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Skriven 2006-01-03 23:33:54 av Whitehouse Press (1:3634/12.0)
Ärende: Press Release (0601033) for Tue, 2006 Jan 3
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U.S. Attorneys Discuss Patriot Act Meeting with the President
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For Immediate Release
January 3, 2006

U.S. Attorneys Discuss Patriot Act Meeting with the President
The Stakeout



United States Attorneys:

Ken Wainstein, U.S. Attorney, District of Columbia
Carol Lam, U.S. Attorney, Southern District of California
Michael Garcia, U.S. Attorney, Southern District of New York
Roslynn Mauskopf, U.S. Attorney, Eastern District of New York
Mary Beth Buchanan, U.S. Attorney, Western District of Pennsylvania
Debra Wong Yang, U.S. Attorney, Central District of California

WAINSTEIN: Good afternoon.

My name is Ken Wainstein. I'm the U.S. attorney here in Washington, D.C.,
and I'm here with a number of my U.S. attorney colleagues from around the
country. And we just had a meeting with the president about the Patriot
Act.

He asked us to give him our input about the importance of the Patriot Act
to our investigations and our criminal cases and national security cases
around the country.

We told him that we use it each and every day to protect our country
against terrorists and criminals, and though there are only 20 of us here
today, I can assure you that every other one of the 93 U.S. attorneys uses
the Patriot Act tools each and every day in his or her efforts.

The president -- we are very grateful that the president heard out our
concerns and we're very grateful that he appreciates the vitality, the
centrality of these authorities and importance of these authorities in our
efforts to protect the country against terrorists.

It's also important to note, and he recognizes as well, that the Patriot
Act has been critical in other non-terrorist criminal cases around the
country.

And to give you some anecdotes about how important the Patriot Act has been
over the last few years, some of my colleagues are going to tell you about
some of the cases in their districts.

Thank you.

Carol Lam, U.S. attorney in the Southern District of California.

LAM: Good morning.

This morning I briefed the president on a case that we have in San Diego
involving a weapons-for-drugs deal that was taken down in an undercover
operation.

As many of you know, before the Patriot Act, sharing was not permitted
between an ongoing foreign intelligence wiretap and criminal prosecution.
This created, unfortunately, a situation where people had to choose, law
enforcement had to choose between either pursuing an intelligence
investigation or a criminal investigation.

With the Patriot Act, we are now permitted to share that information so if
an intelligence investigation is going on and evidence of a crime is
revealed, that information can be shared with criminal investigators and
criminal prosecutors so that, that information and evidence can be used in
a criminal prosecution.

In San Diego, this case involved three individuals, weapons dealers who
were interested in taking Stinger missiles from undercover FBI agents and
reselling them to Al Qaida and the Taliban. In return, they were going to
give 600 pounds of heroin and five metric tons of hashish to the undercover
FBI agents. As weapons for drug deals shows the narcoterrorism that's going
on in the world today.

With Section 218, the information-sharing provisions of the Patriot Act, we
were able to share information and that resulted in the undercover
operation that took these dangerous individuals out of commission.

Thank you very much.

GARCIA: Thank you.

Mike Garcia from the Southern District of New York.

I spoke to the president this morning about cases that we had in New York
back in the 1990s, and I was a prosecutor then and I saw firsthand the
effect of the wall, the wall between the intelligence investigations and
the criminal investigations, when we were prosecuting some of the major
terrorism cases at that time.

Specifically, we spoke about the Rahman case, the blind cleric who was
charged with a plot to blow up landmarks in New York City.

When that investigation was launched, it was an intelligence investigation
and the prosecutors and the criminal agents were walled off from that
information until the last minute when, by luck and extraordinary effort,
enough information came over that wall to enable us to prosecute Sheikh
Rahman and his followers and to convict them of terrorism charges.

And I contrasted the rules that we had to operate under in the '90s in the
Sheikh Rahman case with the rules that we have today under the Patriot Act,
where sharing is the rule and not the exception that comes about by luck
and personal relationships, that somebody mentions something and, by hard
work, you can follow up and get enough information.

Now, we have a process for sharing information.

And that was evident in the case that involved Sheikh Rahman's attorney,
Lynn Stewart, his translator, and another associate, Sitar (ph), that was
recently prosecuted in the Southern District under the new sharing rules of
the Patriot Act, where we can expend our energy actually investigating and
prosecuting terrorists and not trying to determine how agents of the same
government can share information about terrorists.

Thank you very much.

MAUSKOPF: I'm Roslynn Mauskopf, the United States Attorney for the Eastern
district of New York.

In addition to bullets and bombs, money is the lifeblood of terrorists.
And, in the Eastern district of New York, we have used the Patriot Act and
many of its provisions to choke off the supply of money to terrorists.

In one case prosecuted in the Eastern District of New York, we used the
Patriot Act to secure convictions of Mohammed Al-Moayad and Mohammed Zayed.

Both of these individuals were Yemeni citizens. And Mohammed Al- Moayad was
the self-proclaimed spiritual adviser to Osama bin Laden.

Using the provisions of the Patriot Act, we were able to convict these two
individuals of material support of terrorism, for funneling over $20
million to Al Qaida and Hamas.

