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FBI Documents in OK City case



The attached text is a press release from the Dept of Justice, Office of
Inspector General.  Believe it or not, sometimes "routine archiving" can
actually be a matter of life or death.

Not that there was the tiniest shred of a chance that it would have made a bit
of difference in this case...but it kinda make you think, don't it?

 ==========================================================================
"The issue was first discovered in January 2001 by two conscientious employees
in the FBI's Oklahoma City field office as part of a routine archiving process."
 ==========================================================================

Inspector General Releases Report on Belated Production of Documents in the
Oklahoma City Bombing Case

March 19, 2002 (Washington, D.C.)  Glenn A. Fine, Inspector General of the U.S.
Department of Justice, today released a 192-page report examining the belated
production of documents in the Oklahoma City bombing case.  The investigation
found that widespread failures by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) led
to the belated disclosure of more than 1,000 documents related to the trials of
Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols.  The revelation of the belatedly produced
documents led the Attorney General to postpone McVeigh's execution and request
this investigation by the Office of the Inspector General (OIG).

  The OIG traced the failures to a variety of causes, including individual
mistakes made by FBI employees, the FBI's cumbersome and complex
document-handling procedures, agents' failures to follow FBI policies and
directives, inconsistent interpretations of FBI policies and procedures, agents'
lack of understanding of the unusual discovery agreement in this case, and the
tremendous volume of material being processed within a short period of time.
The OIG concluded that the FBI's computer systems although antiquated,
inefficient, and badly in need of improvement  were not the chief cause of the
failures.

The OIG did not find that FBI employees intentionally withheld from the defense
documents they knew to be discoverable.

The OIG's investigation found that the failures to disclose documents were
widespread and not confined to a single FBI field office or a few individuals,
Fine said.  Both FBI field offices and the Oklahoma City bombing Task Force bear
responsibility for the failure to properly disclose the materials.

    The OIG report criticizes several senior FBI managers for how they responded
when they became aware of the belated documents problem.  The issue was first
discovered in January 2001 by two conscientious employees in the FBI's Oklahoma
City field office as part of a routine archiving process.  In materials sent to
Oklahoma City by FBI field offices, these employees found documents that had not
been turned over to defense attorneys.  Yet, the OIG found that the senior
managers to whom they reported the problem failed to adequately manage the
document review process and failed to set any deadlines for completing the
project.  Most troubling, the managers failed to notify FBI Headquarters or the
prosecutors in the case until the beginning of May, one week before McVeigh's
scheduled execution.

We believe these delays by the FBI supervisors were a significant neglect of
their duties, Fine said.  They could have, and should have, notified FBI
Headquarters and the prosecutors much earlier about the potential problem, not
wait until one week before the scheduled execution date.  The OIG recommended
that the FBI consider disciplinary action for these managers' failure to resolve
and disclose the problem in a timely way.

In addition, the OIG found that the FBI failed to effectively address the
document problems even after they were discovered.  The OIG found that the
instructions issued by FBI Headquarters to the field were confusing,
contradictory, and incomplete.  The OIG also found that many field offices
failed to provide information and documents in a timely or accurate manner in
response to several requests in 2001.

The OIG also found that some Oklahoma City documents were destroyed before the
problem of the belated production of documents was discovered.  As part of a
process to preserve significant case documents, the FBI archivist in December
2000 authorized FBI field offices to destroy copies of Oklahoma City bombing
documents that remained in their files if the field office followed specific
guidelines.  Nine field offices destroyed documents covered under the discovery
agreement with defense attorneys, although employees in the field offices
insisted that they had destroyed only copies of materials that had been sent to
the Task Force.  While probably true with regard to most of the destroyed
documents, there is no way of knowing with certainty whether all the destroyed
documents were copies that had, in fact, been sent to the Task Force previously
and subsequently disclosed to the defense.

The OIG concluded that the FBI's antiquated information management systems could
have a continuing negative impact on the FBI's ability to handle or retrieve
documents in an efficient, useful, or comprehensive way.  The OIG report offers
a series of recommendations to help address the FBI's systemic weaknesses,
including improved planning for complex, document intensive cases; computer
system enhancements; increased automation training; and improvement and
simplification of FBI record-keeping systems.

The FBI's computer systems and procedures for handling documents were  and still
are  inordinately cumbersome and badly in need of reform, Fine said.  The OIG
and others have pointed out some of these problems in the past, but until
recently the FBI has made insufficient efforts to correct the deficiencies.  FBI
employees need, and deserve, better systems and support, Fine said.

The full report is available on the OIG's website at
http://www.usdoj.gov/oig under the heading Special Reports.

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