Capitol Murder (26 page)

Seconds after the door closed behind Schatz and Dana, Crawford broke into a huge grin.

“I hope you remember what you just saw, Miss Striker, because that is the way to kick ass and take names in the doing-justice business.”

Ginny nodded and kept her opinion of what she had just seen to herself. Everything Crawford had done went against her basic sense of fair play. She knew that Crawford had complied with the law, but the end result was that Schatz would have no information he could use to defend his client. Ginny had no sympathy for terrorists, but a court would have to decide whether Tolliver was a terrorist. What if he was innocent but he couldn’t defend himself because his lawyer had no information about his case?

Ginny was also upset by Crawford’s attitude. A man’s life might literally be at stake. Crawford was treating the case as if it concerned only him and Bobby Schatz, but the case really revolved around the ability of the government to prove Tolliver’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Ginny was appalled by laws that hid evidence and begged for an unjust result and by a prosecutor who treated a matter this serious as a game.

“C
an he do that?” Dana asked when they were out of the building and headed back to Schatz’s office.

“Oh, yeah. The federal rules are barbaric. Most prosecutors don’t follow them to the letter, but under them we aren’t entitled to see the statements of a witness until after he testifies, which means you probably aren’t going to have any time to investigate before I cross.

“Then there’s the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act. The government attorneys go to the FISA court, which is made up of federal judges. Their proceedings are secret, and it’s almost impossible for a defendant to find out the basis for the search or even that a search occurred unless they decide to use evidence they got using the warrant. And even then, there’s a declassification process that can prevent a defendant from ever knowing the real basis for the warrant.

“What’s worse, the government is allowed to conduct searches and wiretaps under FISA without satisfying the normal Fourth Amendment requirement of showing probable cause that a crime has been committed when it’s trying to get a warrant.

“On top of that you have CIPA, the Classified Information Procedures Act, which sets out procedures when a defendant wants discovery of evidence that’s classified. The defendant can’t get classified evidence unless a judge finds that it’s relevant, and the judge makes that finding in secret. If the government objects after a judge finds the evidence is relevant, the court enters a nondisclosure order and tries to figure out an appropriate sanction for the government’s failure to disclose the evidence it’s decided is relevant to defending the case. And even when there is no nondisclosure order, the defense attorney can only see the evidence if he has a security clearance, and the defense attorney is usually prohibited from showing the evidence to the defendant. If the judge decides that the defendant can see the evidence, he provides it in a sanitized form like a summary or a redacted document.”

“What about the government’s obligation to give the defense evidence in its possession that can clear him?” Dana asked.

“In the
Moussaoui
case, the defense wanted to interview terrorists who were detained in U.S. custody outside the country to develop witnesses who would testify that Moussaoui’s involvement with al-Qaeda was limited. The court wouldn’t let the defense interview the potential witnesses. The best they got were summaries of intelligence reports they would have been allowed to read to the jury if the case had gone to trial.

“The whole thing stinks to high heaven, but our client is caught up in post–9/11 hysteria, and that gives a guy like Crawford an opportunity to trample on his rights that he’d never have if Tolliver were charged with bank robbery.”

“What are you going to do?” Dana asked.

Schatz shrugged. “I’ll scream and holler and file motions and hope that Crawford gets overconfident and screws up.”

Chapter Thirty-nine

T
he next morning, Ginny arrived at the DOJ bright and early. She was taking off her coat when Terrence Crawford pushed a multitiered cart into her office. Ginny was surprised to see her boss doing a job that would normally be assigned to a secretary.

“Great news,” Crawford said. “I was able to rush through your security clearance, which means you are now able to organize these top-secret files.”

Crawford scanned the office. When he spotted Ginny’s hole punch, he grinned maliciously.

“Good, good,” he said. “You’ve got a hole punch and I’ve provided you with binders and tabs. When you’ve got the case file organized, bring it to my office. Say by tomorrow afternoon.”

