
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
C-SPAN’S “NEWSMAKERS”
Guest:
FBI Assistant Director, John Miller
Reporters: Lara Jakes Jordan of the Associated Press and
James Gordon Meek of NY Daily News
Moderator: C-SPAN
AIR DATE/TIME:
SUNDAY, June 3, 2007 at 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. ET
Please use with attribution to
C-SPAN’s “Newsmakers”….*
* NOTE: C-SPAN should appear in all-caps because it is an acronym for Cable Satellite Public Affairs Network
Please contact
Jennifer Moire in C-SPAN's Media Relations Department at
202-626-8797
or jmoire@c-span.org for questions
© NCSC
Copyrighted
material: use with attribution only
SUSAN SWAIN, HOST: This week, Newsmakers welcomes John Miller, the FBI’s Assistant Director for Public Affairs. Our journalists questioning him are Lara Jakes Jordan, who is the Associated Press Justice Department Reporter, and James Gordon Meek, Washington Correspondent for the New York Daily News.
Before we begin our questions, Mr. Miller, I wanted to share with our audience a very brief description of your career path because it’s an unusual one. You’re one of many Americans whose careers changed after 9/11.
Twenty-five years as a reporter, and that took you to the Middle East where you covered a rise of Islamic fundamentalism and radical movements there, including an interview at one time with Osama bin Laden. After 9/11 you switched careers to get into counter-terrorism efforts and now at the FBI.
With that background, let me turn to Lara Jakes Jordan.
LARA JAKES JORDAN, JUSTICE DEPARTMENT REPORTER, ASSOCIATED PRESS: Well, veering off a little bit from counter-terrorism at the get-go, as I understand it the FBI’s going to be releasing some new statistics in the next couple of days, the Uniform Crime Report that comes out annually.
The last couple of reports have shown that violent crime is on the rise nationally. I’m wondering if the new report will show that as well.
JOHN MILLER, ASSISTANT DIRECTOR FOR PUBLIC AFFAIRS, FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION: Well, I think you can anticipate it will if you’ve looked at some of the other data.
The Police Executive Research Forum, which is an independent police think tank, did a survey across more than 50 cities several months ago that would be pretty predictive by examining violent crime categories and showed that there would be, in all likelihood, a continued uptick in violent crime, particularly among mid-size American cities.
I think the data that we’re going to release Monday will contain no big surprises in that regard.
JORDAN: Last year, for example, the national rate went up I think 2.3 percent. Do you think it’ll be larger, on pace, smaller than that?
MILLER: Well, we’re going to release it all at one time on Monday. Just as a housekeeping matter, we used to release this so that the media had time to work with it and kind of do some analysis (INAUDIBLE). And then everybody else got mad.
So as a housekeeping matter we release it all at once and not in advance. And that’ll be Monday. So I’m not going to discuss it beforehand because it kind of goes against the news system.
JAMES GORDON MEEK, WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT, NEW YORK DAILY NEWS: Looking at the trend of violent crime that’s been going up the last few years, what does the FBI attribute that to? Obviously a lot of resources (INAUDIBLE).
MILLER: We don’t do much of the attributing. We leave that to the academics, to the think tanks, to the people who are in the business of analysis. What we have done is worked with our local law enforcement partners to gauge how can we help? How can we help more? How can we – how can we give you tools that will work better?
We’ve expanded the number of violent crime task forces. We’ve expanded the number of gang task forces. We have stood up the National Gang Intelligence Center.
So they’re very much like in terrorism, Jim, we can kind of connect the dots and make those connections between criminal networks as they spread across the country so that when you see an organization like the 18th Street Gang or a new emerging gang, relatively new, like MS-13 that appears in 37-some odd different American cities, we can draw the lines between those networks.
We’ve added resources in that regard to focus on the most violent crimes.
MEEK: But John, in that sense has – you know, post 9/11 there’s an evolving change within the FBI in terms of how much resources are put towards criminal, the traditional criminal investigations, counter terrorism. Is the FBI, is that trend reversing now? Is the FBI putting more resources into criminal investigations…
MILLER: No.
MEEK: …any more than it did five years ago?
MILLER: No. We have the resources that we have. Nobody doubled the size of the FBI nor do I think you could have done that that quickly.
