Dog days take toll on the FBI

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Sept 11, 1995 | by Douglas Burton

The dog days of 1995 have deepened the FBI's summer of discontent. The bureau was on the receiving end of an investigation by the House Judiciary Committee in July about its handling of the Branch Davidian stand-off near Waco, Texas, and more heat will be coming Sept. 6 when Sen. Arlen Specter's Judiciary subcommittee will review the agency's handling of the Ruby Ridge, Idaho, siege of Randy Weaver in 1992, including new charges of an FBI cover-up.

But, hey! Give the bureau credit for being all business when it comes to clamping down on the excessive use of force by local police in a suburb of Washington. On Aug. 10, five Prince George's County, Md., police officers were lured to a warehouse expecting to be served subpoenas for a grand-jury investigation. Instead, they were surrounded by 20 FBI agents who seized their clothes, guns, gun belts and police cruisers. The charge? Well, no charge yet. The FBI was acting on a search warrant in connection to possible charges of a civil-rights violation.

On April 28 the county's SWAT team may have beaten a 25-year-old African-American they suspected of being a cop killer. Subsequent events suggest they gave a "wood shampoo" to the wrong man. The suspect, Jeffrey C. Gilbert, was beaten so badly that he needed a four-day hospital stay. The FBI agents apparently wanted to match the officers' boots and weapons with photos of the suspect's injuries.

"It was a dehumanizing strip search," groused John Bartlett, president of Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 89. "It's outrageous. The FBI had no clothes to give them, a major had to go and purchase flip-flops and sweats," Bartlett told the Prince George's Journal.

A high-ranking federal law-enforcement official told the Washington Post that the unusual tactic was used to "minimize a volatile situation" since a confrontation between police from two different agencies "has a potential for volatility."

Perhaps, on the eve of Senate hearings into its own misconduct, the FBI was trying to serve notice that the agency is a stickler for procedure. It has reason to worry. On Aug. 11, FBI Director Louis J. Freeh suspended embattled former deputy Larry Potts and three other senior FBI officials pending a criminal probe of whether the four had lied or obstructed justice during an internal review of the fatal 1992 siege of Weaver's cabin in northern Idaho. A month earlier, Freeh had demoted Potts to the FBI's training division on the eve of the House Judiciary Committee's Waco hearings.

One key issue to be scrutinized by senators is whether Potts authorized the use of deadly force that resulted in the shooting of Weaver's son in the back, killing the Weaver dog and the shooting of Weaver's wife, Vicki, who was killed as she held their 10-month-old daughter in the door of their cabin on Aug. 22, 1992. In May, FBI agent Eugene F. Glenn, who was the on-site commander at the Weaver shooting and who later was censured, suspended and transferred, charged that the FBI's internal review of the incident was "a scheme to protect Potts," the Washington Times reported.

Indeed, Potts had weathered an internal review of the FBI's shooting team in September 1992 that concluded the FBI was justified in killing Vicki Weaver because "she willfully placed herself in harm's way." But, when Weaver went to trial in 1993, the FBI refused to produce its report as well as other records requested by U.S. District Judge Edward J. Lodge in Boise, Idaho. Lodge slapped a $1,920 fine on the FBI and said the FBI's behavior "served to obstruct the administration of justice," the Post reported.

Potts' stock went down following Weaver's acquittal on all but two minor counts. A special Justice Department task force looked into charges of a cover-up and concluded that the sniper killing of Vicki Weaver was unjustified and that orders authorizing the shooting were unconstitutional. The task force recommended the case for prosecution but was turned down by other officials in the Justice Department.

In moves that are peculiar to the inner workings of federal bureaucracy, Freeh promoted Potts to the post of acting deputy director in December, then a month later censured him and disciplined 11 other agents for their handling of the Ruby Ridge incident, but in May he said he "continue[s] to have the utmost confidence in Larry Potts."

Meanwhile, police and citizens in Prince George's County still are fuming. Said Bartlett to the Times: "They [the FBI agents] are using scare tactics. This is the same tactics they used in Waco, but now they're out there busting cops." Only time will tell if Prince George's police can show that their procedures live up to federal standards.