Those who are charged with enforcing the law on others have a special obligation to obey the law themselves. The FBI did not, and we should demand accountability from them.
FBI headquarters officials sought to cover their informal and possibly illegal acquisition of phone records on thousands of Americans from 2003 to 2005 by issuing 11 improper, retroactive "blanket" administrative subpoenas in 2006 to three phone companies that are under contract to the FBI, according to an audit released Thursday.Emphasis added.
Top officials at the FBI's counter-terrorism division signed the blanket subpoenas "retroactively to justify the FBI's acquisition of data through the exigent letters or or other informal requests," the Justice Department's Inspector General Glenn Fine found.
The revelations come in a follow-up report to Fine's 2007 finding that the FBI abused a key Patriot Act power, known as a National Security Letter. That first reports showed that FBI agents were routinely sloppy in using the self-issued subpoenas and issued hundreds that claimed fake emergencies.
I hate to send a man to jail -- to turn a free man into a prisoner seems to me worse than killing him. Still, that is the law we have, and these high FBI officials have broken it after being specially charged, and taking a special oath, to uphold it. The lot of them who signed such documents should go to prison, if convicted.
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