So what we have done is we have come to a point where there’s a split where it’s about 50/50 between national security programs and criminal programs. And for the foreseeable future, that is probably where it will stay.
Now, there are – there are people on Capitol Hill who have talked about adding agents and earmarking them towards criminal programs to buttress that program. And that’s certainly something that would be helpful.
But right now we have had to look at how do we address the criminal issues by getting tighter sets of priorities, focusing on those priorities? And violent crime is one of them. But certainly there are others, like public corruption.
So it’s about how to leverage them to literally get the biggest bang for the FBI’s buck. We’ve been a lot smarter about how we’ve used them. Those task forces are force multipliers because each one comes with a cadre of local officers and officers from other federal agencies. And that’s been one of the ways we’ve been able to continue to be targeted.
JORDAN: But hasn’t the FBI overall put fewer dollars into violent crime initiatives than it did before 9/11?
MILLER: I mean, I can’t tell you about fewer dollars. Our largest cost is personnel costs. And certainly we’ve put fewer personnel into violent crime in the post 9/11 era because the demands have simply been that our top priority is to counter and prevent another terrorist attack.
And to do that we had to increase resources there. Again, without doubling the size of the FBI, those resources have to come from somewhere. They don’t come out of the sky. So if you have priorities, you have to pull from one priority to another.
It’s another reason why when we look at violent crime we weren’t able to ask the question, “How do we put more into this?” So what we were forced to do was ask the question, “How do we do this smarter?” And that’s what we’ve done.
MEEK: This week we had a new videotape, the latest videotape, from Adam Gadahn, this kid from California who was raised Jewish, converted to Islam, and is now the spokesman for al Qaida. He’s been indicted for treason – I think the first American in decades to be indicted for treason.
Do you see – do you think it has a role beyond just being the propaganda base of al Qaida? And if so, what is that role? And secondly, what is the net effect realistically of his putting out these tapes that are, you know, wagging a finger in our faces, threatening more attacks?
MILLER: It’s difficult to speculate about his role because as a key al Qaida spokesperson who delivers messages on behalf of Osama bin Laden and Dr. Ayman Al-Zawahiri, he certainly – he certainly has, if not direct reach, at least very close connections to the highest levels of al Qaida because that’s where the messages that he is delivering are coming from.
It’s certainly been documented that he has met personally with bin Laden, has been within al Qaida structure and camps for a number of years. And a lot has been said about that.
The second part of your question is beyond his role to whatever extent it exists in the hierarchy, what is his effect as a messenger? Adam Gadahn is a propaganda tool in that he speaks as an American. Al Qaida uses him to speak to America. And we have seen messages like the latest message from him before.
MEEK: You think there’s any – you think he’s involved in operational planning at all?
MILLER: I can’t speculate on that from here.
JORDAN: What evidence have you seen, or has the Bureau seen, of the net effect that Gadahn’s statements have on his intended audience? In other words, how is he – is he successfully reaching other people in order to recruit them into al Qaida? Or is homegrown terrorists or to commit other acts of crime for terrorism in the United States?
MILLER: It’s hard to say in that there aren’t many tools to gauge that by. You can’t go through recent people who were, you know, secretly either recruited or indoctrinated to al Qaida and ask them how much of a fact, you know, was Adam Gadahn.
JORDAN: Does his name come up in prisons? I know that’s a breeding ground for some homegrowns.
MILLER: I think he’s a messenger and a propaganda tool who preaches some specific messages, some basic al Qaida doctrine. If you’ve seen his tapes, some of them literally go on for hours.
But I think he has an intended audience for Osama bin Laden. And that audience is first, the English speaking world in general, and then more specifically the United States.
JORDAN: So in other words, how much of a concern are the Adam Gadahn’s of the world to people like yourself or the Bureau or to people like me or Susan or to James? Should normal people be really worried about the message that he’s spreading?
MILLER: I think al Qaida, if they didn’t have Adam Gadahn, would find someone else who spoke English to deliver those messages. I don’t think that Adam Gadahn is that personally important to the message as is his mode of delivery.
So I don’t think he’s that terribly significant as an individual. I think they found a tool and they’re leveraging it.
JORDAN: OK.
