NRA-ILA FaxLine NRA Institute for Legislative Action 11250 Waples Mill Road * Fairfax, VA 22030 Phone: 1-800-392-8683 * Fax: 703-267-3918 7/20/95 NRA-ILA Special Report THE WACO HEARINGS: DAY TWO POLL REVEALS WACO HEARINGS MORE LEGIT THAN WHITEWATER The hearings are being held mainly ... WHITEWATER WACO ...to investigate legitimate issues 28% 56% ...because Hill GOP wants to embarrass Clinton Admin 67% 38% -- Washington Post/ABC News Poll, July 14-17, 1995 LACK OF PROBING RAISED MORE QUESTIONS Day one of the Waco hearings turned into night one, as the Committees continued to look into the events leading up to the February 1993 raid on the Branch Davidian center near Waco, Texas. The night ended leaving several questions still unanswered. ISSUING THE WARRANT While questioned on Wednesday night about the warrant-issuing procedure, Chuck Sarabyn, former BATF Assistant Special Agent in Charge (ASAC) in Houston and commander of the Waco raid, testified that he did not know who was to serve the warrant. Hard to believe that the leader of the raid did not know who he authorized to issue the warrant. Were agents trying to serve a warrant or stage a raid? Dan Hartnett, former BATF Deputy Director for Enforcement, testified Wednesday night that when the agents approached the door, they saw Koresh standing outside. Yet according to Dick Reavis, author of Ashes of Waco, Agent Ballesteros testified at the pre-trial hearing that when he approached the door, he saw the door open and Koresh was standing in the doorway with a hand on each side. More contradicting stories and unanswered questions... Henry McMahon, the firearms dealer who sold to Koresh, called Koresh with Special Agent Aguilera standing by. Koresh invited the agent over to inspect his firearms, but Aguilera declined. He testified Wednesday night that the reason he didn't go was because he wanted to check McMahon's records further to see if Koresh was dealing without a license. A perfect opportunity to gain access to the house and conduct an examination peacefully was passed up. At Thursday's hearing, the Committee members went down the line of experts to ask them whether or not they would have taken up Koresh on his offer. Every one of them said yes. POSTPONING INVESTIGATION ... SO WITNESS MEMORIES FADE An exchange on Thursday between U.S. Rep. Barr and Robert Sanders, former deputy director for enforcement for the BATF, led to the conclusion that the Department of the Treasury and the Department of Justice postponed the investigation process in an attempt to dull witnesses memories. "I would ask you to take a look [at] some documents," began Congressman Barr. "[O]ne of the documents ... is dated September 17, but it refers to a March 1st meeting specifically referencing the shooting review -- and there [are] notes in there -- this is a Department of the Treasury document in which the assistant U.S. attorney is advising Hartnett to stop the ATF shooting review. "There's another document that you'll see there dated April 14, a Treasury document, which says the Department of Justice does not want Treasury to conduct any interviews or have discussions with any participants who may be potential witnesses, and then later on there is the reference that I mentioned earlier about hoping the passage of time will dim memories, the prosecutors being concerned about developing anything negative, even preliminarily. "You'll see a memo dated April 9, 1993, in which again the Treasury Department, coming from their deputy general counsel, references Department of Justice prosecutors, saying, 'Words critical of ATF must be avoided.' "And then you'll also see some handwritten notes which are less clear, certainly, since they're handwritten notes, than these official documents that I've referenced earlier. "Would this, in your mind, raise the specter of, at best, a disinclination on the part of the administration to see that the facts come out and to do a proper shooting review and, at worse, a deliberate effort to make sure that the facts do not come out?" "Yes, I agree with both," responded Sanders. "In your experience, in your years with the Treasury, have you ever seen anything like that?" asked Barr. "No, I haven't, sir." WHY DYNAMIC ENTRY? ATF called upon the military because of an alleged methamphetamine lab. Why the dynamic entry when volatile chemicals were supposedly involved? Why wasn't the DEA called in? Why wasn't training given to individuals to deal with such a forceful entry on an alleged meth lab? According to a DEA testifier, weeks of training are necessary to prevent the dangers of an explosion. Yet no such training occurred. Most revealing, an exchange between U.S. Rep. John Shadegg and Sergeant Steve Fritts, U.S. Army. "Well, maybe I'm confused here," Shadegg begins, "but my understanding is that either directly or through other members of the military that were involved in this project, you had contact with ATF and it became pretty evident to you that ATF was not worried about the concerns expressed in your paper. Isn't that correct?" "Sir, my impression was that they were not worried about the methamphetamine lab, no," Fritts replied. "Your impression was that they were not worried about it?" "Yes, sir." The next time the Army heard