Gonzales won’t face charges

Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales will note face criminal charges for mishandling classified information while overseeing the Justice Department, officials said Tuesday.

A 30-page report by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine blasted Gonzales for a series of improper actions with sensitive information about two highly classified programs. The report describes Gonzales taking classified information home with him, storing them in an unsecured briefcase, and keeping them in an office safe that was improperly accessible — and breached at least once — by Justice employees.

{mosads}However, the report notes the Justice Department’s National Security Division has declined to press charges. The report was also sent to the National Security Agency for review and to the Justice Department’s Security and Emergency Planning Staff, but neither has prosecution powers.

“Like all other Department employees, Gonzales was responsible for safeguarding classified materials, familiarizing himself with the facilities available to him for storing these materials, and observing the rules and procedures for the proper handling of classified documents,” the report says. “Our investigation found that Gonzales did not fulfill these obligations and instead mishandled highly classified documents about the NSA surveillance program and a detainee interrogation program.”

The report also takes Gonzales to task for giving conflicting answers about his handling of documents when interviewed by White House attorneys, as well as Inspector General investigators. In one instance, Gonzales said he stored information in a safe at his home, although on another occasion he told a Justice Department employee he did not know the combination to his home safe.

Gonzales’s attorney, George Terwilliger, has responded to the OIG report with his own 17-page memo Tuesday that said the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks “presented government leaders with unprecedented issues and challenges under existing law and practice.” The memo also characterizes the amount of material that Gonzales mishandled as “a few pages of personal notes … and relatively few other classified materials.”

Terwilliger also noted that Gonzales’s mishandling did not result in any apparent security breaches or distribution of the information and was not the result of any “conscious disregard” for proper procedures.

“It is clear from the report that there is no evidence that the acknowledged shortcomings in Judge Gonzales’s handling of this material resulted in any unauthorized disclosure of classified information,” the memo states. “We also submit that the report demonstrates that Judge Gonzales’s best recollection is that he always placed the notes in the most secure place over which he had immediate personal control.”

Terwilliger served as a deputy attorney general during the George H.W. Bush administration and was once considered a potential candidate to succeed Gonzales after he resigned last year. Gonzales retained his services last fall.

The materials in question are notes that Gonzales drafted about a congressional briefing on the domestic surveillance program while he was White House counsel, along with draft and final copies of legal opinions about the surveillance and interrogation programs. The materials also include correspondence from members of Congress to the CIA and internal memos that describe “legal and operational aspects” of the two programs.

OIG investigators launched their probe last August, initially focusing on Gonzales’s handling of a single document on the administration’s domestic surveillance program. The inquiry was widened after investigators learned of other classified documents that Gonzales also mishandled.

Investigators interviewed Gonzales three times; he submitted to them voluntarily.