MEEK: Well you’ve obviously met – you’ve interviewed Osama bin Laden. Only a few people – only a couple Americans have done that. You’ve also met and talked extensively with his number two, Dr. Zawahiri, who has put out a lot of tapes.
He speaks fluent English. Why do you suppose he doesn’t put out tapes in English and communicate with us in our own language?
MILLER: Well, I think he has done that. And I think al Qaida is on a bell curve here. They’re getting more effective at this, and they’re doing it in a calculated way and a deliberate way.
First of all, you see that they put out more communications than they used to, that they have picked up the tempo and pasted that a great deal because I think to some extent as their ability to function as a corporate structure because of the capture and killing of so many of its key leaders, al Qaida has tried to put the message out to get others to step forward out there in the public and do things in its name. That’s where those messages are key.
Now Zawahiri speaks perfectly good English and can do those messages in English and has in the past, in some cases. But Gadahn is a special tool because it’s not just that he speaks English. He’s also American. And that has a different – a different subliminal texture for al Qaida.
But you also note, and this is important because it shows an intent, that al Qaida’s messages now come in Arabic – that’s one audience that they’re speaking to – with English subtitles already built in. It’s not the CNNs or the FOX News or the C-SPANs that generate the English subtitle. The tapes come that way now.
And they have realized that they are reaching out to a diverse audience of people. And they don’t want to discriminate through language. They’re trying to reach as many people as possible.
MEEK: Let me just follow up on what you’ve talked about, the operational – or excuse me, the message tempo. Zawahiri’s put out, I don’t know, 16 or 17 videotapes in the last year or so alone.
Counter terrorism officials are now telling me that, you know, maybe we were wrong to think these guys – meaning bin Laden’s over here didn’t’ have direct control over operations. Look at the tapes they put out, usually Zawahiri, within a 10 day turnaround referencing a current event until the time the tape comes out where he references that event.
What do you think those two guys, in terms of their operational control over terrorist attacks, cared (ph) about (ph) al Qaida. Do you think they have control? Do you think it’s just all they have control over is the propaganda?
MILLER: I think what we’re seeing is a bifurcated process which is al Qaida depends on two separate streams of activity. One, self generated to the extent that you will see something like the London Planes plot that came at the end of the summer where there is at least – at least a latent fingerprint of al Qaida control there.
But I think you also look at something like the Fort Dix plot or the Torrence (ph) case where you have people who not only have no connection to al Qaida but couldn’t contact al Qaida if they wanted to, yet they’re acting on al Qaida’s propaganda-driven instructions, or at least inspired by al Qaida.
And I think what al Qaida is counting on now is that it has always taken them, over the years, kind of a two-year arc between major attacks to develop the plan and execute it. What they’re counting on is trying to develop and execute the major plan while at the same time putting out the propaganda fodder and hoping that others will take that ball and run with it. And they’re counting on both happening at once.
Now it’s been more than five years since September 11, and we haven’t seen a successful al Qaida driven major attack. But that doesn’t mean that we haven’t seen them in the works or seen them taken apart.
SWAIN: We’re halfway through. Let me jump in for a second and ask a question that’s on the other side of the equation which is the hunt for terrorist suspects in the United States. Today is the fifth anniversary of the post-9/11 revision of the guidelines the FBI uses that were introduced by then Attorney General John Ashcroft.
On the anniversary, civil liberties groups, privacy rights groups, are criticizing the guidelines saying that they’re too intrusive and not protective of American civil liberties. They want Congress to get involved.
What is the FBI’s message to Congress about what you need to retain in order to do your job effectively?
MILLER: Well, we have to – we have to service both ends of that discussion, which is, one, we have to prevent another terrorist attack and we have to have the tools in place to be able to do our job effectively.
Two, we have to do that by following the guidelines, the rules, and protecting civil rights. And, you know, the guidelines have been changed before over the years as circumstances have changed, as the nature of the threat has changed, as technology has changed.
And, you know, we are…
SWAIN: So your message to Congress would be?
MILLER: A message to Congress is threat continues to evolve and we continue to need these tools. And if there is any arbiter of that or something that vets it, if you look at the worldwide picture from the Canada 17 case to the cases in London, be they the successful attacks or those prevented to the attacks in the United States – and I’m just talking over the last couple of years where you’ll see more than half a dozen plots targeting U.S. soil that were interrupted, is that we’re using the tools. And by and large we’re using them correctly, certainly to the best of our ability. And the threat is clearly still there.
