[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 113 (Tuesday, September 2, 1997)]
[Senate]
[Pages S8641-S8643]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                               RUBY RIDGE

  Mr. SPECTER. Mr. President, I see no other Senator on the floor 
seeking recognition, so I will amplify my remarks at this time about 
the concerns which I have on the congressional oversight and the need 
for additional congressional oversight on the incidents arising out of 
Ruby Ridge.
  Mr. President, the incident at Ruby Ridge has been very heavily 
publicized. And there have been a number of investigations on this 
subject. And investigations are continuing at the present time.
  This incident occurred back on August 21, 1992, which is more than 5 
years ago. With the possible exception of the incident at Waco, this 
incident at Ruby Ridge has caused tremendous consternation with respect 
to action by the Federal Government.
  The essential events at Ruby Ridge were that a man named Randy Weaver 
had been arrested for selling two sawed-off shotguns and had not made 
his court appearances. A large contingent of Federal law enforcement 
officers went to his home at Ruby Ridge in Idaho to take Mr. Randy 
Weaver into custody. It is a very complex matter, a very lengthy 
matter. I will only summarize the essential factors. A firefight broke 
out on August 21, 1992. In the course of that firefight, a Federal 
marshall, deputy marshall, Mr. William Degan, was killed, 14-year-old 
Sammy Weaver, son of Mr. Randy Weaver and Mrs. Vicki Weaver, was 
killed, and Mrs. Vicki Weaver was killed.

  The large force which had assembled there to take Mr. Randy Weaver 
into custody did so because of reports by the Alcohol, Tobacco and 
Firearms agency, which were false, that there had been prior 
convictions as to Mr. Randy Weaver--and he had not been convicted of 
anything--and that Mr. Weaver was a suspect in bank robbery cases, 
which is untrue.
  The essential findings, the essential overstatements, were summarized 
by FBI Director Louis Freeh, who testified at our Judiciary 
subcommittee hearings on October 19, 1995, as follows: ``One 
misstatement of fact exaggerated to another one, into a huge pile of 
information that was just dead wrong.'' As a result of those erroneous 
statements, this firefight occurred and these deaths occurred.
  There have been a number of investigations conducted. Most recently, 
a brief report was filed by the Department of Justice on Ruby Ridge, 
which is only a small part of the full report which was filed. This one 
is eight pages. It was issued back on August 15. In the course of this 
report, there is a notation of some six prior investigations on this 
matter. There had been an exhaustive report by the Department of 
Justice task force that was issued on June 10, 1994. There was an 
investigation conducted by the FBI Inspection Division. There was an 
investigation initiated by the Department of Justice Office of 
Professional Responsibility, following a letter from special agent 
Eugene Glenn, who was the on-scene commander in Idaho. He was an FBI 
agent in charge in Idaho. Then the Judiciary subcommittee conducted its 
inquiry, and then there was an investigation conducted by U.S. attorney 
Michael Stiles, who is the U.S. attorney for the eastern district of 
Pennsylvania. He took over for the U.S. Attorney for the District of 
Columbia. Mr. Eric Holder had recused himself because he knew some of 
the agents who were involved.
  I had expressed my own concern on a number of occasions about the 
length of time that the Department of Justice investigation was taking 
because there were a number of FBI officials who had been suspended, 
with pay, and were simply sitting dormant. Based upon the knowledge 
that I had of this incident, because of the hearings which we had 
through the Judiciary subcommittee, it seems to me that the matter 
should have been concluded a long time ago.

