Ex-Official Denies Bias in Los Alamos Spy Case : Espionage: Former Energy Department aide says Wen Ho Lee’s ethnicity did not influence inquiry. He claims Clinton appointee blocked reports to Congress.

A former Energy Department intelligence official publicly denied Sunday that he singled out Los Alamos National Laboratory physicist Wen Ho Lee as a possible spy for China because of Lee’s ethnicity, also charging that a Clinton administration partisan blocked him from giving information about the case to Congress.

Notra Trulock, who resigned six days ago as Energy’s deputy director of intelligence, said on two news talk shows that Lee was among 12 people, including two others of Asian ancestry and nine whites, working at various federal facilities who had access to information about U.S. nuclear warheads and the neutron bomb that China might have stolen. A group of Energy and FBI investigators analyzed the possibility that each named person might have spied.

Sources said the other 11 people are no longer under investigation.

China has denied engaging in espionage.

Trulock said he did not know at the time that Lee had previously cooperated with the FBI and the CIA and that Lee’s wife had been an FBI informant. But it was the FBI, he said, that focused on Lee as the prime suspect.

Trulock said he quit after the Energy Department inspector general did not confirm his claim that a Clinton appointee, Deputy Energy Secretary Elizabeth A. Moler, told him in 1997 that she did not want him to talk to Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.), chairman of the House intelligence committee.

Moler “told me directly,” Trulock said on “Fox News Sunday,” that “the reason she did not allow me to brief the Hill on this case was that congressional Republicans . . . were only interested in hurting the president on his China policy.”

Moler, who also has left the department, could not be reached for comment.

Trulock also said he was blocked by “senior officials” from informing then-Energy Secretary Federico Pena about his investigation. “Some are gone, some are still there,” he said on Fox.

Asked why higher-ups would resist pursuing allegations from a period when George Bush was president, Trulock answered that after the resignation of Clinton’s first Energy secretary, Hazel O’Leary, “we got a new cast of characters, and that group of people just, I believe, did not have the stomach for dealing with the issues that we were confronting.”

A two-month inspector general’s investigation of Trulock’s claim of partisan interference was inconclusive, stating that 82 interviews “were not able to reconcile . . . conflicting information.” Trulock said on ABC-TV’s “This Week” that the inspector general’s report “trivializes such a serious issue [to the extent] that I decided the time had come for me to leave.”

Trulock has been a contentious figure in the case, with some Democratic lawmakers and Energy officials questioning his assessment that security was heavily damaged by Chinese spying. The Washington Post has quoted a Los Alamos official who accuses Trulock of concentrating on the Taiwan-born Lee because of his ethnic background.

But Trulock also recently received a $10,000 bonus from Energy Secretary Bill Richardson for his persistence in pursuing the espionage allegations.

Lee was fired from Los Alamos for violating security procedures by transferring classified files to a less-secure computer. He has denied passing secrets to China and has not been charged with any crime.

Newsweek reported Sunday that Justice Department security chief John Dion told his superiors that evidence against Lee is not strong enough to warrant prosecution.

Trulock said he did not know how strong the evidence is against Lee, but he repeated his charges that China did get information by spying and that the breach has proved dangerous.

“They have already announced their acquisition of the neutron warhead as a weapon and a deterrent in the ongoing Taiwan issue.”

He added, however, that he thinks Richardson is “on the right track” to strengthen lab security.