Senator: Fbi Promoted Lab Chief Despite Report Investigation Concluded Supervisor Had Intentionally Altered Evidence

The FBI promoted a lab supervisor to that job even though a unit chief concluded he should be censured for improperly altering lab reports, Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, disclosed Thursday.

Grassley said the 1994-95 episode undermines FBI Director Louis J. Freeh’s “rosy portrayal of the lab” and shows that Freeh’s promise in late 1995 of swift action against any misconduct in the lab “was utterly false.”

“The agent found to have intentionally altered evidence was promoted,” Grassley, who chairs a Senate Judiciary subcommittee that oversees the FBI, said in a Senate floor speech.

“Some good people in the FBI tried to do the right thing. But senior management apparently places a higher value on maintaining image, rather than rooting out wrong.”

The FBI said Thursday evening that it “is fully committed to correcting all problems in the FBI laboratory,” is cooperating with the Justice Department inspector general’s investigation of the lab and “will take disciplinary action as required once the investigation is completed.”

A senior FBI official, requesting anonymity, said, “We had serious management failures.” The FBI board that approved the promotion “probably was not aware of” the separate, but unfinished, inquiry that produced the censure recommendation, this official said.

Grassley released a set of FBI documents about the episode obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. The names of the supervisor and unit chief were deleted from the documents, and Grassley did not provide them.

But officials, requesting anonymity, said that supervisor James T. “Tom” Thurman was promoted from principal examiner to chief of a lab explosives unit despite the censure recommendation from scientist-unit chief James Corby, based on his probe of allegations made in 1992 by scientist-agent Frederic Whitehurst.

FBI documents showed that by May 1994 FBI officials had confirmed that Whitehurst’s lab reports had been altered by Thurman.

On Jan. 13, 1995, Corby recommended “both oral reprimand and a letter of censure” for Thurman. Corby wrote that Thurman “committed errors which were clearly intentional. He acted irresponsibly; he should be held accountable.”

The senior FBI official said Thurman’s promotion was approved on Dec. 11, 1994, although he had not assumed his new position at the time Corby’s recommendation was made a month later.