The report detailed acts of unauthorized surveillance, improper searches, and other procedural and legal breaches of civil rights and privacy laws.
Gonzales was also briefed on the abuse of an anti-terror tool known as the national security letter as early as 2005, well before the Justice Department’s inspector general made these violations public.
However, when the report was made public, Gonzales behaved as if he had been as blindsided as the American public had by the breaches in ethics.
In order to help monitor the government’s surveillance activities, the Washington Post reports:
Each of the violations cited in the reports copied to Gonzales was serious enough to require notification of the President’s Intelligence Oversight Board.
The Post also reports:
"Some of the reports describe rules violations that the FBI decided not to report to the intelligence board. In February 2006, for example, FBI officials wrote that agents sent a person’s phone records, which they had obtained from a provider under a national security letter, to an outside party. The mistake was blamed on ‘an error in the mail handling.’ When the third party sent the material back, the bureau decided not to report the mistake as a violation."
What this will do for a man who has already come under investigation from Congress is anybody’s guess, but it should call his veracity when dealing with the Attorneygate investigation into question, and one can only assume there will be renewed cries for his resignation
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