Gonzales was informed of FBI surveillance violations

The Washington Post today reports that Attorney General Gonzales likely knew of the FBI's wide-ranging abuses of Patriot Act powers before he told the Senate intelligence committee that "there [had] not been one verified case of civil liberties abuse." In fact, Gonzales had received at least six reports of violations from the FBI up to three months prior to his statement.

The acts recounted in the FBI reports included unauthorized surveillance, an illegal property search and a case in which an Internet firm improperly turned over a compact disc with data that the FBI was not entitled to collect, the documents show. Gonzales was copied on each report that said administrative rules or laws protecting civil liberties and privacy had been violated.

The reports also alerted Gonzales in 2005 to problems with the FBI's use of an anti-terrorism tool known as a national security letter (NSL), well before the Justice Department's inspector general brought widespread abuse of the letters in 2004 and 2005 to light in a stinging report this past March.

...Each of the violations cited in the reports copied to Gonzales was serious enough to require notification of the President's Intelligence Oversight Board, which helps police the government's surveillance activities. The format of each memo was similar, and none minced words. 

This latest revelation shows yet again that Americans have absolutely no reason to trust Mr. Gonzales. And his lack of trustworthiness is of the utmost concern, because he is the man ultimately in charge of enforcing the law and protecting the rights and civil liberties of the American people. In this time of greatly expanded executive power and ever-diminishing privacy, we need an Attorney General who will uphold the law and protect the interests of all Americans, instead of only the Executive; we need a man who will champion our rights and civil liberties, not lie to the Senate to conceal their erosion. By any measure, Mr. Gonzales has clearly failed to serve the American public.