Word: belled
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Last week Attorney General Griffin Bell sought to end the debate over the FBI and close this tarnishing chapter in the bureau's history. In the process, he shook the pillars of the FBI as never before in its 70-year history by announcing the indictment of three former top officials for "conspiracy against rights of citizens." The three...
...Bell has been uncomfortably mulling over the FBI cases ever since he took office and found out about the bureau's misdeeds. They were being investigated by Assistant Attorney General J. Stanley Pottinger, but he was making little progress because of a stubborn cover-up within the FBI. Pottinger had begun his probe in 1976 by recruiting a team of twelve FBI agents, which was later expanded to 24, all of whom were chosen on the basis of their known integrity and loyalty to the U.S. Government rather than to the FBI establishment...
Within days of announcing the indictments, the accusers have now become the accused. The events of last week also brought charges by J. Wallace LaPrade, head of the besieged New York field office, that the FBI was still conducting the same type of illegal break-in practices under Bell which drove a grand jury to indict Gray and his two aides. LaPrade himself is open to charges of ax-grinding: though unindicted, he was a major target in the FBI probe, and his refusal to tender a requested resignation brought his prompt removal as head of the New York office...
...ONCE, Atty. Gen. Griffin Bell and his beleaguered Justice Department seemed to be fulfilling their legislated mandates when the indictments of former FBI Director L. Patrick Gray III and two of his former top-level aides came down last week. The felony charges stemmed from an illegal wiretapping and break-in operation conducted without court warrants against the Weather Underground in the early '70s by the FBI's New York field office. A federal grand jury apparently concluded that Gray and two of his high-ranking assistants, W. Mark Felt and Edward S. Miller, had authorized the unlawful surveillance activities...
...upon closer examination, the circumstances surrounding the Justice Department's FBI investigation raise a few nagging doubts about the criteria and motivations behind the unprecedented indictments of three former top executives of the bureau. For example, the decision to prosecute the hapless Gray may have merely represented Bell's rebuttal to the five Justice Department attorneys who resigned from the FBI probe four months ago in protest over Bell's alleged foot-dragging on the case...