Patriot Act cited in clandestine search

Washington Post | April 9 2005

WASHINGTON —The Justice Department has acknowledged that the FBI used a secret search warrant to copy and seize material from the home of an Oregon man.

The man, Brandon Mayfield, was wrongly arrested last year in connection with the March 2004 train bombings in Madrid, Spain. Mayfield received a law degree in 1999 from Washburn University in Topeka.

In testimony this week, Justice Department officials said that some of the special powers used to spy on Mayfield were strengthened by the USA Patriot Act.

In a background briefing Tuesday, two Justice officials maintained that the FBI could have taken Mayfield's belongings and conducted surveillance on him even without the Patriot Act because he was under suspicion in an international terrorism case.

The disclosures prompted Rep. John Conyers, a Michigan Democrat, to ask the Justice Department's inspector general to expand his investigation of the case.

Mayfield, a convert to Islam, was arrested May 6 after the FBI concluded that his fingerprint was on a bag of detonators used in the bombings, which killed nearly 200 people. He was freed two weeks later, after the FBI admitted it had bungled the fingerprint analysis. Mayfield is suing the government.

In a March 24 letter to Mayfield, sent as part of the lawsuit, the department acknowledged that in clandestine searches of his home, the FBI made copies of computer drives and documents, and that “ten DNA samples were taken and preserved on cotton swabs and six cigarette butts were seized for DNA analysis.” The letter also said: “Mr. Mayfield is also hereby notified that he was the target of electronic surveillance and other physical searches authorized pursuant to” the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which was expanded under the Patriot law.