what those needs are, so that I can meet the management challenge of using our resources in a way that produces the best result for those people.

I do not think, as some have suggested, that would necessarily be served by building in specific allocations into legislative directions as to how the DEA or FBI or the U.S. attorneys should allocate their resources. That has already been done on a limited basis, of course, in the high-intensity drug trafficking area legislation and we will see how that works. But I ask for the flexibility and the vote of confidence from you and your colleagues to let us try to use the resources we have in the best possible way, and I assure you we will make that effort just as diligently as we can.

Mr. GRASSLEY. My time is up.

Senator DECONCINI. Mr. Attorney General, let me address one quick question here. I introduced, on March 7, S. 2250, which is the legislation dealing with major recommendations from the National Advisory Commission on Law Enforcement, that you played a major role in, and I thank you for the time you put in, your office and the other agencies under Justice.

The legislation will go a long way to remedy many of the problems identified by the Commission as we escalate the war on drugs, that you are committed to. It seems to me we need to address this. I want to know, Mr. Attorney General, have you had an opportunity to look at S. 2250, the Federal Law Enforcement Pay Reform Act of 1990, which takes those recommendations, and do you support it or can you support it and will the administration be doing something to help pass this bill this year?

Attorney General THORNBURGH. I have not had a chance to look at the legislation specifically, but if it embodies, as you indicate, the recommendations of the National Law Enforcement Committee, I can pledge to you that I will be as effective a spokesman within the administration as possible, to see that those recommendations are implemented.

We face a very serious situation with regard to the pay and benefits available to law enforcement officials across the board and we are going to begin to pay a very serious price in not only the inability to recruit people, to fill the positions that the Congress has authorized, but, perhaps of greater importance, to obtain those experienced, sophisticated investigators and prosecutors whose need is especially acute in dealing with complicated money laundering cases, with organized crime cases and white collar fraud cases, where you simply cannot put fresh agents or fresh prosecutors, no matter how talented, into the breach without that seasoning process. I commend you, Senator, for your attention to this matter.

Senator DECONCINI. Mr. Attorney General, would you look at this legislation and see if it does

Attorney General THORNBURGH. I certainly will. I will accept your word.

Senator DECONCINI. I think it does, at least that was the purpose of it and we need some forceful action in the administration, if we are going to try to do something this year.

I think we could do something, if the administration would get behind it, or, if they do not like something about it, what we can do. It seems important enough to me to act on.

Attorney General THORNBURGH. We hope to address that. I believe the Commission's report finally will be delivered this month

Senator DECONCINI. That is right.

Attorney General THORNBURGH [continuing]. And then we will have a specific proposal to deal with.

Senator DECONCINI. If you would take a look at this legislation to see if it falls in those guidelines.

Attorney General THORNBURGH. We certainly will.

Senator DECONCINI. We are going to take a recess until Senator Biden or Senator Heflin returns. It should be about 5 minutes, Mr. Attorney General.

Thank you.

[Short recess.]

The CHAIRMAN. The committee will please come to order.
Senator Specter.

OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR SPECTER

Senator SPECTER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.`

Mr. Attorney General, I compliment you on the appointment of John Dunne, the new Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division, and I would like to discuss with you for a few moments the MOVE case in Philadelphia, which resulted in destruction of a city block and many deaths.

It is a matter which I know you are familiar with. It is a matter which I have discussed with a variety of Justice Department officials over the years. I raised it with Mr. Dennis when he was up for confirmation and with Mr. Lucas and again with Mr. Dunne. I had asked Mr. Dunne to review the case and he has moved ahead on that and we had a brief discussion yesterday. The concerns I have about it turn on the dropping of the incendiary and the failure to put out the fire and a good many other matters.

I just wanted to call it to your attention this morning, because the statute of limitations is about to run. I had written to you about that a few months ago. It occurred on May 13, 1985, and I do not think it is right for any comment by you at this point until Mr. Dunne finishes his work, but I did want to highlight it, because I may be coming back to you, if, as and when that occurs. He is going to re-review the matter and he has asked me to provide information, but at the time we may be very close to the statute of limitations.

