Rep. Frank Calls for FBI Monitoring Curbs

A U.S. congressman whose name surfaced in newly released FBI documents asked Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft on Tuesday for assurances that law enforcement officials were not monitoring legitimate political activity.

Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) made the request after learning from The Times that a letter he authored regarding immigration reform found its way into the FBI files and was classified as secret for many years.

The documents that involved Frank were part of more than 2,800 pages of information released by the FBI as part of a Freedom of Information Act request filed almost 15 years ago. The documents were released in April to Jonathan Dann of the San Francisco-based Center for Investigative Reporting. The Times published a story Sunday detailing the contents of the documents.

In his letter, Frank said that monitoring the activities of Congress as if it were a legitimate law enforcement issue was “outrageous.”

“The wholly unjustified nature of this is underlined by examples such as the inclusion of the file I have been shown in which a secret informant is praised for alerting the FBI to a public meeting that was being held on immigration,” Frank wrote. “Paying secret informants to advise us of public information seems a genuinely stupid idea from a number of perspectives.”

The 1989 letter written by Frank was circulated at a public meeting in New York. It was then passed along to the FBI by an informant who also provided information about those in attendance.

Department of Justice spokeswoman Susan Dryden said Ashcroft’s office had not yet received the letter and that there would be no immediate comment.