Gore’s Aides Faulted in INS Inquiry

Political pressure from Vice President Al Gore’s deputies was “one stimulus” driving a hurried, mistake-prone effort by federal authorities to naturalize more than a million new citizens in 1996, including thousands of possible criminals, Justice Department investigators concluded in a long-awaited report issued Monday.

The three-year investigation by the Justice Department inspector general’s office rejected assertions by Republicans and other critics that the “Citizenship USA” program was created specifically to build a “Clinton voter mill” to turn out new citizens who would be more likely to vote for Democrats than Republicans in the 1996 election.

But the report found substantial evidence that some staff members assigned to Gore’s “reinventing government” reform team tried to play an active role in the citizenship effort because they “hoped for a political benefit” in the upcoming election.

Things became so heated in one meeting between White House and Justice Department immigration officials in early 1996 that Atty. Gen. Janet Reno’s then-top deputy angrily asked one of Gore’s aides to leave after the aide pushed for Immigration and Naturalization Service officials to further accelerate the already rapid pace of naturalizations, the investigation found.

The findings, coming from within the Clinton administration’s own camp, could tarnish Gore’s presidential campaign as the vice president still struggles to divorce himself from scandals that have dogged the administration for much of the last 7 1/2 years.

Promising a full congressional hearing, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), chairman of a House panel on immigration, said the findings show that “there was clearly some collaboration between the administration and the INS.”

But administration officials said the investigation confirms that, despite the citizenship program’s many shortcomings, it was well-intentioned.

Aides to Gore could not be reached for comment on the report. Jim Kennedy, a spokesman for the vice president, said in a prepared statement that “after an extensive review the inspector general’s report confirms what we have consistently said about Citizenship USA--namely that it was an effort designed to reduce the backlog of citizenship applications and not to further any inappropriate political ends.”

Rejected Interview

The vice president refused to be interviewed by Justice Department investigators as part of their review, but his staff offered extensive written answers on his behalf last November in response to the inspector general’s questions.

In those prepared comments, Gore acknowledged that he personally instructed his staff to take part in the Citizenship USA program to help erase a citizenship backlog that he found “unacceptable and embarrassing” but said that politics were never his motivation.

“He did not view the purpose of the reinvention effort as producing 1 million new citizens before the November 1996 election,” the response from Gore’s office said.

The INS launched the Citizenship USA program in 1995 in Los Angeles after a troubling surge in the number of people waiting to have their applications for citizenship heard. The backlog had quadrupled in three years and INS officials pledged to streamline the labyrinthian process by hiring new case workers in an effort to shorten a wait that sometimes took years.

The effort worked: In the next year, more than 1 million people were naturalized as U.S. citizens, much to the delight of immigration activists. But the mammoth undertaking also produced widespread allegations of slipshod management--many of which were corroborated in Monday’s report.

Hundreds of new employees charged with interviewing applicants were brought on board with little training or supervision, the report says. Reports of fraud by outside testers, responsible for verifying that the applicants met English proficiency requirements, were sometimes “completely disregarded,” investigators found.

And, in what INS Commissioner Doris Meissner called the “fatal flaw” of the program, criminal background and fingerprint checks of applicants were often skipped or ignored, the report says. By one estimate, this allowed 6,000 possible convicts--and perhaps more--to be granted citizenship, with about 18% of all applications not properly examined.

In the Los Angeles district, the investigation found, it became customary for the INS to review incoming rap sheets only after applications had already been approved. The intent was that anyone with a criminal record would be “pulled” before the naturalization ceremony.

Mistakes Tolerated

The widespread problems, investigators said, were rooted in an INS culture that tolerated mistakes.

The assumption going into the citizenship program, Meissner told investigators, was that “we have been doing it this way for years and years and years and things need to improve . . . [But] we are not going to create an entirely new system in a flash, and so we will do the best we can with what we have.”

Meissner made the citizenship backlog one of her top priorities from the time she took office and White House pressure had little or nothing to do with her desire to embark on the Citizenship USA program, the investigation concluded.

But she voiced concerns once the program was in motion that White House advisors were showing a “dangerous” interest in the program, opening themselves to charges of political interference, the report says. Indeed, the report concluded that repeated input from White House aides “did not serve the program well” and “imposed additional stress upon a process that, even without their intervention, was substantially flawed.”

The report recounts one meeting in March 1996 among Jamie Gorelick, then the second-ranking official at the Justice Department under Reno, immigration officials and White House deputies. Doug Farbrother, one of Gore’s aides on the “reinventing government” team, tried to push a radical realignment of the INS management structure to speed the citizenship process. But Farbrother instead angered Justice Department officials, who felt he was trying to tell them how to run their affairs, the investigation found.

Upset, Gorelick asked him to leave. Even so, INS officials soon ordered some of the streamlining efforts that Farbrother had proposed, the investigation found.

An e-mail, sent to Farbrother by Gore aide Elaine Kamarck, said of the slow pace of naturalization applications: “The president is sick of this and wants action. If nothing moves today we’ll have to take some pretty drastic measures.”

A few weeks later, Kamarck wrote a memo concluding that “only by working seven days a week and longer hours can we hope to make a significant enough dent in the backlog that it will show up when it matters.”

Gore told investigators in his response that he didn’t know what Kamarck meant by “when it matters.”

Asked about the inspector general’s report, an INS spokeswoman said that “there’s nothing in here that we didn’t know already.”

The inspector general’s office agreed--to a point. Investigators found that the INS in fact has done a better job in checking criminal histories of applicants, the report says, but its failure to follow up on other shortcomings exposed in the 1996 program is still “of great concern.”