January 13, 1959 to October 1961, and as a judge of the Fifth Circuit from October 6, 1961 to March 1, 1976.²

A Scripps-Howard News Service report that was placed in the record of his 1977 confirmation hearings stated that in January 1961, when a federal judge ordered two Black students admitted to the University of Georgia, Bell was instrumental in drafting legislation that gave local communities the option of closing schools rather than integrating, assured students the right to refuse to attend desegregated classes, and provided state grants for students who left public schools for private academies. The report quoted Vandiver as saying of Bell, "He was very helpful to us," and stated that Bell served as John F. Kennedy's Georgia campaign chairman in 1960.³ Bell testified that the moderation in his role lay in the fact that "we did not close the schools" and that Georgia had "no violence" and "no disruption of any sort in the educational process."⁴ A newspaper article that Bell introduced into the record stated that Bell, then Vandiver's chief of staff, had asked the banker John A. Sibley to head the study commission on the state's school systems.⁵ Warren Cochran of Atlanta, a YMCA worker who testified on Bell's behalf, said that Bell asked Black leaders to meet with him, told them he was doing so voluntarily so that they would know what was happening, and said he was trying to convince Vandiver to change his position, which Vandiver did not do; Cochran said the meetings took place at night in the King & Spalding offices in the Trust Company of Georgia building, and, asked by Senator John Chafee whether Bell had asked them to hold off on lawsuits, answered, "We were not ready to file the suits anyway."⁶

In July 1961 Leon Jaworski, the Houston lawyer who became the Watergate special prosecutor in 1973, investigated Bell's background for the American Bar Association's Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary at the request of the committee's chairman, Bernard G. Segal, who had been told that Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, on behalf of Attorney General Robert Kennedy, had asked for the investigation and that President Kennedy intended to appoint Bell if he was found qualified. Jaworski filed his report on July 25, 1961 and testified in support of Bell at the 1977 hearing.⁷

The 1977 Confirmation Hearings

The Senate Judiciary Committee held hearings on Bell's nomination on January 11, 12, 13, 14, 17, 18 and 19, 1977 under Chairman James Eastland, who told Bell on the first day, "I will vote to confirm you."⁸ The Scripps-Howard report in the record described Bell as "a law partner of Carter intimate Charles Kirbo."³

Questioned by Senator Donald Riegle about private clubs, Bell testified that he joined the Capital City Club in Atlanta in 1955 and the Piedmont Driving Club in 1956, that he was made an honorary member of both when he was appointed to the court, that he joined the Oglethorpe Club in Savannah as a nonresident member, and that he became a dues-paying member of the Atlanta clubs again when he resigned from the bench. He said the clubs had no restrictive covenants and that the judges of the Fifth Circuit had debated at a court meeting whether to continue in private clubs and "stayed in."⁹ Clarence Mitchell, director of the Washington bureau of the NAACP, testified that a judge who belonged to a private club that denied membership on the basis of race had a duty to inform the litigants of the membership, and that, as far as the NAACP knew, Bell had not done so in a case he tried.¹⁰

Bell testified that he had withdrawn from King & Spalding as a senior partner on December 31, 1976, would retain no equity and be paid nothing, and had made a written statement disqualifying himself from any matter in which King & Spalding or his son's Savannah firm Lee & Clarke represented a party, from matters involving parties that paid the firm a regular monetary retainer, and from matters involving a "regular client," defined as one that had made "a substantial financial contribution to the gross fees of King & Spalding on a regular basis over a significant number of years."¹¹ David Cohen, president of Common Cause, asked that Bell provide the committee with a list of all corporate, business and other institutional clients of King & Spalding and a gross-dollar figure for the "substantial" threshold; a representative of the National Organization for Women told the committee that, according to information from attorneys, the firm had no women or Black partners.¹²¹³ The Justice Department's official biography records that Bell was sworn in on January 26, 1977.¹

Liddy Commutation, April 12, 1977

On April 12, 1977 President Carter signed an order commuting Liddy's sentence from 20 years to eight years; the order bore the countersignature "Attorney General: Griffin B. Bell." The White House announcement stated that the action was taken "in the interest of equity and fairness based on a comparison of Mr. Liddy's sentence with those of all others convicted in Watergate related prosecutions."¹⁴