[[Page S8642]]

  Our subcommittee held 14 days of hearings from September 6 to October 
19, 1995, heard testimony from 62 witnesses, interviewed many others, 
reviewed thousands of documents, including the entire transcripts and 
exhibits from the trial of Mr. Randy Weaver and Mr. Kevin Harris and 
various internal reports prepared by the Department of the Treasury, 
the Department of Justice, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. 
Based upon that detailed knowledge of this incident, it seemed to me, 
and also based on the experience I have had as district of attorney in 
Philadelphia in some background investigations, this is a matter that 
should have been concluded a long time ago. I took this matter up on 
many occasions with the Attorney General and, in fact, back on November 
25, 1996, I called for a meeting and had one in my office with Attorney 
General Reno, then Deputy Attorney General Gorelick and U.S. Attorney 
Michael Stiles on November 25, 1996. I continued to discuss this on 
many occasions to Attorney General Reno and Deputy Attorney General 
Gorelick and U.S. Attorney Stiles, and as illustrative of my ongoing 
concern, wrote to them on February 26, 1997, as follows:

       Dear Attorney General Reno: I again express to you my deep 
     concern about the long delay of the Department of Justice in 
     completing the investigation of certain FBI officials arising 
     out of the incidents of Ruby Ridge. As you know, the 
     Judiciary Subcommittee on Terrorism completed exhaustive 
     hearings in September and October of 1995 and published a 
     voluminous 154-page report in December 1995.
       I expressed my concern to you on the Department of Justice 
     delay months ago and met on this subject with you and Deputy 
     Attorney General Gorelick and Michael Stiles on November 25, 
     1996. I would appreciate your prompt response on when you 
     expect this investigation to be completed.

  I had a response from the Attorney General that it would be completed 
soon. I then brought it up again with her in Department of Justice 
oversight hearings on April 30, 1997, and again was told that it would 
be completed soon. Then this Department of Justice abbreviated report 
was, as I say, submitted on August 22, but it is not the conclusion of 
the matter because there has been a referral here to the Department of 
Justice Management Division which will propose what, if any, 
disciplinary sanctions should be imposed on the individuals under 
investigation and also to the Justice Department Office of Professional 
Responsibility, which had been investigating this matter back in August 
of 1995.
  So the matter is still ongoing and incomplete so far as the 
Department of Justice is concerned.
  When I sought to have subcommittee hearings back in the summer of 
1995, that was opposed in a number of quarters, including the 
Department of Justice. We finally moved ahead, but because of the 
August recess, we scheduled for immediately after Labor Day, and then 
in late August, we proceeded with our subcommittee hearings. It is not 
an easy thing to do when there is a public statement by the Deputy 
Attorney General that Senate action will impede the ongoing 
investigation. That has a certain political overtone which is very 
difficult to move against. But we did, and I think our investigation 
has spurred more activity by the Department of Justice because it was 
our inquiry on the so-called rules of engagement which led to further 
the Department of Justice investigation.
  I should say, Mr. President, that it is not possible to outline all 
of the things which have happened in this matter, but in the Federal 
trial which was completed against Mr. Randy Weaver and Mr. Kevin 
Harris, both were acquitted. One of the issues which was an outgrowth 