any BATF reference to the alleged drug lab occurred during an attempt to gain clearance from Fort Hood for flash-bang stun grenades. "Mr. Fritts," Shadegg continued, "Let me just go back to this one more time. In discussions with committee staff, I thought -- it is my understanding you made it clear to at least the staff that BATF pretty well blew off the issue of there being a methamphetamine lab." "Yes, sir," Sergeant Fritts replied. "I said the impression I received that they -- once the paper was presented, they no longer showed any interest in a methamphetamine lab." In reading from one of the subpoenaed Treasury documents, U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen called into question whether Treasury officials were aware that the methamphetamine lab was nothing more than a hoax. Ros-Lehtinen posed her question to Mr. Wade Ishimoto: "Following up on our conversation about the drug nexus, we have in our committee notes from someone who appears to have worked or continues to work with ATF, and this was just given to us in a loose form, and let me read to you a few of the sentences here....'the National Guard was a scam, in my opinion. To my knowledge, there was never any mention of a meth lab being on the compound, that this was a scam initiated by the bureau's headquarters, again, in my opinion, to obtain the additional resources of the National Guard.'" PUBLICITY STUNT PERHAPS? Marion K. Pinsdorf, communications professor at Fordham's Graduate School of Business wrote in the Summer 1995 issue of The Public Relations Strategist , "Journalist Mary Gotschall said BATF wanted to showcase its costly special response team to stave off a merger with the FBI or Internal Revenue Service. `They were bureaucrats trying to protect their jobs,' she wrote. They invited, indeed sought, maximum media coverage by tipping off local media that `something big' was going to happen near Waco. "On the day of the raid, Sharon Wheeler, BATF's public relations director, was positioned near the compound with press releases and fax machines, ready to announce the BATF's glowing triumph to the world,' Gotschall wrote." Even Bob Sanders, former deputy director for enforcement for the BATF, thinks the raid was a publicity stunt for the troubled agency. During Wednesday's hearing, U.S. Rep. Bill Brewster asked Mr. Hartnett about rumors that the public relations coordinator for the ATF had released information to the press that something big was going to happen in Waco. But Mr. Hartnett's responded guardedly: "Yes, and we heard that, and the person -- I believe her name was Sharon Wheeler -- she's testified before committees and she just did not give any information out about Waco, Texas, at all. "She was in -- she was in Dallas and she called, called a reporter to ask if he was going to be in, or called two reporters -- I'm not quite sure, I don't recall -- and said, are you going to be in, we're going to have something coming up in the next day or two. As I recall, that's how it came out. She never mentioned Waco." Congressman Brewster: "Why did she do that?" Mr. Hartnett: "She wanted to be able to get a hold of them if there was a story and they recovered these arms. Now this all came up after the fact that we heard this and it came out at hearings before." Concluded Professor Pinsdorf in Public Relations Strategist: "At Waco, 'public relations considerations' were paramount, dooming the raid from the start." KEY FINDING OF DAY ONE? TREASURY COVER-UP Under questioning July 19, a former BATF deputy director vilified the Treasury report on BATF actions in the 1993 tragedy near Waco, Texas, as "filled with falsehoods and distortion of the facts." That was the key finding of the previous day offered by U.S. Rep. Zeliff. At first, Congressman Zeliff said, former BATF deputy director Jim Hartnett described the Treasury Report on BATF's action in Waco as "a cover-up," but noted that the former official tried to retrieve that phrase in later testimony. Even Hartnett's retrieval was revealing: "I feel that the Treasury Department has said things since the time of the raid at Waco that have been incorrect. I feel that the Treasury report, where it says some very good things that should be done, things that we could correct in law enforcement. I think it also had many omissions, distortions and false statements in it...I believe that they were concerned about the fallout from the media that they couldn't just say that management at the scene there made mistakes, but that wasn't the tone of the report. They felt that they had to write a scathing report, which made a lot of people suffer, like Chuck [Sarabyn] and some of those other people down there that were just doing their job, and it was, I think, very biased and unfairly written." U.S. Rep. McCollum: "And you think that was a coverup of sorts for what?" Hartnett: "I think they felt like -- and I don't know if coverup is a term that I would use. I would say that they felt that they had to -- at least when it came to the press -- show that they were taking some very strong action, and they weren't responsible for anything, and these managers down there had done this intentionally, and that just was not the case." "The truth is being sought and new