PropertyValue
?:author
?:datePublished
  • 2018-03-17 (xsd:date)
?:headline
  • Did Obama's Justice Department Force the FBI to Delete 500,000 Fugitives from a Background Check Database? (en)
?:inLanguage
?:itemReviewed
?:mentions
?:reviewBody
  • The political skirmishing over how to address the problem of gun violence in the United States took a new turn in March 2018, with the publication of reports by right-leaning media outlets accusing President Obama of undermining the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS). Partisan web sites reported that Obama's Department of Justice had forced the deletion of the names of more than 500,000 fugitives with outstanding arrest warrants from the NICS database. The reports centered around an exchange between Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-California) and acting FBI Deputy Director David Bowdich during a 14 March Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on School Shootings and Safety, quoted as follows by the Daily Wire blog: The exchange was accurately reported, as confirmed in this excerpt from a C-SPAN video of the hearing: What the Post's less-politicized coverage also made clear was that the policy change was the culmination of a debate that spanned three administrations, from George W. Bush's to Donald Trump's. According to a DOJ inspector general's report dated September 2016, the need for official guidance on the issue was first brought to the attention of the department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) in 2008 (under Bush), and had still not been resolved eight years later as Obama's term was nearing its end: If the Post's reporting and Bowdich's testimony are accurate, the OLC finally did make its decision in late 2016, siding with the ATF on the meaning of fugitive from justice. But it was on Trump's watch that the policy became official, with the issuance of a 15 February 2017 guidance memo from the FBI which read, in part: Did the Number of Records Deleted Actually Total 500,000? As previously alleged, the guidance had the immediate effect of causing the names of some 500,000 subjects to be conditionally purged from the existing NICS database because they did not meet all of the above criteria. Below are charts from the FBI showing the total numbers of active fugitive from justice records at the end of 2016 vs. the end of 2017: 2016 2017 Taken out of context, these figures are grossly misleading, however. Approximately 430,000 of the deleted entries are actually still in the database, just under a different heading. According to the Washington Post's reporting, those 430,000 names were all originally submitted by the state of Massachusetts, which under its own policy classifies all people with outstanding warrants, whether for misdemeanors or felonies, as fugitives from justice. Since Massachusetts law forbids anyone so classified from buying guns, all of those names were re-entered in the NICS database under the state prohibitor category. That leaves a much smaller total of 70,000 people formerly classified as fugitives whose names were actually removed from the database (though some of those will be added back in if and when the FBI determines that subjects crossed state lines or qualify under other prohibitors). Despite the politicized reporting of the Justice Department's reinterpretation of fugitive from justice, which was undertaken in good faith to conform to federal statutes and resolve a longstanding conflict between agencies, there's no evidence that it was a partisan determination. The matter was first referred to the DOJ for adjudication under Bush, finally resolved under Obama, and implemented under Trump. Its consequences have been questioned by Democrats and Republicans alike. David Chipman, a former ATF official who now advises the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, has called on Congress to rewrite the statutory definition of fugitive from justice to include all people with outstanding arrest warrants. (en)
?:reviewRating
rdf:type
?:url