Ruby Ridge Hearings Bring 6th Suspension

An FBI supervisor has become the sixth agent suspended as a result of the investigation of whether officials covered up their roles in the deadly siege at Ruby Ridge, the FBI said Tuesday.

The supervisor, George Michael Baird, was suspended until the Ruby Ridge investigation is complete, according to an unsigned three-sentence statement from the FBI. It said the action, like the previous five suspensions, “was consistent with Department of Justice practice” of suspending officials under investigation for possible criminal charges.

Baird’s only involvement in the Ruby Ridge case was as an inspector’s aide assigned to a team that conducted an internal investigation of the 1992 incident during the next two years, said three FBI officials who declined to be identified by name.

The Justice Department opened a criminal investigation last summer into whether top FBI officials had covered up who was responsible for approving “shoot on sight” rules issued to FBI snipers at Ruby Ridge.

Prosecutors wrote Baird a letter Oct. 13 identifying him as a “target” of the grand jury investigation, according to Legal Times, a weekly newspaper here. That could not immediately be confirmed.

“Target” letters usually are sent to individuals considered likely to be indicted soon.

“If someone receives a target letter, in virtually all cases they will be indicted or will agree to plead guilty before indictment - usually in about a month,” said a Justice official familiar with the practice in the U.S. attorney’s office here, which is conducting the probe. “It’s extraordinarily rare for the target to come in with exculpatory evidence sufficient to avert the indictment.”

Baird did not immediately respond to telephoned requests for comment.

He was assigned to a team from the FBI’s inspection division that reviewed the bureau’s performance at Ruby Ridge for a Justice Department task force, the officials said. The team was headed by Robert Walsh, who now leads the FBI’s investigation of an Amtrak derailment in Arizona.

A key issue was how FBI snipers at Ruby Ridge came to be told that they “could and should” shoot any armed adult male spotted in the open at the mountainside cabin of Randy Weaver, a white separatist who was the subject of the siege. The normal FBI policy restricts the use of deadly force to situations where it is necessary to prevent imminent harm to someone.

The Justice Department task force concluded that the “could and should” shooting rules were probably unconstitutional.

It recommended possible prosecution of the FBI sniper who shot and killed Weaver’s wife Vicki. The department decided last year not to charge the sniper, who said he was aiming at an armed associate of Weaver’s and hit his wife by accident.

Last summer, five FBI officials who worked at headquarters during the siege were suspended. The highest ranking of the five, Larry Potts, also was demoted from the FBI’s No. 2 post to an unspecified training division job.

The U.S. attorney’s investigation was opened after two of the five admitted to internal Justice Department investigators that they had destroyed documents about the siege and a third admitting knowing about such destruction, Justice officials have said.

Potts has denied any impropriety on his part and denied that he approved the altered shooting rules.

The latest internal investigations began after FBI Director Louis Freeh placed most of the blame for the rules on Eugene Glenn, the FBI field commander at the scene, and on Richard Rogers, head of the hostage rescue team to which the snipers were assigned.

Glenn and Rogers have sworn that Potts approved the “could and should” directive.

Baird was put on administrative leave with pay from his current post as a supervisor in Salt Lake City, the bureau statement said. He transferred there to head a criminal investigative squad after the internal Ruby Ridge inquiry, the officials said.

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