Lawyer Up!

As Waveflux noted below, “principals in the FBI investigation are lawyering up.”

Maybe the FBI needs to lawyer up, too. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), which sent copies of Foley’s emails to the FBI on July 21 of this year, is now writing to the Department of Justice asking for an investigation into why the FBI is now claiming that they couldn’t investigate because the emails were “heavily redacted.” CREW is calling bullshit.

The FBI is also claiming that it came back to CREW and asked for more information so that it could follow up, but that CREW refused to provide anything further. Reporters from several other news organizations have repeated this allegation. The FBI is lying.

On Monday, October 2, CREW sent a letter to the DOJ I.G.’s office, attaching exact copies of the emails CREW had sent to the FBI on July 21, 2006. Both the former page’s name and the person to whom the page forwarded Rep. Foley’s emails were clearly visible. Moreover, after CREW sent the emails to the FBI, CREW’s only subsequent contact with the Bureau was one telephone call from the special agent to whom CREW had sent the material confirming that the emails were from Rep. Foley. CREW had no further contact with the FBI.

In contrast with this new explanation for failing to investigate the Foley matter, The Washington Post has reported that an unnamed FBI official stated that the Bureau decided not to investigate after concluding that the emails “did not rise to the level of criminal activity.”

Melanie Sloan, CREW’s executive director said today, “the FBI cannot have it both ways; either it failed to investigate the Foley emails because they did not rise to a level of criminal activity or because it did not have adequate information to do so. Pick one.”

Seems like no one in D.C. had any interest in pursuing a matter that would embarrass the GOP…until the GOP couldn’t avoid embarrassment any longer. And now it’s everyone else’s fault that no one in a position to do anything did.