MELISSA BLOCK, host:
As we heard a moment ago, FBI Director Robert Mueller was on Capitol Hill today to testify about the bureau's counterterrorism efforts, but at the very hour that session was scheduled to begin, the Justice Department's inspector general released a scathing report. It described how the FBI illegally obtained thousands of Americans' telephone records during the Bush administration.
NPR's Ari Shapiro has that story.
ARI SHAPIRO: After 9/11, Congress gave the FBI new authorities to get Americans' phone records. The USA Patriot Act included tools called National Security Letters for the FBI to use in emergencies. When Congress reauthorized the Patriot Act several years later, lawmakers added a new provision, telling the Justice Department's inspector general to look into how the FBI was using National Security Letters. And what the inspector general found confirmed privacy advocates' worst fears. Mike German is a former FBI agent who now works for the ACLU.
Mr. MIKE GERMAN (Former FBI Agent, ACLU): When the first audit came out in 2007, the inspector general had discovered wanton abuse of the National Security Letter authority.
SHAPIRO: The FBI illegally obtained thousands of Americans' phone records by lying claiming emergencies where there were none. A second report in 2008 found that the abuse continued after the problems were initially flagged. Now comes this report - nearly 300 pages describing what the inspector general calls an egregious breakdown in the FBI's responsibility to obey the law. Mike German.
Mr. GERMAN: The FBI would use Post-it notes, use face-to-face interactions, emails, you know, just all sorts of informal ways to collect information the FBI had no right to obtain.
SHAPIRO: The report says phone company employees acted like FBI agents. They worked in the FBI building, and agents would do what they called sneak peeks basically looking over a phone company employee's shoulder to get information from a computer screen without going through any formal channels. The report also says the FBI obtained reporters' phone records without getting the attorney general's permission as required. Lucy Dalglish of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press says she is disappointed but not surprised.
Ms. LUCY DALGLISH (Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press): It has been relatively unfortunately common, particularly at the FBI, to ignore a lot of the regulations that are on the books when it comes to going after reporters and their sources.
SHAPIRO: At today's hearing, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy confronted FBI Director Robert Mueller, who has been in charge of the bureau since 2001.
Mr. PATRICK LEAHY (Chairman, Senate Judiciary Committee): This was not a matter of technical violations. If any one of us did something like this, we'd have to answer to it. This was authorized at high levels within the FBI and continued for years.
SHAPIRO: Leahy asked Mueller...
Mr. LEAHY: Will any FBI officials be sanctioned or punished for these violations of law?
SHAPIRO: Mueller says individuals have been disciplined, but he would not go into detail. And he said the FBI is working to get rid of the information that it obtained illegally.
Mr. MUELLER: We put in place a process to go through every one of those numbers and determine whether we had a valid legal basis to retain that number. And where we did not, it was purged from our system.
SHAPIRO: He said the illegal practices ended in 2006, and the FBI now has more internal controls in place to prevent the problems from happening again.
Ari Shapiro, NPR News, Washington.