And these two individuals didn't stop there. They were seeking to raise
millions of dollars more in support of terrorism.

With the help of the Patriot Act provisions, these two terrorists
financiers are now in federal prison, each serving 75 and 45 years in
prison, respectively.

Without the provisions of the Patriot Act, we would not have been able to
build and prove this case against these two master terrorist financiers.

BUCHANAN: Today, we met with the president and we talked about cases
ranging from international terrorism to criminal activity throughout our
country. We talked about narcotics trafficking cases. We talked about child
exploitation and domestic terrorism.

Section 212 of the Patriot Act was used in Western Pennsylvania -- and I am
Mary Beth Buchanan, the U.S. attorney for Western Pennsylvania -- we used
Section 212 of the Patriot Act to rescue a 13- year-old child who had been
taken from her home in Pittsburgh and abducted by a 38-year-old child
molester.

Without the Patriot Act, we would not have been able to get critical
information that we needed from an Internet service provider, who in the
middle of the night was able to give us information on an emergency basis
to help us to rescue this child from her captor's home in Virginia.

We also talked about a domestic terrorism case involving an imperial wizard
of the Ku Klux Klan who had obtained explosive bombs and devices, and he
planned to obtain hand grenades and blow up abortion clinics.

Without the Patriot Act, we would not have been able to get a wiretap to
get evidence against this individual to successfully prosecute him.

As you can see, the Patriot Act is extremely vital to United States
attorneys across the country to protect our nation from terrorism and from
criminal activity of every type.

At this time, we're happy to take your questions.

QUESTION: The administration has portrayed this as somewhat of a partisan
debate. And, obviously, all of you are here in support of the provisions in
question. Do you feel like there are any legitimate issues when it comes to
some of these provisions, that they go beyond the protection of civil
liberties, that some of your colleagues who aren't here do have a
legitimate case to bring up those concerns?

BUCHANAN: We support the conference report. We believe that this report
gives us the adequate tools that we need to investigate terrorism and to
protect the people from criminal activity. We believe that this provides
adequate safeguards in every respect, and we fully support this report. And
we would ask Congress to enact this legislation and to make the Patriot Act
permanent to give us the tools that we need.

QUESTION: Is there anything in the Senate bill that would make that version
unworkable from your perspective?

WAINSTEIN: We're just going to say that as to the conference report, we
support it fully. We support the tools it provides, how it builds on the
original Patriot Act and the safeguards that are included in it, and we're
fully in support of it.

QUESTION: I have a question for Debra Wong Yang. When the Patriot Act was
originally passed in 2002, it beefed up the FISA court. It streamlined it.
It tripled the amount of time that was available from 24 to 72 hours for
prosecutors who had to go to the FISA court to get the permission for
wiretaps. It (inaudible) there were a number of ways in which it
strengthened and streamlined and made more agile the FISA court.

Does the president's willingness to go around the FISA court since then
bypass the FISA court and entirely make it more difficult to pass this
reauthorization, in your opinion, of the Patriot Act? Has the Patriot Act
addressed the problems that you all as prosecutors had with FISA courts?

YANG: Well, I think that the Patriot Act does address all the problems that
we need to and with all the changes and safeguards. I mean, there are other
mechanism that are in place because we are in the midst of doing a number
of things and looking at a number of individuals.

I don't want to say, in particular to that particular issue. But with
respect to the Patriot Act, I don't think it's harmed us at all. In fact,
his support has been a great -- I guess a great thing that we can use in
trying to fight the war on crime in all aspects.

QUESTION: Are you as a prosecutor comfortable with the notion of
warrantless wiretapping that on one end involves somebody who's an American
citizen or somebody in the United States?

YANG: I think that there are certain things that we need to do, given the
time and the place that are in history, if we want to protect our country
and we want to do it adequately.

QUESTION: Was there any discussion of that issue in your meeting with the
president?

YANG: I'm not at liberty to answer that, sir.

QUESTION: I'm sorry?

YANG: I'm not at liberty to answer that.

QUESTION: Can I ask (inaudible) from the White House, Fran Townsend invited
you down, (inaudible)?

WAINSTEIN: We coordinated this through the Department of Justice. We talked
to them last week and we were all very grateful to have this indication and
to have the opportunity to talk to the president about our concerns about
how important the Patriot Act is to us and our colleagues at the U.S.
Attorneys Offices.

QUESTION: Did you reach (inaudible) at the Justice Department?

WAINSTEIN: It was just -- I got an e-mail from the folks in the department
who arranged things, and I called back and we got it all set up just as we
set up any meetings.

QUESTION: Can I ask why you feel like you're not at liberty to talk about
whether the issue of (inaudible) surveillance program was talked about? Why
do you not feel free to talk about that?

(UNKNOWN): (OFF-MIKE)

WAINSTEIN: Let's just say we're here today to talk about the Patriot Act.
It's very important to our operations. We're focused on that. We want the
country to be focused on it. We want the government to be focused on it. We
want Congress to be focused on it.

So we really want to stick with the Patriot Act and how important it is to
us.

Thank you.

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