Accusations of Criminal Malfeasance in the FBI General Counsel’s Office
On April 14, 2010, the House Judiciary Subcommittee held a hearing on the Inspector General’s “Report on the FBI’s Use of Exigent Letters and Other Informal Requests for Telephone Records”. Committee Chair John Conyers (D-Mich.) issued a harsh rebuke of FBI General Counsel Valerie Caproni, when he said, “Today’s hearing showed that the FBI broke the law on telephone records privacy and the General Counsel’s Office, headed by Valerie Caproni, sanctioned it and must face consequences.”
Conyers went on to say he was “outraged” that the FBI Office of the General Counsel had invented exigent letters apparently out of whole cloth, “It’s not in the Patriot Act. It never has been. And its use, perhaps coincidentally, began in the same month that Ms. Valerie Caproni began her work as general counsel.”
Given the most recent revelations of Elon Musk’s “Twitter Files” concerning the FBI, Conyers’ closing statement in a letter to then FBI director Mueller is eerily prescient, “I’m extremely disappointed that every time Congress has tried to plug potential civil rights and civil liberties violations in our counterterrorism activities, the FBI seems to have figured out a way to get around it.”
Chairman Conyers implored Mueller to take action and fire the responsible parties in Caproni’s Office. No records of any action in response could be located and the press release has been removed from the House Judiciary web page.
Rather than face any consequences for her actions, Caproni would leave the FBI to join Northrup Grumman as Deputy General Counsel in 2011. She was nominated for a District Court Judge position in the Southern District of New York by Barack Obama in 2012.
During the course of her contentious Senate confirmation, Ranking Member of the Judiciary Committee Chuck Grassley sent a letter to the Dept. of Justice Office of the Inspector General. The letter detailed Senator Grassley’s concerns about undue resistance to the committee’s requests for documents and transcripts related to Caproni’s ongoing constitutional abuses including repeated inappropriate use of National Security Letters and the even more urgent “exigent letters” throughout her tenure. The Grassley letter describes a culture of autocracy at the FBI that obstructed oversight, ignored the law and operated with impunity.
Valerie Caproni was confirmed by the Senate in 2013 and still serves as a U.S. District Court Judge for the Southern District of New York where she continues her abuse of citizens’ constitutional rights to this day.