I don’t think that this would be a time to inhibit our ability to prevent those attacks when you have so many of these threats that are documented and in progress.
JORDAN: Well let me turn from that to the NSLs, the National Security Letters. The Justice Department’s inspector general released a report several months ago, as you know, saying that the FBI had improperly, and in some cases, illegally, used these letters, administrative subpoenas, that they didn’t have proper authorization and trying to get personal data about Americans or people in the United States from phone companies and Internet companies. It didn’t properly inform Congress that they were doing so or update to the status.
I understand the Bureau’s doing an internal review on the use of these and see how widespread the abuse was. Can you update us on where that internal review is, when it’ll be done, how widespread this problem has been?
MILLER: Well, the internal review is still in progress because we have to go across 20 divisions and 56 field offices and 400 resident agencies and so on.
JORDAN: And when do you expect that’ll be done?
MILLER: I can’t give you a time. I can get you a time. I just can’t give you one off the top of my head. What we have found within our review is we have found some of the same problems the Inspector General identified which were systemic problems.
So since we are looking at the same system but a much larger sampling than the Inspector General did, we’re finding the same problems within that system as we expected to.
What we’ve done as well as kind of a 15-step program, which was outlined the day the report came out, to put in permanent fixes is, as a stop-gap effort we have developed very extensive and what we feel is much clearer guidance to the field.
It’s not that there weren’t rules. And it’s not that there wasn’t guidance and it’s not that there wasn’t training before the last mistakes were uncovered by the Inspector General. It’s that obviously it was not sufficient because some people weren’t going by it to the letter A. And B, we didn’t have an effective compliance piece in. In other words, it wasn’t enough to have the right training and the right guidance. You had to know, you had to have a machine, to check whether people were following it.
So we’ve put out clearer guidance by developing that. We’ve actually brought in our most harsh critics, the privacy groups, the civil liberty groups. We had them go over a draft of this guidance. They came up with almost 20 suggestions.
JORDAN: Can you give me an example?
MILLER: In a second. And I think we adopted almost all of those suggestions. Some of the suggestions were just as simple as when you’re requesting these kinds of records, somebody could read this paragraph to mean that those kinds of records would be applicable within this meaning, too.
Why don’t you give an example that these kinds of records would be this, that, and the other thing? But in the case of subpoenaing financial documents from an insurance company, health related records would not.
And, you know, we’ve had a look at their example and said, you know, somebody could misconstrue this that way. That would be a good example to put in. And we added those to the guidance as it went.
JORDAN: So you think this will be largely cleared up with better training and clearer paperwork?
MILLER: No. I think the opposite of that. I think that we had good training and we had good mechanisms for paperwork and that failed. So I think what the director has concluded is that only a very strong compliance program on top of good guidance – now, better guidance – on top of good training – now enhanced training – is to trust that none of that will work and that a compliance program needs to be put into place that will actually continually pick from the system, sample randomly, and check against it so that we can spot these trends faster.
And in that regard, the Inspector General did us a service because we had the rules in place. We had the guidance in place. And not in all cases were they being followed.
JORDAN: So the director, I believe, in congressional testimony indicated that he’d be willing to eliminate NSLs for another kind of administrative subpoena. Can you talk a little – as I understand it, the second kind of administrative subpoena would be open to court approval or challenge or…
MILLER: It’s just a simpler process. In a drug case, in a healthcare fraud, if you want the very same records, you can use an administrative subpoena that goes to one statute, one set of laws, and that’s how you glean your information.
It’s a simple tool. It has a simple beginning and a simple end. In the National Security front, the National Security Letter was adapted. It was a tool to use in spy cases. And it was the National Security tool because when it was – when it was built, terrorism wasn’t the issue it was today.
So they took the handiest National Security tool, the NSL, and they adapted it to terrorism. But it’s very complex because it answers to a number of statutes. It answers to financial privacy statutes, to statutes about financial privacy, medical, a whole set of laws.
So when you’re going to fill out an NSL and you go into that process, you have to discern which law you’re using and how it applies to your case, whereas with the administrative subpoena you could come up with something that answered to one statute, one set of rules, and you could eliminate a lot of the places where the mistakes are made because it’s more streamlined.
