The investigators had included a panel of five internationally renowned forensic scientists, the first time in its sixty-five-year history that the FBI lab, considered by many - not least, by itself - the best in the world, had been Senator Grassley's hearings took place in the wake of the release five months earlier of a damning 517-page report by the Inspector General's Office of the Department of Justice, the result of an eighteen-month investigation into the FBI laboratory. To the packed committee room for being "so cynical." The documents had arrived but were so heavily redacted as to be virtually useless, he said, holding up page after page of blacked-out FBI memos. In fact, within an hour, Senator Grassley had to apologize Words, the ghosts of FBI past are still very much in the present." He went on to say that he expected the requested documentation to arrive the moment the hearings finished. The Bureau's actions contradict the director's assertion that it is inviting oversight. Senator Grassley said the FBI was being hypocritical. Said, was despite FBI director Louis Freeh's appeal for more oversight to another congressional subcommittee just four months earlier, when he had stated that the FBI could be the most dangerous agency in the country if "not Had to be postponed twice, he stated, because of the FBI's refusal to cooperate by supplying requested documentation and by making FBI employees available to testify without the bureau's lawyers present. But the facts the senator went on to outline hardly seemed likely to do that. His purpose, he explained, was to help restore public confidence in federal law enforcement in general and the Federal Bureau of Investigation in particular. It was his opening statementĪs chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Administrative Oversight into the Courts at hearings entitled, "A Review of the FBI Laboratory: Beyond the Inspector General's Report." As the lights of six television cameras were switched on and photographers and cameramen began to jostle for position, Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa began to read slowly from three sheets of paper. With a quick adjustment of his black-and-white spotted tie, he seated himself at the center of a semicircular dais under the carved eagle on the hardwood-paneled The tall, graying legislator strode past the American flag onto the platform of Committee Room 226.
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