Prosecutor to Head New Security Division, Sources Say

The White House is eyeing a top federal prosecutor and longtime protege of FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III to oversee a restructuring of the Justice Department’s national security operation, officials familiar with the selection process said Friday.

Kenneth L. Wainstein, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia and a former chief of staff to Mueller, is expected to be named as early as Monday as the assistant attorney general in charge of a new national security division at the Justice Department, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media about personnel matters.

Wainstein, 44, has been the chief federal prosecutor in Washington, the largest U.S. attorney’s office in the country, for the last two years. He has also held other high-level posts, including general counsel of the FBI.

The new position is central to the efforts by the Justice Department to refashion itself as a terrorism-fighting agency in a post-Sept. 11 world. It is part of a continuing effort to remove strategic and structural barriers to intelligence officers and prosecutors sharing information.

Those barriers were cited as a major reason for the failure of the U.S. to preempt the Sept. 11 attacks, and have fed a series of intelligence reforms throughout government.

The Justice Department reorganization was urged in March 2005 by a bipartisan commission headed by Laurence H. Silberman, a senior federal judge, and Charles S. Robb, the former Virginia senator and governor.

Their panel’s report criticized America’s intelligence community and urged fundamental changes. That has led to a series of high-level moves at the CIA and the FBI that, among things, make the agencies more accountable to National Intelligence Director John D. Negroponte.

The report called the Justice Department’s organizational structure “awkward” and “outdated.” It recommended the creation of a senior level assistant attorney general to oversee the disparate operations and to serve as a single focal point for all national security matters.

The new division would include the Office of Intelligence Policy and Review, which handles government requests for secret surveillance in terrorist and espionage cases before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. This is the same court bypassed by the Bush administration to conduct domestic surveillance without warrants of terrorist suspects. The program’s existence was disclosed by the New York Times late last year.

The new division would also include the counter-terrorism and counterespionage sections of the department that are currently part of its criminal division. The division would have more than 200 prosecutors, investigators and staff members. It is one of the few areas that the department is planning to expand in its fiscal 2007 budget request, which was released last month.

Wainstein came to know Mueller when both men prosecuted homicide cases in the District of Columbia in the mid-1990s. He joined Mueller’s staff in 2003.