Mr. Attorney General, I would like to raise a number of points with you. One was recently called to my attention involving a very complicated legal situation involving the Davis-Bacon interpretation, where you have the distinction between a leasing and a purchase, with Davis-Bacon applying to purchase by the Federal Government, and there was a decision by the Department of Labor Wage Appeals Board which said that a lease was within purview of the act.

Then, there was an opinion by the Office of Legal Counsel of the Department of Justice before you became Attorney General, so it does not have your own personal imprimatur. The matter was then litigated in the district court for the District of Columbia, and

Judge Revercomb ruled that the Labor Department position was correct and that the Attorney General's opinion stated only the Government's litigation position, and then the matter went forward.

Without reviewing all of it, there was a later opinion by another judge, Judge Gasch on the district court here in Washington, which dismissed a suit brought by Building Trades on the ground that there was lack of standing. This case raises a number of issues, the foremost of which is the resolution of an important legal principle, so that people will know what the conclusion is and the undesirability of really having it decided on standing grounds and also of the position of the Department of Justice in maintaining a binding opinion, in the face of a substantive court ruling to the contrary. I appreciate your responsibility in the opinions, but I raise a question about whether there is a substantive judgment by a court, and perhaps that has to be determined when all of the appeals have been followed. I only found out about this on Friday and have not had a chance to write to you about it. It may be something which you would want to consider, unless you have some familiarity with the issue.

Attorney General THORNBURGH. I do not, Senator. I would be glad to consider it, if you would give us the details.

Senator SPECTER. All right. I will send the papers over to you, because it is really

Attorney General THORNBURGH. What is the name of the case? Senator SPECTER. Well, there are a number of cases. One case is Outpatient Clinic, one case is Building Trades v. Turnage, another case is Crown Point Outpatient Clinic-there are a whole series of cases. I will submit them to you, but I would appreciate it if you would take a look at that, because there are some really important issues.

The next matter that I would like to raise with you, Mr. Attorney General, involves the question of oversight, which is always a troublesome issue, because we are all so busy that the Judiciary Committee has very little time to devote to the subject of oversight.

But we have come upon the question in some of the more protracted impeachment hearings which we have had. I wrote to you last November about the Hastings case, the Judge Hastings impeachment proceeding, where I was on the panel, and we had occasion to go very deeply into the situation there and got a response from Mr. Navarro which really did not reach the point. I understand the press of his business and he and I had a chance to talk about it, because I bumped into him at a hearing on the House side on the death penalty a couple of weeks ago. His response took up Hastings and Claiborne and Nixon, none of which I had referred to. I understand the press of business, but I would like to deal with the substantive issues here.

When we got into the Hastings case, we found that when the FBI served a subpoena duces tecum on Judge Hastings for records in a specific case which was under investigation, that they then took all of his records in his office, so that they did not treat it as a subpoena duces tecum, which, as we all know, requires the production of the records for the grand jury, and they did not limit their seizure of materials just to the case in question, but took all of his records.

Of course, he was presiding on many cases in which the United States was a party, so that defendants in other cases might have been prejudiced.

We did not get into that, because it was obviously very collateral to what we were pursuing, but I found that kind of a situation extremely troubling. There was a second matter that was referred to in the materials that I forwarded to you last November. In the second investigation of Judge Hastings, he had been investigated on the possibility of a bribe, but then on the leak of grand jury information.

In the second matter, there had been a representation by an FBI agent to Judge Hastings as to whether Judge Hastings was under investigation, and the Judge asked that question directly and the FBI agent responded in an untruthful way. Those two factors seem to me and to a number of my colleagues on the Hastings panel to be really serious issues.

