Ashcroft Assailed on Gun Policy Memo

By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 25, 2002; Page A11

Gun control groups yesterday accused Attorney General John D. Ashcroft of misleading Congress in December by not disclosing an internal Justice Department opinion that concluded the FBI could legally search gun purchase records for the names of suspected terrorists.

But Justice Department officials said there is no contradiction between Ashcroft's views and the legal opinion, since both conclude that authorities can only search for names of people known to be felons, illegal immigrants, domestic abusers or mentally ill.

The flap centers on a fledgling FBI effort last fall to search the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) for the names of suspected terrorists. Justice officials in mid-October ordered a halt to the effort, arguing that the search appeared to violate the federal law that set up the background check system.

The move sparked howls from gun control advocates and many Democratic lawmakers, who questioned why Ashcroft would bar such searches while simultaneously jailing immigrants in secrecy for often tenuous ties to terrorism.

Ashcroft defended the decision in Senate testimony in December, saying "the United States Congress specifically outlaws and bans . . . the use of approved purchase records for weapons checks on possible terrorists or anyone else."

But in a confidential Oct. 1 memorandum, which only came to light this week, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Sheldon Bradshaw concluded that "we see nothing in the NICS regulations that prohibits the FBI from deriving additional benefits from checking audit log records" in conjunction with the Sept. 11 probe, and noted that the bureau had commonly done so in other circumstances.

Bradshaw cautioned, however, that "it is not enough to suspect or have reason to believe that an individual is prohibited" from buying a gun to run the name through NICS.

Gun control groups argue that the Bradshaw memo is at odds with Ashcroft's position on NICS, and that the attorney general should have disclosed the opinion in his congressional testimony.

"The OLC memorandum is the smoking gun proving that Ashcroft grossly misled Congress and the American people," said Mathew Nosanchuk, a former Justice Department lawyer in the Clinton administration who now serves as legislative counsel for the Violence Policy Center, a gun control group. "Ashcroft described the department's legal authority with the same accuracy that WorldCom reported its profits."

But a senior Justice Department official, who declined to be named, said "the attorney general was perfectly consistent" in his representations of the law.

The FBI's plan last fall would not have qualified as an audit of NICS, because many of those on the list of suspected terrorists were not known to have broken the law or to otherwise be prohibited from buying a gun, the official said.

The Bradshaw memo is certain to be a point of contention today when Ashcroft testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The internal memorandum from Bradshaw was first disclosed this week in a report from the General Accounting Office, which was reported in the New York Times. The memo also found that an Ashcroft proposal to destroy records of approved gun purchases after 24 hours would hamper the FBI's ability to keep guns out of the hands of prohibited buyers. Such records are held for 90 days.

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