facts are starting to come out," the co-chairman said. Other key findings highlighted by Zeliff: ATF agents testified for the first time that they actually refused an invitation by David Koresh to come and examine Koresh's firearms long before the deadly raid and that which followed. Zeliff's second point centered on testimony by legal experts who criticized the search warrant as filled with "inflammatory language ... sloppy ... [with] factual inaccuracies." "Third, we learned that the ATF gave little or no attention to doing a knock-and-serve entry.... a viable option seems to have been under-utilized, perhaps prematurely rejected." Fourth, said Congressman Zeliff, while BATF's request for military involvement hinged on a methamphetamine drug lab at the Mount Carmel Center, a deputy sheriff testified that "he had never seen and had no knowledge of any drug lab." Fifth, a surviving Davidian claimed that "helicopters shot through the roof of the compound," an allegation strongly disputed by authorities. "Sixth, we learned, contrary to [the] Treasury [Department's] prior account, ... at least one ATF agent did carry a loaded gun on board a helicopter that went to the compound on raid day despite testimony from the prosecutor of the Davidians that no one did so." Congressman Zeliff also noted internal BATF documents which confirmed that pages of agency surveillance logs were þtorn out.þ Documents attributed to a BATF agent fired for his role in Waco and later reinstated were "destroyed." Also yesterday, while BATF firearms expert Ed Owen was displaying gun after gun, U.S. Rep Zeliff interjected a long-standing complaint: "I would just like to make a comment on behalf of our side as far as these weapons are concerned. We tried at great length to try to have access to those weapons and received a letter dated July 11 from Mr. Kent Marcus, Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General, U.S. Department of Justice, saying ... That [transporting Davidian guns from Austin to Washington for inspection] will cost the taxpayers of Texas and the United States many thousands of dollars. We would have enjoyed the opportunity to have worked with both sides here to examine those weapons as well.... [W]e tried to ... Get a third party or at least get the Justice Department to x-ray these weapons ... You know, you have a serious heat problem in a fire. Certain materials get melted down...." WACO, WACO, WACO? OR SIDESHOW, SIDESHOW, SIDESHOW? Diversion and distraction were again the tools of choice of politicians intent on executing the Administration's Waco damage control plan revealed in the Washington Post the day before. U.S. Rep. Tom Lantos called for dispelling the "cloud that hangs over these hearings ... the people involved, the circumstances, the financing, the intricate intertwining of committee staffs and staff of the National Rifle Association." Predictably, U.S. Rep. Charles Schumer weighed in. "The issue of ... how the NRA influenced those hearings ... is very, very, very important in terms of the fairness of the hearing." And U.S. Rep. Conyers complained that Republican leaders of the panel left the minority with unacceptable choices: "we should go to the ethics committee to file a complaint, or perhaps we should go to the Department of Justice and file a criminal charge. "The defect with those suggestions is that we don't know what the problem is that we would like to complain about. We're searching for facts right now." Congressman Conyers suggested that the minority party allow the proceedings to go forward "with the understanding that this is the last day that we are going to tolerate any stalling on the questions of how NRA may have impacted upon the investigation leading to these hearings." Schumer and others were intent on issuing a subpoena for NRA attorneys and associates to answer questions on the oft-repeated charges that NRA "orchestrated" the Waco hearings. U.S. Rep. McCollum reiterated his pledge to speak to leadership about the Democrat's complaints but declared their request inappropriate. A unanimous consent rule governed the proceedings thus far, and McCollum would revert to a slower questioning regimen if that rule were challenged. "I just want everybody to understand that [delay] will be the net sum gain of this. The hearings will go forward." U.S. Rep. Henry Hyde cleared the air: "I think one of the most telling remarks I've heard this decade was just uttered by my good friend, Mr. Conyers. They got to find out what the problem is. They are a bunch of legislators in search of a problem. Anything, but let's proceed with hearings on Waco.... [I]f you wish to question the conduct of a private party who 'volunteered their services,' quote, quote, then go question that party. But I don't intend to recommend the subpoena, because that's a diversion from what we are inquiring about -- Waco, Waco, Waco. Not NRA." Quotes are excerpted from hearing transcripts provided by the Federal News Service. Tomorrow: Day Three of the Waco Hearings-- read all about it through the NRA-ILA FaxLine! =+=+=+=+ This information is provided as a service of the National Rifle Association Institute for Legislative Action, Fairfax, VA. 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