Warrantless Wiretaps and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act

On August 22, 1973, in United States v. Brown, Bell wrote for a Fifth Circuit panel affirming the conviction of Hubert Geroid Brown on a federal firearms charge, and held that warrantless wiretaps authorized by the then Attorney General for the purpose of gathering foreign intelligence, in which Brown's involvement was "happenstance at the most," were lawful. The opinion stated that the President "may constitutionally authorize warrantless wiretaps for the purpose of gathering foreign intelligence" and cited as accord the district court decision in Zweibon v. Mitchell, which had sustained a wiretap authorized by Attorney General John N. Mitchell.¹⁵ At the 1977 hearing Senator Charles Mathias read the passage to Bell, who answered that it was written "before we knew of the abuses that we now know of, in foreign intelligence gathering" and was "too broad in today's context perhaps." Senator James Abourezk asked whether the President had the power to wiretap American citizens without a warrant in the foreign security field, and Bell answered: "I have some doubt that he does," adding that "as long as I am Attorney General, if I have any thing to do with it, that will not happen."¹⁶¹⁷

Bell testified on July 19, 1977 before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's Subcommittee on Intelligence and the Rights of Americans, accompanied by John M. Harmon of the Office of Legal Counsel, Frederick D. Baron and William Funke, in support of S. 1566, a bill to authorize applications for a court order approving electronic surveillance to obtain foreign intelligence information within the United States. He adopted the prepared statement he had given to the Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Criminal Laws and Procedures, which described a procedure in which applications for warrants would be made to one of seven district judges publicly designated by the Chief Justice, with appeal to a three-judge court of review, on a finding that the target was a "foreign power" or an "agent of a foreign power," with certification by the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs or a similar official.¹⁸ Carter signed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 on October 25, 1978 and stated that it required "for the first time, a prior judicial warrant for all electronic surveillance for foreign intelligence or counterintelligence purposes in the United States in which communications of U.S. persons might be intercepted."¹⁹

Correspondence with the Central Intelligence Agency

CIA records from the Bell years show the Attorney General and Director of Central Intelligence Stansfield Turner writing to each other by first name ("Dear Griffin," "Dear Stan"). On May 9, 1977 Bell answered a request from Deputy Director E. H. Knoche for legislation on unauthorized disclosure of classified information by saying he would wait for the study of a Presidential Review Memorandum working group chaired by the Office of Legal Counsel and including the CIA general counsel.²⁰ On June 1, 1977 Bell asked the CIA for any documents of the preceding five years containing significant analysis of competition in energy markets, to support a Justice Department antitrust policy statement on the energy sector; Turner's reply, catalogued as July 1977, stated that the agency had published none directed at the competitive practices of United States energy firms.²¹

On May 25, 1978 the Senate Foreign Relations Committee wrote to Bell about the delay in the FBI investigation of its staff member Stephen Bryen, begun after Michael P. Saba filed an affidavit with the Department of Justice on March 13, 1978.²² On August 24, 1978 Bell wrote to Turner about the prosecution of William Peter Kampiles, a former CIA employee charged with passing a classified manual to the Soviet Union, assuring him that the Department would take protective measures and stating that "prosecutive judgments and decisions" were "solely the responsibility of this Department"; he told Turner that the case would go to a grand jury in Hammond, Indiana on Friday, August 25.²³ On August 17 and November 13, 1978 Turner wrote to Bell seeking support for legislation to protect the identities of CIA officers and agents.²⁴ On February 6, 1979 Turner invited Bell to speak to CIA employees in the headquarters auditorium on "Intelligence and the Legal System," and on May 10, 1979 thanked him for his discussion of "Foreign Intelligence and the Legal System."²⁵

