Project Eagle
Multi-million-dollar Justice Department procurement of the mid-1980s to automate its litigating divisions, which INSLAW alleged was meant to carry PROMIS for companies tied to Earl Brian.
Project Eagle was a multi-million-dollar project of the Department of Justice to automate its litigating divisions; its request for proposals was issued in May 1986. Lowell Jensen, deputy attorney general until he was appointed to the federal bench the following June, recalled the project but denied any part in awarding its contracts. Floyd Bankson of the Criminal Division's Office of Policy and Management Analysis worked on its implementation.1
INSLAW's Allegations
INSLAW alleged that its PROMIS software "was intended by DOJ to be the uniform case management software for the Project EAGLE computers"; that Earl Brian's Hadron "was originally slated to receive the Project EAGLE contract award by DOJ as a sweetheart gift from Brian's long-time friend, then Attorney General Meese"; that Brian and the department dropped Hadron as "the vehicle for the contract in the fall of 1985, following the failure of the covert DOJ effort to force INSLAW's liquidation"; and that by January 1986 they had substituted Tisoft, Inc., which that month "was awarded a $30 million computer systems contract by Meese's Justice Department" and amended its articles of incorporation to permit the sale of stock to outside owners who would gain majority control. Margaret Wiencek, formerly director of administrative services at Brian's Financial News Network, said Patrick R. Gallagher of Tisoft regularly telephoned the chairman's office at FNN's Los Angeles headquarters in at least 1987. INSLAW alleged that the department encouraged the hostile takeover bid by Systems and Computer Technology in 1986 "to remove INSLAW as an obstacle to the planned award of Project EAGLE to Tisoft and the planned implementation of PROMIS on the Project EAGLE computers."2
A confidential source of Ronald LeGrand, chief investigator of the Senate Judiciary Committee, quoted in Bill Hamilton's 1989 affidavit, believed "that documents relating to Project Eagle were shredded inside DOJ" and that INSLAW should subpoena "DOJ paperwork prepared by a Jensen subordinate relating to the purchase of large quantities of computer hardware for which the senior DOJ career staff could see no justification." Interviewed later, the source denied having "reason to believe that any documents related to Project Eagle were improperly shredded," and Miles Matthews, the former deputy associate attorney general, said he had never heard of Project Eagle procurement documents being shredded.12
Investigations
The staff study of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in September 1989 "found no proof that INSLAW's problems with the Department were connected to the Department's 'Project EAGLE' procurement." At the department's authorization hearing of May 16, 1990, Attorney General Richard Thornburgh cited the materials produced for the House Committee on the Judiciary "in your request regarding INSLAW and Project Eagle."3 The Justice Department's review of September 27, 1994, called INSLAW's account "pure conjecture" and stated that House investigators' interviews of "several individuals involved with the EAGLE contract" gave "no substantial evidence" of a link with INSLAW.2
Sources
- U.S. Department of Justice. Report of Special Counsel Nicholas J. Bua to the Attorney General of the United States Regarding the Allegations of Inslaw, Inc., March 1993, interviews of Lowell Jensen, Floyd Bankson and Miles Matthews. https://archive.org/details/doj-oip-inslaw-1993 ↩
- U.S. Department of Justice. Report on the Review of Special Counsel Nicholas J. Bua's Report, September 27, 1994, quoting INSLAW's Analysis and Rebuttal of the Bua Report, pp. 60-61, and the LeGrand source's statement, in the same archive.org volume as the Bua report. https://archive.org/details/doj-oip-inslaw-1993 ↩
- U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on the Judiciary. The INSLAW Affair: Investigative Report, H. Rept. 102-857, September 10, 1992, quoting Department of Justice Authorization for Appropriations for Fiscal Year 1991, hearing of May 16, 1990, Serial No. 94, p. 48; the Senate staff study as quoted in the Bua report. https://archive.org/details/InslawAffairInvestigativeReport ↩
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