HALF OF FBI REFERRALS FAIL TO MAKE IT TO COURT

WASHINGTON - The FBI has been seeking prosecution of international
terrorism cases at six times the rate it did before Sept. 11, but more than
half of those cases considered by federal prosecutors never made it to
court, Justice Department records show.

In the year before the attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., FBI agents
sent 10 international terrorism cases a month to U.S. attorneys for
prosecution, according to the records obtained by Syracuse University's
Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. In the first six months after
the attacks, they sent 59 a month.

The records reflect the intense FBI focus on anti-terrorism investigations
after Sept. 11, but they also show prosecutors declined to file charges in
60 of the 98 FBI anti-terrorism cases they considered from last October
through March. The prosecutors did not reach a decision during the period
on all of the more than 350 cases referred to them.

In half the cases not prosecuted, U.S. attorneys said there was a "lack of
evidence of criminal intent" or no evidence a federal crime had been committed.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Sen. Charles
Grassley, R-Iowa, say they are troubled by both the high rate of declined
prosecutions and the reasons prosecutors cite for not pursuing the cases.

The lawmakers asked Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert
Mueller in a letter Friday to explain why so many FBI terrorism referrals
are not being prosecuted.

FBI officials say the referral of a case to a U.S. attorney is not the
equivalent of an FBI recommendation for prosecution. In anti-terrorism
cases in particular, the officials said, much of the effort to prevent
terrorist attacks does not result in prosecutions.

FBI spokesman Bill Carter said the exhaustive investigative effort to
unravel the Sept. 11 plot may have contributed to the large number of
international terrorism referrals that federal prosecutors chose not to pursue.

"Did we open cases that went down blind holes? Probably," Carter said in an
interview. "But I don't have any direct knowledge of that."

The Sept. 11 investigation caused the overall number of crimes referred for
prosecution by the FBI to drop by 23 percent during the first three months
after the attacks. But by the end of March, the number of FBI referrals had
climbed back to pre-Sept. 11 levels.

Despite assertions by Ashcroft and Mueller that the FBI was focusing more
on terrorism prevention, the records show that bank robberies, drug
violations and bank frauds accounted for more than a third of all FBI
referrals in the first six months after Sept. 11. That's roughly the same
level as in the previous five years.

Leahy and Grassley said in their letter that the FBI's continuing focus on
bank robberies, drug violations and bank fraud raises "troubling questions
about whether the FBI and Department of Justice are devoting sufficient
resources to counterterrorism efforts."

They asked the FBI and Justice Department to provide a detailed breakdown
of their bank robbery and drug enforcement cases since Sept. 11.

"Director Mueller has to put more agents on the trail of al-Qaida and other
terrorists and leave the Bonnie and Clyde investigations to local
authorities," Grassley said in a separate statement.

Carter said the bureau never stopped working other criminal investigations
even as it began focusing more on terrorism prevention. He said many recent
referrals for bank robberies and other crimes resulted from investigations
that began long before Sept. 11.

"Cases don't just happen overnight," he said. "Many are long term and very
complex investigations. ... The cases referred by us to U.S. attorneys are
usually not those opened the day before."

TRAC obtained the records after winning a two-court battle with the Justice
Department over the Freedom of Information Act. The records come from
internal administrative data the department maintains on all criminal and
civil cases.