of that Federal trial was the activity of one of the key FBI agents to 
destroy a record which had been ordered to be produced by the Federal 
judge. That individual is now awaiting sentencing. In October of 1996, 
Special Agent E. Michael Kahoe, of the FBI's Violent Crimes and Major 
Offenders Section, was charged with and later pleaded guilty to 
obstruction of justice relating to his destruction of an FBI after-
action critique on the Ruby Ridge matter. He is scheduled for 
sentencing on September 11.
  The FBI has had an extraordinary record for law enforcement in this 
country and abroad, and I think it has been a very, very important law 
enforcement agency. From time to time there are problems with the FBI, 
as there are with any agency, but it certainly is a matter of 
overwhelming concern for someone who has the responsibility of being 
the chief of the Violent Crimes and Major Offenders Section who 
destroys a report ordered to be produced by a Federal judge. That is 
the case here.
  There are other major matters which our subcommittee looked into and 
which have been investigated by the Department of Justice where they 
concluded they did not have sufficient evidence to charge two other 
senior FBI officials with criminal conduct on falsifying the so-called 
rules of engagement which were a part of the controversy at Ruby Ridge. 
The rules of engagement provided that if any adult is observed with a 
weapon prior to surrender announcement, deadly force can and should be 
employed if the shot can be taken without endangering any children. The 
second aspect: if any adult in the compound is observed with a weapon 
after the surrender announcement is made and is not attempting to 
surrender, deadly force can and should be employed to neutralize the 
individual. Mr. President, those rules of engagement, simply stated, 
violate the U.S. Constitution. That was the judgment of the Department 
of Justice task force. That was the judgment of the Judiciary 
subcommittee, and that was the judgment of the FBI Director, Louis 
Freeh, that those rules did violate the constitutional standard for use 
of deadly force. You just cannot do that in America.
  To the credit of FBI Director Louis Freeh, those rules of engagement 
were changed and the procedures of the hostage rescue team were 
changed. We have yet to see an acknowledgment by the Alcohol, Tobacco 
and Firearms unit of their inappropriate conduct in this matter, either 
from the Secretary of the Treasury, Robert Rubin, or the director of 
the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms unit, John Magaw. I know that is a 
strong statement, but that happens to be the fact. I have met 
personally with Mr. Rubin and Mr. Magaw, and they have not taken 
responsibility for what the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agency did in 
this matter, which was spread false information about Mr. Weaver with 
respect to saying he had prior convictions, which he had not, and 
saying he was a suspect in a bank robbery case, which he was not.
  In any event, Mr. President, the matter goes on in the eight-page 
report which has been filed by the Department of Justice. As the saying 
goes, more questions are raised than are answered. I have made a 
request to see the entire report and am told that will not be made 
available until the Office of Professional Responsibility finishes its 
work, and that may occur at some point in the future, which is very, 
very difficult to predict. At any rate, we have this eight-page report, 
and as I say, it raised a good many new questions.
  The scope of the investigation conducted by the Department of 
Justice, headed by U.S. Attorney Stiles, has this to say under the 
section of Scope of the Criminal Investigation:

       The investigative team used a variety of techniques to 
     collect all available evidence in this matter. They gathered 
     large amounts of documented material that had never come to 
     light during prior internal inquiries into the events at Ruby 
     Ridge.

  Now, the question was raised in my mind, if these documents had not 
come to light on prior internal inquiries into the events at Ruby 
Ridge, why not? The question is raised in my mind as to whether the FBI 
made available to the Senate Judiciary subcommittee all of the 
documents which we had requested. This report goes on to say, ``The FBI 
offices were searched, and more than half a million pages of documents 
were obtained and analyzed, including previously unreviewed files 
containing the bulk of the FBI headquarters' records, including files 
of the FBI's Strategic Information and Operations Section and the 
Violent Crimes and Major Offenders Section.''
  So a question is raised immediately as to whether the Department of 
Justice task force which worked back in 1994 and whether the FBI 
Inspections Division and whether the prior investigation by the Office 
of Professional Responsibility and whether the Senate hearings which 
called for all of these documents, whether those documents were 
produced at that time.

[[Page S8643]]

  This is just a brief thumbnail description as to some of the 
questions that we have and that are pending yet. My sense is that it is 
indispensable that the Judiciary Committee move ahead with the inquiry 
that was conducted back in 1995 to find out specifically why it took 
the Department of Justice approximately 2 years to come to this stage 
of their inquiry and take a look at the findings that led to a 
declination of prosecution as to some individuals in the face of what 
appears to be significant evidence on a falsification of the rules of 
engagement.
  We do know that at the hearings conducted in 1995, there was another 
set of rules of engagement which discussed a permissive use of force, 
specifically noting where deadly force may be used. During the course 
of our subcommittee hearings, we could never determine precisely who 
issued the rules of engagement because no one would take responsibility 
for them. But the way this investigation has been conducted by the 
Department of Justice, certainly in my judgment, urgently requires 
congressional oversight. We know that the prosecuting attorney of 
Boundary County has now issued an indictment against a special agent 
sharpshooter, whose firing resulted in the death of Mrs. Vicki Weaver, 
on charges of involuntary manslaughter.
  Had I been the prosecuting attorney there, I would not have brought 
that prosecution, under all the facts of the case. I have been a 
district attorney and have made judgments that involve when a 
prosecution ought to be brought. But I can understand why the district 
attorney of Boundary County brought the charges in light of the bad 
bungling that the Department of Justice has made of this case. And 
there are many, many collateral matters that have not yet been answered 
satisfactorily. The Attorney General approved the promotion of Mr. 
Potts to be Deputy Director of the FBI, in a context where red flags 
were present about Mr. Potts' qualifications for that job, being a very 
close personal friend of FBI Director Freeh. That was inquired into at 
some length during the Judiciary subcommittee hearings, but we did not 
have the benefit of the Attorney General's testimony in that matter. 
She took the position that she does not testify before subcommittees 
because there are so many subcommittees. The point the subcommittee 
raised at that time was that we were not asking her opinion on a 
variety of legislative issues where there are so many issues and 
subcommittees, but we asked for her testimony as a fact witness as to 
why she personally approved the promotion of Mr. Potts. But she 
declined to appear. We declined to issue a subpoena or have a 
confrontation on the issue.
  When I discussed this personally with the Attorney General, she 
restated her position and said maybe she should have appeared. I told 
her at that time, months ago, she might have occasion to appear yet. I 
hope that she does have occasion to appear on the questions relating to 
many issues in this very complex matter, because as stated in the 
statement issued by U.S. Attorney Stiles, this was approved by the 
Department of Justice and, inferentially, by the Attorney General 
herself. These are matters that have to be inquired into.
  On the subject of having this matter now taken to the Office of 
Professional Responsibility, I have grave questions about what will 
happen there and what the time sequence will be, and their explanation 
as to why they took so long is there are many statutory requirements 
that may be reviewed by the Congress. The incident involving William 
Jewel in Atlanta occurred back in July 1996, and it took a full year to 
get oversight hearings before the subcommittee on that matter. Those 
hearings did not do any credit to the Office of Professional 
Responsibility, where Mr. Shaheen, the director of that unit, 
testified. Mr. Shaheen testified that Mr. Jewel's constitutional rights 
were violated, but it was nowhere in the report. I asked the very 
fundamental question, ``Why doesn't the report say so?'' It is one 
thing to testify before a subcommittee that the constitutional rights 
of a suspect were violated. But to fail to do so in the report does not 
give guidance to other agents in the field. It was in the context that 
Mr. Jewel was told he was being questioned for a training film purpose, 
and he was misled by the FBI agents under those circumstances. It was 
later concluded that his Miranda rights had been violated. In a 
repeated line of questioning, Mr. Shaheen could not cite any part of 
the report that said that. He cited sections of the report that did not 
say what he said he said, and he admitted that. Then, after the hearing 
was over, on the same day, Mr. Shaheen sent me a two-page letter saying 
that he had misspoken, that the Office of Professional Responsibility 
had not in fact found that Mr. Jewel's constitutional rights had been 
violated--a conclusion which is a little hard to understand in light of 
his extensive testimony on this subject.
  Madam President, this is a very important matter. As I have said 
earlier, it is a matter which is still resonating in America. I was in 
Pennsylvania, at my open house town meetings on the 13th, 14th and 
15th, when the report came out that the Department of Justice would not 
bring any prosecutions and a week later when the prosecuting attorney 
of Boundary County, ID, brought the indictments against Kevin Harris 
for murder in the first degree against Deputy Marshal William Degan and 
involuntary manslaughter against Special Agent Horiuchi. It is my hope 
that we will continue this inquiry with congressional oversight, 
because only the Congress can really undertake the kind of questioning 
of department heads, the Attorney General, the Director of the FBI, or 
the Director of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, or the Secretary of 
Treasury, of that rank, to find out what has happened, so that we can 
tell the American people what the facts are. There is tremendous unrest 
on this subject, which is part of the unrest and distrust of Government 
that I have referred to earlier, confirmed by the earlier public 
opinion poll.
  Madam President, in the absence of any Senator seeking recognition, I 
suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. SPECTER. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

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