FBI's Mueller Faces Sharp Questioning

FBI Director Robert Mueller testifies on Capitol Hill, Tuesday, May 2, 2006 before the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on FBI oversight. (AP Photo/Dennis Cook) (Dennis Cook - AP)

On other issues, Mueller said the FBI has tightened its rules for dealing with confidential informants after recent scandals on both coasts, including a retired agent's indictment on murder charges.

The unspecified changes followed embarrassing revelations of a love affair and gangland killings that an earlier overhaul of informant guidelines was intended to prevent.

"Given the circumstance in New York, the protocols relating to our handling of informants changed dramatically," Mueller said.

Retired FBI agent R. Lindley DeVecchio was indicted in March in state court in Brooklyn, N.Y., on charges of helping a mobster _ who also was an FBI informant _ plot four murders in the 1990s. DeVecchio has pleaded not guilty to the charges.

In Los Angeles, another informant, Katrina Leung, admitted in December that she lied to the FBI about her intimate relationship with her FBI handler, James J. Smith.

Last year, Justice Department inspector general Glenn A. Fine found that FBI agents frequently violate the bureau's rules on informants.

Those rules were rewritten in 2001, after celebrated cases in which FBI agents protected mobsters from prosecution or tipped them off to investigations while simultaneously using them as informants.

In one case, former FBI agent John J. Connolly Jr. tipped off Boston mobster James "Whitey" Bulger to a looming racketeering indictment, causing Bulger to flee. He remains at large.

Senators also raised questions about the government's new consolidated terrorism watch list, the National Security Agency's warrantless eavesdropping program and mistakes in fingerprint identification in a terrorism case.

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said it would not take a corporation five years to fix problems in the terrorist watch list, which is intended to combine lists from many government agencies.

Mueller acknowledged there are inaccuracies that would take several years to weed out, as Fine has reported.

"There are 200,000 names to be vetted," Mueller said.

Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., the committee chairman, lectured Mueller at length on his belief that the eavesdropping program violates federal law. Specter also voiced irritation that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has been unwilling to answer his questions. Gonzales has said he is constrained from answering fully because so much of the NSA program remains classified.

"We haven't found out very much because the attorney general wouldn't tell us anything," Specter said, adding that he would not call Gonzales back for another hearing because doing so would be "futile."