“Tomorrow, but . . .”

“No buts. There’s a team of lawyers waiting for this material. I imagine this job will evoke fond memories of your days at Rankin, Lusk—the all-nighters, the Saturdays and Sundays at the office when normal people were at the beach or lying around at home doing the
Times
crossword.

“Well, enough of this idle chatter. I’m taking up valuable time.”

Crawford sped away before Ginny could protest any further. She was appalled by the joy he seemed to take in her discomfort. What a prick! She wondered if Crawford had any redeeming qualities. She sure couldn’t think of even one.

Ginny walked over to the cart. Its three shelves were loaded down with banker’s boxes. In addition to the boxes, three-ring binders were stacked on the bottom shelf. Ginny counted twenty boxes in all. She lifted the cover of one of them. It was filled to the top with paper. She groaned. This was going to take forever; only she did not have forever, she had until the next afternoon.

The first thought that sprang into her head was
coffee
. She was going to need a lot of it. On the way down to the basement cafeteria, something occurred to her. Security clearances had been discussed by Ginny’s coworkers on a few occasions, and Ginny had the impression that they took a while to get. On the day Crawford moved her over to Counterterrorism, he had mentioned that he was going to try to expedite the process, but he seemed to have pushed her clearance through in record time. She wondered why.

Ginny filled a thermos to the top with coffee and carried it back to her office. Just thinking about the daunting task she was facing was exhausting. She poured out a cup of caffeine and took a stiff drink. Then she carried the first box to her desk and pulled a stack of paper out of it so she could see what she was dealing with. It didn’t take her long to realize that she was looking at 302s—the FBI equivalent of a police report—in the FedEx case. She was still pissed off at Crawford but not as pissed off as she had been. Working at Justice might not pay as much as Rankin, Lusk, but no one at Rankin, Lusk would have the inside scoop on one of the biggest terror cases in American history.

Ginny read the first report. It was an interview with a person who worked at a concession stand at the football stadium. The interview concerned a fellow worker, but the name of the subject in whom the interviewer was interested was redacted. Ginny flipped through a few of the other reports. Names and other information—like an address in one case—were also blacked out. News stories on television and in the papers had reported that hawkers for several concessions were believed to be suicide bombers who were arrested before they were able to detonate their bombs. Ginny assumed that the terrorists were being held at a secret prison somewhere. She wondered what that would be like and she shuddered. She had read stories about waterboarding, and she’d seen the pictures from Abu Ghraib prison. She was certain that she couldn’t stand up under that type of pressure. Something else about the prisoners being held at a secret prison bothered her, only she couldn’t put her finger on it, so she got back to work.

A lot of the 302s in the first two boxes recounted interviews with people who worked at concession stands at FedEx Field. Ginny built a tower out of these reports on a corner of her desk. She would put them in a binder in alphabetical order when she had collected all of these interviews and the reports that concerned them.

Ginny was reading a report of an interview with a woman named Ann O’Hearn when she noticed that Keith Evans and Maggie Sparks were the agents who had conducted the interview. She smiled. It made this tedious work easier when she could connect with someone involved in the investigation.

Later on, Ginny came across a series of reports about a man named Lawrence Cooper who owned the concession stands where the suicide bombers had been employed. It came as a shock when she found out that he had been murdered. She thought about that. The terrorists had to figure out a way to get their people into FedEx Field. Maybe Cooper was part of the plot or a dupe who had been talked into hiring the suicide bombers. Maybe he was killed to prevent him from telling anyone who had arranged for him to hire the four bombers. Ginny felt proud of herself when she read a report by a detective who had drawn a similar conclusion.

B
y the time six o’clock rolled around, Ginny’s head was swimming, her stomach was rumbling, and the lines on the reports were starting to blur. After calling Brad to tell him that he shouldn’t wait up for her, Ginny went down to the cafeteria. It was good to get away from the banker’s boxes, even if it was only for the time it would take her to buy her dinner. She carried a sandwich, two bags of chips, and more coffee back to her office.