I am concerned about your response to the specifics, but I am more concerned about how we really function in an oversight capacity. You have a vast department, it is just not possible for every action in every line to be scrutinized with the kind of care which we all would like, and we are very, very busy here. I would like to get your response as to procedurally how we really deal with these issues and then I would like to have your comments on the specifics, to the extent you would care to comment.

Attorney General THORNBURGH. Procedurally, how the Department of Justice deals with those issues is through our Office of Inspector General and the Office of Professional Responsibility, each of which are charged with specific tasks that have to do with allegations made of wrongdoing by any employee of the department. In addition, if there is criminal conduct involved, then the U.S. Attorneys Office or the Criminal Division would look at those improprieties, as well.

There have been reports, I believe, from both of those entities regularly furnished to the Congress and they summarize the actions that are taken with regard to the type of allegations that you refer to, and I would suggest that scrutiny of those reports might indicate areas where congressional oversight might find us to have come up short in a particular area.

I must say, because these are agencies that are designed to carry out these types of investigations, that I am not familiar with either of the cases that you raise, but I am confident that the mechanisms that are in place address the concerns that you have.

If there are shortcomings in those mechanisms, of course, then it is up to the Congress to point those out. There has never been much reluctance on the part of the Congress to point out shortcomings of activities in the Department of Justice and we try to respond to them as best we can, but I would invite that scrutiny in these instances to those agencies as well.

Senator SPECTER. Well, there is some reluctance, at least this Senator feels it, knowing the kinds of burdens you have. But if you take this particular case, I am at a loss, really, as to how to attract attention until we get one of these annual hearings. Here you have the matter of a subpoena duces tecum and I sent it over and get back a letter from Mr. Navarro which refers to two others matters

as well as Hastings. It is really a very generalized letter, speaking about the procedures. Then I talked to Mr. Navarro about it.

How do we make the

Attorney General THORNBURGH. I do know if these examples, Senator, were referred to the Inspector General's Office or the Office of Professional Responsibility. I am at a loss to really assess how well our mechanisms designed to insure that misconduct on the part of any employee is dealt with. How they operated in this case, I do not know the details, whether they were assessed and found wanting for some reason. I just do not know.

Senator SPECTER. My time is up and I will wait until my next round. It may take me until next year, but I will await until my next round.

The CHAIRMAN. Will the General follow up on the specifics and

Senator SPECTER. I was going to say that. I do not know what happened in the department, either. Of course, I followed the practice of writing to you and then I talked to Mr. Navarro about it. I would like an answer as to the specifics, if you could provide it to us, on both the subpoena duces tecum

Attorney General THORNBURGH. Well, to the extent that we can, matters that are looked into by the Inspector General's Office and the Office of Professional Responsibility often involve grand jury proceedings or other kinds of criminal investigatory files which, as you know, are often beyond our ability to legally furnish to the Congress.

Senator SPECTER. Well, they may or they may not. I do not think they do in this case. Here you have a matter of a subpoena duces tecum which was served in the matter, so I do not

Attorney General THORNBURGH. Well, I do not know what was done, Senator, within the Department of Justice and, without knowing that, I cannot really-I am at a loss to respond. I will look into it, but I want to caution that it is not always possible for us to report back to you in a particular case if it insoles a grand jury investigation or a criminal investigation that we are not authorized to share.

You and I have had this discussion about the MOVE case and I realize the sensitivity of that, but until the rules are changed, we have to follow the rules, for the very reasons I mentioned in my discussion with Senator Biden.

Senator SPECTER. I totally agree with you about following the rules and we are going to reexamine rule 6(e) when we next have the crime package. But I do not believe that the matters that I have raised here would involve any of those limiting factors.

If I might just ask-

Senator LEAHY. I will go vote and I will be back.

The CHAIRMAN. No

Senator LEAHY. I will be back.

Senator SPECTER. I will wait until the second round.

The CHAIRMAN. The Senator from Vermont.

Senator LEAHY. Mr. Chairman, we are going to have a vote right now, supposedly, if that is the case.

The CHAIRMAN. I understand.