SWAIN: Four minutes left.
MEEK: John, there was very dramatic testimony in the last couple of weeks by the former Deputy Attorney General Jim Comey where he described this late night session at the former Attorney General John Ashcroft’s sick bed when he was in great pain, sedation, where he went up to try to stop the then White House Counsel and then – White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales who’s now the Attorney General, from signing some sort of executive order to reauthorize a surveillance program believed to be administered by the National Security Agency.
As part of that testimony, Mr. Comey said that the FBI Director, Mr. Mueller, was prepared to resign if this was not worked out in a way that he and the deputy attorney general, who was then the acting Attorney General, not to confuse things, thought it should be worked out.
MILLER: However, you did it very clearly.
MEEK: Thank you. Some protection should be put in place to make it legally certifiable, this surveillance program, but that this became a very dramatic moment. What can you tell us about the director’s, according to Mr. Comey, threat to resign over this?
MILLER: I can tell you that after 25 years as a reporter, I thought that was a very interesting story, and I walked very quickly down to the director’s office and said, “Do you want to talk about that?”
And he said to me what he would say to you, which is, “I don’t discuss private conversations between myself and other persons or deliberative conversations or any of those other things.” And I think the reason he answered that way is because to do so would be to inhibit future deliberative and private conversations.
So I can’t – I can’t vet that for you.
MEEK: Well, see, nobody denied it since this story’s come out.
MILLER: I saw the testimony on television. And he didn’t confirm it and he didn’t deny it to me. What he said is, “I don’t discuss my private conversations with others.” And we put out a statement to that fact. And that’s where that’s going to stay right now.
SWAIN: Two minutes left.
JORDAN: OK. On a related note about that program, the terrorist surveillance program, the number of FISA applications and warrants that have been approved in the last several years keep going up. Last year there were almost 2,200 FISA applications that were approved. This is – these are, as you know, search (INAUDIBLE).
MILLER: There was a lot of internal criticism.
JORDAN: Wondering if you can talk a little bit about why the number keeps going up, you know, at a time when terrorist investigations or actual convictions of cases seem to be going down.
MEEK: Does this mean there are more spies and more terrorists?
MILLER: Well, it’s a good question. Certainly FISA applications aren’t just for terrorism. They’re for National Security cases which could include espionage…
JORDAN: Three-quarters of them are terrorism related, though.
MILLER: ..and I would hearken back to my other answer which is we’re seeing a very high tempo of terrorist activity, not just based on the cases you’ve seen brought in the United States because a FISA application is not the way to a prosecution necessarily. It’s a way to legally collect information, whether that’s electronic surveillance or otherwise, whether that’s over a telephone or an Internet connection or otherwise. And it is an intelligence tool.
So if somebody wants to accuse us of collecting more intelligence against terrorists and spies, I’d like to plead guilty.
JORDAN: How much of that evidence or intelligence that you all collect, actual pans out into a full investigation that might lead to a prosecution?
MILLER: It’s a – it’s a faulty question. And I don’t mean it’s a faulty question of yours. It’s a question that is attached an old paradigm which is that collecting intelligence has to pan out into a case.
Collecting intelligence is to learn more about the threat, more about the adversary, more about the networks, more about the financing, and more about how to disrupt, weaken, prevent, terrorist attacks.
Prosecution is another tool in that mix that when you’ve wrung it dry of that intelligence, may be the thing you bring to bear, and sometimes maybe not. But you can’t connect the numbers together and say, “More FISAs necessarily must mean more prosecutions.”
JORDAN: Less prosecutions.
MEEK: Well, just to zero in on that, has the FBI – can you tell us if the FBI has identified any al Qaida cells? I don’t mean just a loan operator here or there, but an actual operational cell.
MILLER: I can’t tell you that. And that doesn’t mean the answer’s no.
SWAIN: And that has to be it for our time. Mr. Miller, thank you very much for joining us this week.
MILLER: Thanks for having me.
SWAIN: We’re going to take a short break and we’ll be back to talk with both of you about the attitude on Capitol Hill about the FBI these days.
(BREAK)
SWAIN: After our conversation with John Miller of the FBI, we are back to talk with James Gordon Meek of the New York Daily News and Lara Jakes Jordan of the Associated Press where she covers the Justice Department.