Twenty minutes later, Ginny was finished with her sandwich and one of the bags of chips. She tossed her trash in the can under her desk and opened the next banker’s box. It contained transcripts of the interrogations of the suicide bombers. Ginny was surprised at how little most of the bombers knew. They were all from small villages and were educated in madrassas where they studied the Koran and little else. Their only exposure to a wider world had been in a training camp in Somalia, a day or two in a safe house in Karachi while they waited to be smuggled out of Pakistan, and their work in FedEx Field.

One prisoner, AB, was the only bomber who appeared to be of above-average intelligence. While reading the transcript of his interrogation, Ginny found out how the FBI had learned Ron Tolliver’s license plate number. An autopsy report let Ginny know that AB had committed suicide.

The next set of 302s dealt with the way Ron Tolliver had been tracked down, the raid on his house, and his transportation to the Department of Justice. Ginny sat up straight. That’s what had bothered her before. The suicide bombers had been captured at FedEx Field and immediately transported to a secret prison. Why was Ron Tolliver taken to the DOJ? If he’d been imprisoned in the secure facility where the other members of the cell were being held, Bobby Schatz would never have been able to find him. Ginny puzzled over this problem for a while, then gave up.

B
y eleven, Ginny had developed a dull headache and her vision was blurred. She decided that she would finish reading the last pile of paper in the banker’s box on her desk, then call it a night. She was halfway through her last stack when she found a typed transcript that looked out of place among all the 302s. After finishing the first page, she realized that she was reading the transcript of Terrence Crawford’s interrogation of Ron Tolliver.

Crawford started off by insulting and threatening the prisoner. Ginny wasn’t surprised. If she studied a genome of Crawford’s DNA, she was certain she wouldn’t find the gene for subtlety. From the one-sided nature of the conversation, Ginny concluded that Tolliver had not been intimidated.

Ginny turned the page and smiled when Schatz appeared on the scene, brandishing his court order and demanding that the cameras and microphones be turned off. She could imagine what Crawford looked like when he was forced to leave the room.

By the time she had flipped to the next page, Ginny’s smile had morphed into a frown. The transcript should have ended when Crawford left the interrogation room, but it went on for many more pages. It was clear that the microphones had been off for a while, because the conversation between Schatz and Crawford ended abruptly as soon as Schatz made his demand that his attorney-client conference not be recorded. But the transcript continued in the middle of one of Schatz’s sentences. Someone had turned on the microphones again, and Ginny bet that it was her boss.

Was it legal for Crawford to listen in on a conversation between an attorney and his client? It had been made crystal clear in law school that the attorney-client privilege was a sacred cornerstone of the judicial system. Competent representation of a client was almost impossible if a client didn’t feel she could speak freely to her lawyer. Ginny could not imagine that there was an exception to the rule that would permit Crawford to eavesdrop on the discussion between Schatz and Tolliver.

Ginny turned to her computer and logged on to Westlaw, a tool for legal research. It didn’t take long to find cases that held that the Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution provided a right to counsel for defendants in criminal cases and that a defendant’s rights under that amendment were violated if a prosecutor eavesdropped on an attorney-client meeting.

In
Coplon v. United States
, the defendant was convicted of giving United States intelligence reports to a Russian agent. The D.C. Court of Appeals reversed the conviction presuming prejudice when the defendant’s telephone conversations with her lawyer were monitored after her arrest.

In
Caldwell v. United States
, a government agent managed to get himself employed by the defendant’s lawyer. The agent learned confidential attorney-client communications, which he revealed to the United States attorney. The appellate court held that this intrusion was so serious that the defendant didn’t have to show actual prejudice to get the case reversed.

By the time Ginny logged off, she was convinced that taping an attorney-client conference was an act of prosecutorial misconduct so serious that a defendant didn’t even have to show that the taping prejudiced his case to win a dismissal.