Can't Stop Won't Stop

The ConWeb just can't stop lying about Jamie Gorelick.

Gorelick is the former Clinton Justice Department official vilified by conservatives for a 1995 memo regarding a "wall" that prohibited sharing of information between the CIA and the FBI, a memo then-attorney general John Ashcroft conveniently declassified for his testimony before the 9/11 Commission (of which Gorelick was a member) in order to blame the Clinton administration for insufficient attention to counterterrorism.

The June 10 public release of a report by the Justice Department inspector general regarding the FBI's handling of pre-9/11 intelligence information gave the ConWeb a reason to bash Gorelick anew.

A June 11 NewsMax article complained that press accounts of the report "made no mention of the role played in the disastrous bungle by Hillary Clinton's Justice Department protege Jamie Gorelick," citing Ashcroft to blame "Gorelick's now notorious wall memo" and asserting that "none of the [news] reports so much as mentioned Gorelick's name, let alone her connection to Mrs. Clinton."

WorldNetDaily's Joseph Farah continued the attack in a June 13 column:

The FBI and CIA were blocked from this kind of cooperation by the "wall" erected between them through a set of Justice Department directives issued by Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick. In effect, the Clinton Justice Department had made it illegal for that kind of sharing of information between the agencies.

[...]

Gorelick wasn't some flunky in the Justice Department. She had been selected for the job by Hillary Clinton and had assumed the role held by Webster Hubbell before he was forced from his position to face Whitewater-related charges that landed him in prison. Gorelick, like Hubbell before her, essentially ran the Justice Department because of the gross incompetence of Attorney General Janet Reno.

But Farah's and NewsMax's attacks on Gorelick are false, as they were the last time this came up. Gorelick did not create the "wall"; it was created in 1978. As she claimed in an April 2004 commentary, her 1995 memo actually permitted freer guidelines regarding the exchange of information than what was eventually approved. Also, Ashcroft's Justice Department formally reaffirmed those guidelines in August 2001.

Now, as then, the ConWeb did not report these facts. As history shows with facts that are inconvenient to their bias, don't expect them to report these facts anytime soon.