He’s gonna need a lot more than an umbrella.
Already wrestling with the flood of disclosures from three ongoing scandals, President Obama was hit yesterday with a damning new internal report that showed his administration gave witness-protection status to terrorists – and then didn’t tell the agency that keeps dangerous people off US flights. As a result, terrorists who should have been on a “no-fly” list were allowed to fly.
How many terrorists flew? The government won’t say, according to the audit.
But the agency that runs the witness program did figure out that it lost track of two known or suspected terrorists.
At least one of them is outside the United States, the report said.
The terrorist-witness fiasco comes as the president scrambled to deal with other embarrassments:
* Obama told reporters he didn’t know the IRS was targeting conservative groups until he saw news reports last week — even though his White House counsel was told of it last month.
* He said he makes “no apologies” for the Justice Department’s heavy-handed investigation of Associated Press phone records to find out who in his administration was leaking confidential secrets concerning national security.
* And he tried to calm the outcry over last year’s Benghazi terror attack and the “talking points” scandal by calling on Congress to boost security at American diplomatic posts around the world.
The president also claimed that he retains “complete confidence” in Attorney General Eric Holder. But his comments came amid the new revelations about how the left hand of Holder’s Justice Department had no idea what the right hand was doing.
The department, through the US Marshals Service, administers the federal witness protection program. It was created to safeguard people who testify against mob bosses and other vengeful criminal targets, but now includes terrorists who rat out former colleagues.
Among the witnesses in hiding are some who cooperated in probes of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the foiled 2007 suicide bomb plot against the city’s subways, and the 2007 conspiracy to blow up JFK Airport, according to the report released yesterday. But “the department did not definitively know how many known or suspected terrorists were admitted” into the witness program, the department’s inspector general said.
The marshals fixed up terrorists with new identities — but didn’t tell the Justice Department’s Terrorist Screening Center (TSC).
The TSC is the agency that passes on names of suspected terrorists to create the “no-fly” list to keep the nation’s commercial air traffic safe.
Thanks to the inspector general’s probe, the Justice Department tightened security last year. The marshals disclosed to the TSC the new IDs they gave to “a majority of the known or suspected terrorists” in the witness program, the report said.
But two of them had vanished.
In July 2012, the marshal service admitted “it was unable to locate two former [witness program] participants identified as known or suspected terrorists,” the report said. One is in another country and the other is “believed to be residing outside the United States,” the report said.
Congressional reaction was harsh.
“This is gross mismanagement — plain and simple — that jeopardizes American lives and cannot be tolerated,” said Rep. Bob Goodlatte, a Virginia Republican, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee.
The report indicated that marshals didn’t share the new identities because they didn’t trust other agencies and “expressed concern for the confidentiality of the program and the safety of its participants.”