Criminal Inquiry Opened Into CIA Tape Destruction
WASHINGTON — The Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation into the destruction of CIA interrogation videotapes and appointed an outside prosecutor to oversee the case, Attorney General Mukasey said today.
The CIA acknowledged last month that it destroyed videos of officers using tough interrogation methods while questioning two Al Qaeda suspects. The acknowledgment sparked a congressional inquiry and a preliminary investigation by Justice.
RELATED: Statement by Attorney General Mukasey
"The Department's National Security Division has recommended, and I have concluded, that there is a basis for initiating a criminal investigation of this matter, and I have taken steps to begin that investigation," Mr. Mukasey said in a statement released today.
Mr. Mukasey named a federal prosecutor in Connecticut, John Durham, to oversee the case. Mr. Durham has a reputation as one of the nation's most relentless prosecutors. He served as an outside prosecutor overseeing an investigation into the FBI's use of mob informants in Boston and helped send several Connecticut public officials to prison.
"The CIA will of course cooperate fully with this investigation as it has with the others into this matter," an agency spokesman, Mark Mansfield, said.
The CIA's inspector general, John Helgerson, who worked with the Justice Department on the preliminary inquiry, has recused himself from the investigation. Prosecutors from the Eastern District of Virginia, which includes the CIA's headquarters in Langley, Va., are also recused.
Mr. Mukasey named Mr. Durham the acting U.S. attorney on the case, a designation the Justice Department frequently makes when top prosecutors are recused. He will not serve as a special prosecutor such as Patrick Fitzgerald, who operated autonomously while investigating the 2003 leak of a CIA operative's identity.
The CIA has already agreed to open its files to congressional investigators, who have begun reviewing documents at the agency's Virginia headquarters. The House Intelligence Committee has ordered the former CIA official who directed the tapes be destroyed, Jose Rodriguez, to appear at a hearing January 16.Mr. Rodriguez's attorney, Robert Bennett, had no comment.
