Guys in Suits: on a Mission
OK, they may look like accountants, but this team of government lawyers is a key cog in the war on terror
One of Wainstein's tougher tasks will be to make sure the FBI's often complex counterterrorism and intelligence investigations are conducted appropriately. "I think he's strong enough to say 'No' when 'No' must be the answer on something," says former deputy attorney general James Comey. "But he's also creative enough, and enough of an agent's prosecutor, that if there's a legal way to get to 'Yes,' he will try to."
The National Security Division (proposed fiscal year 2008 budget: $78 million; 346 employees; 236 lawyers) resulted from a key recommendation of the presidential commission investigating the intelligence failures prior to the war in Iraq. The division brings together the Office of Intelligence Policy and Review, a previously stand-alone entity in the department-whose lawyers draft the arcane foreign intelligence court surveillance applications-with the prosecutors in the counterterrorism and counterespionage sections, previously located in the Justice Department's Criminal Division. Sounds like routine bureaucratic shuffling, but it's not; that presidential commission decided the reorganization could bring much greater coordination to the Justice Department's national security efforts. Long before the commission threw its weight behind the idea, senior justice officials, like Comey and OIPR chief James Baker-now on leave at Harvard-pushed for a one-stop shop for national security matters. "There were certain difficulties with respect to the old structure," Baker says. "It was more complex, you had more players, and there were more disparate interests. It's already complicated. Why make it more complicated?"
There were lots of other reasons the idea made sense, says Comey, now general counsel and senior vice president of Lockheed Martin. After the 9/11 attacks, Comey says, the "constant drumbeat" from counterterrorism investigations turned counternarcotics, corruption, fraud, and important other criminal priorities into "stepchildren" of the Criminal Division. "It's hard enough to manage the Criminal Division when you don't have a 600-pound gorilla of counterterrorism sitting on your desk every day," Comey says. "Now that gorilla is sitting on Ken Wainstein's desk."
Changing a hidebound bureaucracy like that of the Justice Department is anything but easy. "I think a concern of people who were working counterterrorism criminal cases and the people in OIPR was that one was going to swallow the other," says Comey. "And I spoke to both groups and assured both groups that nothing like that was going to happen."
Winners and losers. Wainstein, friends say, has the natural ease and grace needed to salve some of the "bureaucratic tenderness" that inevitably results from such structural change. "That's important in a new bureaucratic organization where there have been winners and losers," says former justice official Daniel Levin. "He won't rub people's noses in it."
Among the ranks of the career prosecutors, Justice Department officials say, there's a certain measure of relief that "one of their own" will oversee the big terrorism and spy cases because neither Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Deputy AG Paul McNulty, nor the head of the Criminal Division, Alice Fisher, has any front-line prosecutorial experience. And although McNulty is respected, both Gonzales and Fisher are viewed by some inside and outside the department as political actors committed primarily to Bush's war-on-terror agenda.
advertisement
