During his 11 years as Director
of the Federal Bureau of Investigation,
Mueller’s agency routinely violated
federal law ,and the Bill of Rights.
Mueller took over the FBI
one week before the 9/11 attacks.
On Sept. 17, 2011, Mueller declared:
“There were no warning signs
that I’m aware of that would indicate
this type of operation in the country.”
This claim helped
the Bush Administration
get the Patriot Act passed,
vastly expanding the FBI’s
ability to capture Americans’
personal information.
Mueller his the fact (until the following May)
that FBI agents in Phoenix and Minneapolis
had warned FBI headquarters of suspicious
Arabs in flight training programs prior to 9/11.
A House-Senate Joint
Intelligence Committee analysis
concluded that FBI incompetence
and negligence “contributed to the
United States becoming, in effect,
a sanctuary for radical terrorists.”.
The Wall Street Journal called for
Mueller’s resignation, while a
New York Times headline warned:
“Lawmakers Say Misstatements
Cloud F.B.I. Chief's Credibility.”
The Patriot act allowed the FBI
to increase by a hundredfold
— up to 50,000 a year —
the number of National Security
Letters (NSLs) it issued to citizens,
business, and nonprofit organizations
-- recipients were prohibited
from disclosing that their data
had been raided.
NSLs entitle the FBI
to seize records
that reveal:
“where a person makes
and spends money, with whom he lives
and lived before, how much he gambles,
what he buys online, what he pawns
and borrows, where he travels,
how he invests, what he searches for
and reads on the Web, and who telephones
or e-mails him at home and at work,”
the Washington Post noted.
The FBI can spy on thousands of people’s
records with a single NSL — regardless of
the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition
of unreasonable warrantless searches.
The FBI greatly understated the number
of NSLs it was issuing and denied abuses,
helping sway Congress to renew the
Patriot Act in 2006.
The following year,
an Inspector General report
revealed that FBI agents
may have recklessly issued
thousands of illegal NSLs.
Shortly after that report was released,
federal judge Victor Marrero denounced
the NSL process as “the legislative
equivalent of breaking and entering,
with an ominous free pass to the
hijacking of constitutional values."
Rather than arresting FBI agents
who broke the law, Mueller created
a new FBI Office of Integrity
and Compliance.
The Electronic Freedom Foundation,
after winning lawsuits to garner FBI reports
to a federal oversight board, concluded
that the FBI may have committed
“tens of thousands” of violations
of federal law, regulations, or
Executive Orders between
2001 and 2008.
At an April 2005 Senate hearing,
Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.)
asked Mueller:
“Can the National Security Agency,
the great electronic snooper,
spy on the American people?"
Mueller replied:
"I would say generally,
they are not allowed to spy
or to gather information
on American citizens."
Nine months later, the New York Times
revealed that Bush had unleashed
NSA to illegally wiretap up to 500 people
within the U.S. at any given time
and peruse millions of other Americans’
emails.
Mueller’s biggest attack on privacy
occurred with Section 215 of the
Patriot Act, which entitles the FBI
to demand “business records”
that are “relevant” to a terrorism
or espionage investigation.
In 2011 testimony to the Senate Intelligence
Committee, Mueller “suggested the FBI
interpreted (Section 215) narrowly
and used it sparingly,” the ACLU noted.
But several times a year,
Mueller signed orders to the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Court, swaying it to continually renew
its order compelling telephone companies
to deliver all their calling records
(including time, duration, and location
of calls) to the National Security Agency.
On June 5, 2013, leaks from former
NSA contractor Edward Snowden
revealed this massive NSA surveillance.