Well, there was a lot of discussion about internal review of the FBI and about funding and deployment of resources. With the Democratic Congress and an Attorney General who has been a bit embattled of late, what is the attitude about the FBI on Capitol Hill right now?
JORDAN: I think it’s fair to say that the FBI has largely gotten a by from Congress. Director Mueller came up and testified earlier this year before a lot of the controversy with the firings of eight U.S. attorneys surfaced.
And at that hearing he was knocked for some of the, you know, the internal review process. This was also before the NSLs were revealed to have been abused. But he was knocked for not having made an arrest in the anthrax terror investigation case. For example, that’s been almost six years, five and a half years in the making.
And ever since the U.S. attorney scandal erupted, haven’t heard a lot of criticism of the FBI because I think Congress has been pretty consumed with that.
MEEK: Well, you know, nothing could have helped them more than to have a story out there that you threaten to resign over because Mueller has been criticized in years past since he took office in the days right before 9/11 for being much too cozy with the Bush White House.
And, you know, we saw a break from that a couple years ago right around this time period, interestingly, when the Gadahn be-on-the-lookout was first issued where there was a lot of internal criticism of being too close, particularly in an election year.
And you’ve seen this guy moving away from the White House trying to be more independent, which a lot of people in the FBI and the greater community think a director ought to be. So this is – this may help them still.
I think that Director Mueller is up holding hands a lot on Capitol Hill because I think a lot of the patience has worn thin with a lot of things. And it’s not just the NSLs. It’s the computer problems. You know, they’re still using these antiquated computer systems for their case file management that were outmoded when they were installed a decade or more ago.
But, you know, the Bureau, it’s an up and down relationship. They sort of came out early, privately behind the scenes against torturing terrorists who we capture on the battlefield or elsewhere. And, you know, that made them look good.
But, you know, there’s a lot of patience wearing thin about some of their problems.
SWAIN: Well, on the reference to the computers, the FBI asked for and got billions of dollars to upgrade their computer software, their integration system. And it’s just been the subject of a critical GAO report about the integrity of it.
You mentioned patience wearing thin. Where is the – what is the direction of the oversight and Congress on the FBI’s ability to carry out what it says it wants to do?
JORDAN: There’s skepticism for sure. And the Judiciary |Committee certainly wants to get more information out of the FBI. Republican Arlen Specter, who’s the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, has expressed major frustration with Mueller, for example, for not talking about classified information that the FBI has given to the intelligence community – intelligence committees.
But at the end of the day, the FBI’s going to get their money. They just will because lawmakers don’t want to have rising crime rates in their home districts. They don’t want to have to answer to their constituents about it. They sure don’t want to be the person who cuts funding and then we get hit by another terrorist attack.
So for all of the frustration and angst on the Hill, the FBI is going to get their money.
SWAIN: First part of the conversation, we have a minute left, was really about deployment of resources. And Mr. Miller said the limited resources and change priority…
MEEK: They want more agents.
SWAIN: …that’s what that was all about?
MEEK: I guess – I don’t know how official that message was, but it seemed to indicate that if they had more agents to do traditional crime fighting, what they used to refer to as the knuckle-dragging element of the FBI, that would be a great thing.
And it is kind of surprising in one sense that the FBI hasn’t swelled its ranks or it hasn’t grown substantially since 9/11 even though they’ve had to shift so much attention to counter terrorism.
It’s meant that they do less of the traditional things, bank robberies, you know, drug cases, whatever. And I think the FBI, there’s a big segment of them I would love to get back to doing, good old fashioned crime fighting.
But Lara’s right, you know, they’re going to get their money on Capitol Hill no matter what, but they’re going to get kicked in the teeth a little bit when they go up to testify in hearings.
SWAIN: Last question, and very quick, the – you were asking questions about the report which will be released on the national crime statistics next week. What do you think, if the numbers continue to rise, that the political impact of that report will be?
JORDAN: Wow, it’s really hard to say. But at the end of the day, nobody wants to have crime in their back yard, right? And certainly the Bush administration and its attorney general doesn’t want to be – have their legacy as crime going up.
So I think it could be – I assume it would be pretty damaging in November ’08.
SWAIN: Thanks to both of you for being with us this week.
JORDAN: Thank you.
END