Posted on 12/12/2001 2:31:58 PM PST by grimalkin
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The FBI conducted a "deeply and fundamentally flawed" investigation from 1994 to 1999 of nuclear weapons scientist Wen Ho Lee, who was suspected of spying for China, according to a Justice Department report released on Wednesday.
The full, 779-page unclassified report, two chapters of which had been previously released, said the FBI's National Security Division and its Albuquerque office never made the investigation a high priority.
"The investigation was never accorded the resources which the underlying allegations warranted and should have dictated," the report found. "Frequent, unnecessary and inappropriate delays characterized the Wen Ho Lee investigation."
Lee, a Taiwan-born naturalized U.S. citizen, was fired from his job at the Energy Department's Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico in March 1999 amid the spy allegations.
After the spy allegations collapsed, Lee was arrested and charged in December 1999 on 59 counts of mishandling classified nuclear data. He pleaded guilty last year to one count of downloading nuclear weapons design secrets to a non-secure computer, and the government dropped all remaining charges.
While the case was pending, Lee was held in solitary confinement.
The report was completed in May 2000, and its general findings -- sharply critical of the FBI, and to a lesser extent of the Justice and Energy Departments -- were made known at the time.
Then-Attorney General Janet Reno in 1999 named federal prosecutor Randy Bellows to head the internal review into whether mistakes were made in the Lee case beginning in 1982, when his name first surfaced in a separate espionage case at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
In the investigation in 1982-84, the FBI failed to formally tell the Energy Department of specific derogatory information about Lee that might have led to the revocation of his security clearance, the report said.
In the investigation in the late 1990s, the FBI's National Security Division initially showed an "unreasonable reluctance" to get involved, and then inappropriately deferred to Energy Department judgements, it said.
The heavily redacted report said the FBI could have searched Lee's computer files at any point during a preliminary investigation in 1994 or 1995 or during the full-scale investigation in 1996 through 1998.
The failure "permitted Lee to download in 1997 some of our nation's most prized nuclear weapons secrets," the report said. The report also blasted the FBI and the Energy Department for failing to restrict Lee access to sensitive, classified nuclear weapons secrets during the full investigation.
In one of two chapters that previously had been released in August, the report rejected claims that Lee had been singled out for investigation because of his race.
The insinkerator got away with it. He's got some brass ones and no shame whatsoever. Come to think about it, so does his wife.
Ya' think? The guy admitted to illegally downloading files full of nuclear secrets, transferring them to a dozen tapes, taking them off site, and a bunch of them are still missing. Yet, this guy got off on a plea deal where 58 of 59 of his felony charges were dismissed. Part of his plea deal was that he would cooperate with the investigation and help recover the remaining tapes. He has lied and stonewalled everything, yet authorities refuse to revoke his probation and invoke suspended punishments or re-charge him. Nothing wrong with the system here...
No Duhhh bump
BTTT
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.