The ITT Charges, March 1978

A newspaper account of March 21, 1978, preserved in the CIA Reading Room, stated that the Justice Department had charged Edward Gerrity and Robert Berrellez of ITT with perjury and obstruction of the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee on multinational corporations, over testimony about the company's cooperation with the CIA in Chile; that the department had decided not to prosecute ITT chairman Harold Geneen; that "Attorney General Griffin Bell decided to go ahead with the prosecution of Gerrity and Berrellez despite fears in the intelligence community a perjury trial would disclose national security secrets"; and that "CIA director Stansfield Turner met with Bell last Thursday to express his concern." The article stated that the statute of limitations was about to expire for all three officials. A Washington Star report of August 1978, also preserved in the CIA Reading Room, stated that the Justice Department had announced that "to safeguard national security and U.S. foreign intelligence interests" it would not pursue three of the six counts against Gerrity.²⁶²⁷

The FBI Surveillance Prosecutions

According to the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, the Justice Department began in April 1976, before Bell took office, an investigation of FBI break-ins against relatives and acquaintances of Weather Underground suspects, and in April 1978 a grand jury indicted L. Patrick Gray III, Felt and Miller for conspiring to deprive them of their rights under 18 U.S.C. 241. Gray's trial was severed on March 5, 1979. Felt and Miller were convicted on November 6, 1980. The government filed a nolle prosequi as to Gray on December 10, 1980, acknowledging that the charges were "unconvincing." Gray sued Bell and Justice Department attorneys on April 9, 1981; the district court dismissed the suit on immunity grounds in July 1982 and the court of appeals affirmed on June 21, 1983.²⁸

In discovery proceedings in 1979, Chief Judge William B. Bryant ruled that Felt and Miller could assert the "Barker-Martinez defense" of reasonable reliance on the authority of superiors, a defense drawn from the 1976 appeal of the Fielding break-in defendants, in which Liddy was a co-defendant.²⁹ Mark D. Cummings, who was assigned to Felt's defense, wrote that former Attorneys General John N. Mitchell and Richard Kleindienst testified at the trial, and that Richard Nixon testified for the defense, citing trial transcript pages 5909 to 5936.³⁰ The Christian Science Monitor reported on April 16, 1981 that President Ronald Reagan had granted "full and unconditional" pardons to Felt and Miller, who had been fined a total of $8,500.³¹

The Liddy commutation bears Bell's countersignature on April 12, 1977; the charges against Gerrity and Berrellez were filed on March 20, 1978; and the indictment of Gray, Felt and Miller was returned in April 1978.¹⁴²⁶²⁸

After the Justice Department

Bell resigned as Attorney General on August 16, 1979 and returned to practice in Atlanta. In 1980 he headed the United States delegation to the Madrid Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, and in 1982 he was a co-chair of the Attorney General's National Task Force on Violent Crime.¹ He served on the Secretary of State's advisory committee on South Africa from 1985 to 1987.³²

On September 5, 1985 Bell held a press conference to release his report on E.F. Hutton, which the company had commissioned after pleading guilty earlier in 1985 to 2,000 counts of mail and wire fraud over a check-overdrafting scheme operated from mid-1980 to mid-1982. The Christian Science Monitor reported that Bell said he tried to link top officers to the conduct but was "never able to do that from a standpoint of criminality," found "excessive or abusive" overdrafts, and recommended reorganization of the board of directors; the report cleared former president George L. Ball and others in the top circle of improper activity in connection with the overdrafting. The same report stated that a House subcommittee on crime was investigating the case, in particular the Justice Department's failure to seek criminal penalties against any individuals.³³

In 1989 Bell became vice chairman of President Bush's Commission on Federal Ethics Law Reform.¹ On December 30, 1992, White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater announced that Bush had asked Bell to assist him in seeking a copy of his deposition of January 11, 1988 in the Iran-Contra investigation, which the Independent Counsel had decided not to provide, and that Bell would assume full responsibility for advising the President should the Independent Counsel fail to complete the investigation during Bush's term.³⁴ In a statement prepared for the 1999 debate over reauthorizing the independent counsel statute, Bell wrote that he had experience under the statute "as Attorney General and later as counsel for President Bush in the Iran-Contra investigation," that he was opposed to renewal, and that he had been co-chair, with Senator Howard Baker, of the Miller Center commission that unanimously recommended that the statute be allowed to expire.³⁵

Bell died on January 5, 2009 at Piedmont Hospital in Atlanta, at the age of 90; the Associated Press reported the cause as kidney failure, with pancreatic cancer and kidney disease.³⁶