Former US attorney general Alberto Gonzales mishandled highly classified information relating to the National Security Agency’s (NSA) wiretapping program and the administration’s prisoner interrogation program, an internal report concluded on Tuesday.
The Office of the Inspector General, which investigated Gonzales’ handling of the documents, said he kept classified material at his home and in an office safe in violation of security procedures. The inspector general referred the matter to the national security division of the Justice Department for possible criminal action, but officials there declined to prosecute Gonzales.
Gonzales’ mishandling of the classified documents adds a new embarrassment to the long list of problems that tainted his tenure as attorney general.
RESIGNATION
Gonzales resigned one year ago, after two-and-a-half years in the job, in the face of growing criticism from lawmakers over his role in the NSA wiretapping program and in the dismissals of nine US attorneys.
The office of Inspector General Glenn Fine said in its report that Gonzales had mishandled 18 documents that were considered SCI classification, or sensitive compartmentalized information, a security category for documents considered more tightly controlled than top secret.
The most sensitive material among the documents was Gonzales’ handwritten account of an emergency meeting at the White House on March 10, 2004, regarding the agency’s wiretapping program.
Gonzales, who was then White House counsel, called the meeting with the eight highest-ranking members of Congress after James Comey, then the deputy attorney general, refused to certify the legality of the agency’s program. At the time, Attorney General John Ashcroft was in intensive care in the hospital after gallbladder surgery.
US President George W. Bush had authorized the wiretapping program in October 2001 — three weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks — to allow the agency to eavesdrop on the international communications of Americans suspected of terrorist ties without getting a court order normally required in such circumstances.
INQUIRY
The FBI began conducting an inquiry into the possible unauthorized disclosure of classified information after a New York Times article on the program in December 2005.
Concerns about the legality of the program by Comey and other top Justice Department officials sparked a near revolt at the department after Gonzales and Andrew Card, then White House chief of staff, made a nighttime visit to Ashcroft’s hospital room to try to get him to overrule his deputy’s decision.
Hours before the visit, Gonzales had briefed the eight congressional leaders about the Justice Department’s legal protests and, according to prior accounts, discussed emergency legislation to allow the program to go forward without its approval.
Gonzales told the inspector general’s investigators that Bush instructed him to make a written account of the meeting and he drafted his notes in a spiral notebook a few days later.
The inspector general said those notes included “operational aspects of the program,” along with its classified code name, and constituted a highly classified document that should have been stored in what is known as a SCIF, or a government storage area used to secure the most highly classified material.
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