WASHINGTON, Dec. 19 (UPI) -- The House Government Reform Committee is planning a series of hearings to force the Bush administration into handing over subpoenaed documents.
That panel is bucking a Dec. 12 decision by President Bush to withhold from Congress a raft of law enforcement documents -- some of which are decades old -- by citing executive privilege. Committee members said the president has received bad legal advice and is abusing his authority.
"The Congress has to exercise its oversight responsibilities in order to protect the American public from malfeasance in government and corruption in government," Chairman Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind., said. "When an executive order is issued that stops us from our oversight responsibilities, then the very foundations of our government start to be in jeopardy."
Those hearings come as the White House and Department of Justice have asked Congress for boosted authority to fight the war on terror and that authority should come with increased oversight, some House Republicans said.
"When the attorney general indicates that in this time of crisis we need to give expanded powers to police agencies and the Justice Department to help us in our national defense, that is a reasonable request," Rep. Steven C. LaTourette, R-Ohio, said. "At the same time, it is a reasonable expectation that there will be additional oversight by the other, co-equal, branches of government."
The Bush administration and the Justice Department in particular have faced some scrutiny from members of both parties in Congress for establishing military tribunals and aggressively detaining suspects using immigration law, for example.
Burton said his committee was unlikely to tackle those issues directly. But separately, Burton on Friday also fired off a letter to the General Accounting Office seeking an investigation into whether the department might have artificially inflated the number of terrorist convictions it has claimed. Burton said DOJ's claims might have been "overstated."
The Bush administration, claiming executive privilege, refused Dec. 12 to honor subpoenas from the committee in its investigation of the use of informants in organized crime investigations and campaign finance violations in the Clinton administration.
Justice Department officials said then that the refusal would keep investigations "free from political influences."
Burton claims the decision to reject the subpoenas reflects a policy of the Bush administration to refuse cooperation with Congress on criminal investigations, even when the cases are closed.
Most of the documents requested by Burton's committee focus on a 30-year span of investigations into organized crime figures in New England. The committee has been investigating how the Federal Bureau of Investigation oversaw the use of several informants in Boston organized crime circles that used their position as "agents" of the FBI to better manage their criminal empires.
The two top informants in the probe -- Stevie "The Rifleman" Flemmi and James "Whitey" Bulger -- continued to manage and expand a criminal operation throughout Boston while under the supervision of FBI agents, who allegedly falsified records and ignored procedure in allowing them to continue operating as mobsters. Those operations included as many as two dozen murders.
Both Flemmi and Bulger began working with the FBI in the early to mid-1970s. Flemmi is awaiting trial on a litany of charges. Bulger fled prior to his indictment in 1995 and continues to elude capture.
The investigation into Bulger and his handlers also led congressional and Justice Department investigators to discover that an even earlier case involving infamous Mafia assassin Joe "The Animal" Barboza and Stevie Flemmi's brother, Vincent. Both men are suspected of helping the FBI solve a 1965 murder outside Boston, but apparently supplied intentionally false information that convicted four innocent men for the crime.
Documents uncovered by the committee earlier in the year determined that then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover knew that the informants had given misleading information about the participants in the murder and that the men convicted most likely did not commit the crime.
As part of this investigation, Burton subpoenaed 17 sets of documents related to the FBI investigations and informants beginning in 1965 and continuing through the current hunt for Bulger. They also requested a set of documents related to the decision not to pursue an independent counsel to investigate Clinton-era campaign finance violations.
Every request was denied under the orders of the president.
According to a Bush memo to Attorney General John Ashcroft signed Dec. 12, the requested documents should not be turned over because of the effect making such material would have on internal decision making.
"Congressional pressure on executive branch prosecutorial decision making is inconsistent with separation of powers and threatens individual liberty," Bush wrote.
But lawmakers said the actions by the administration that are covering the FBI's tracks don't look good. "I think now their actions have reached the level of a coverup," Rep. John J. Duncan, R-Tenn. said.
