UNITED STATES SENATE Committee on the Judicary Washington, D.C. 20510-6275 March 11, 1998 Mr. Eric M. Larson P.O. Box 5497 Takoma Park, Maryland 20913 Dear Mr. Larson: Thank you for your letters regarding the BATF in which you included testimony given before the House of Representatives' Appropriations Committee. I appreciate the information you provided because it is essential to the oversight role of the Judiciary Committee. Your concerns, combined with the concerns of others like you, provide insight that would be difficult to obtain in any other way. I will certainly keep your information in mind when considering future legislation dealing with the BATF. Once again, thank you for taking the time to write to me on this important issue. Sincerely, (signed--Orrin Hatch) Orrin G. Hatch Chairman --------------------------------------- Page 1 March 22, 1998 The Honorable Orrin G. Hatch, Chairman Committee on the Judiciary United States Senate 224 Dirksen Senate Office Building Washington, D.C. 20510-6275 Dear Chairman Hatch: Thank you for your letter of March 11, 1998, and I am gratified to know that you deem my recent testimonies before the House Subcommittee on Treasury, Postal Service and General Government Appropriations to be "essential to the oversight role of the Judiciary Committee." In this testimony, I provided documented credible instances of mismanagement, misconduct, and criminal wrongdoing by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF) in its administration of the National Firearms Act (NFA) of 1934. In particular, BATF has created serious errors in the National Firearms Registration and Transfer Record (NFRTR). I am writing to tell you of my intention, on April 3, 1998, to respectfully request the Subcommittee to consider removing the NFRTR from custody of the BATF, and to permanently reassign its functions to the Department of Justice. As you know, the Department of Justice is responsible for the "instant background check" of persons who wish to purchase handguns, which is scheduled to go into effect this year. Therefore, it would be relatively easy to incorporate the NFRTR into that existing infrastructure, and modifications to allow for administration of the NFRTR would likely be very minor. Removal of the NFRTR from BATF will also place these records within a professional organization that is capable of maintaining them, and probably will require a badly needed 100% record verification. I will summarize my reasons for making this request below. On May 21, 1996, less than one month after I first testified about these problems, U.S. District Judge John A. MacKenzie dismissed five convictions for nonregistration of NFA firearms on appeal, declaring that the NFRTR records were too unreliable to support a conviction. In fact, a BATF Special Agent, Mr. Gary N. Schaible, testified that BATF employees could in fact have destroyed the documents in question. The U.S. Attorney prosecuting the case declined to cross-examine Mr. Schaible, and the BATF has not appealed the dismissals. Astonishingly, the BATF made no apparent effort to correct the problems that I identified in my 1996 testimony, because I detected them again in the next round of data it released the following year. So, I returned to testify before the Subcommittee again on April 8, 1997, nearly a year later, using these data, and this time extensively documented credible instances of apparent mismanagement, misconduct and criminal wrongdoing by BATF. On May 10, 1997, I formally complained to the Treasury Department Inspector General (IG) about several specific events, but on June 5, 1997, the IG told me that it was declining to investigateand referred my complaint to BATF. In an effort to prevent what surely would have been another coverup, I contacted the House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight. In early October 1997, the Committee ordered the IG to: (1) independently audit the BATF's firearm registration practices; and (2) evaluate the BATF's internal -------- Page 2 report. Although the BATF internal report was completed in September 1997, I was unable to obtain a copy until late January 1998. The results were no surprise: the BATF completely exonerated itself, The Treasury IG has not, to my knowledge, reported anything at this juncture. In response to statistical evidence I presented that BATF was apparently adding firearms to the NFRTR after being confronted by their owners with valid registration documents, BATF stated in its 1997 internal report that such apparent increases "may be" due to reclassifications of forms. Yet, when I asked NFRTR custodian Gary N. Schaible in April 1996; whether BATF had added firearms to the NFRTR because lawful owners presented valid documents of which BATF had no record, he stated: "Yes. I assume that's happened." Thus, it appears likely that at least some people have been unjustly prosecuted for possessing a lawfully registered firearm, for which BATF lost the registration documents. In a separate internal 1981 report I obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, but which BATF apparently released to me by mistake, a BATF employee stated that some firearms were registered to people who would then have been 112 years oldand that BATF knew they were dead! BATF's data show that of 14,259 NFA firearms registered from 1934 to 1939, 11,175 (78%) are still owned buy the same person or organization who registered or obtained them that year. Of the 58,904 firearms registered during the 1968 amnesty, 50,314 (85%) are still owned by the same people. Someone who was 21 years old in 1968 would be aged 51 in 1998; a 65-year-old would today be 95. At least some of these people are dead. Yet, BATF states in its 1997 internal report that some firearms may be registered to dead people, but BATF has no knowledge of this. Mr. Chairman, each of the 58,904 amnesty registration forms has a social security number on it; it was a required data field for the registration to be accepted. It would take no more than a few hours to determine from the Social Security Death Index exactly how many of these 58,904 NFA firearms are registered to people who are dead. What does this say about the ability of the Government to keep track of firearms that the Congress has declared are dangerous, and must be strictly controlled? And how pervasive is this problem? Well, according to the most recent data BATF has publicly released (as of December 31, 1996), exactly 108,556 persons have never legally transferred ownership of firearms they registered or acquired by transfer in or before 1971. Inasmuch as the NFA was enacted in 1934, this corresponds to ownership periods in 1998 of from 27 to 64 years. Someone who registered an NFA firearm at age 65 in 1934 would have been 112 years old in 1981 (BATF's example in its internal report); in 1998, such a person would be 129 years old. Chairman Hatch, this is a preposterous situation, and it is outrageous for the BATF to disclaim any responsibility for firearms being registered to deceased persons, when it identified this as a problem in 1981, some 17 years ago. Do you, as Chairman of the Committee on the Judiciary, find BATF's disclaimer of responsibility to be an acceptable response to this situation, on behalf of the Government? I could go on at some length about these and similar issues, and have reserved them for my testimony, but feel that I must discuss one more event here because it is apparently evidence of both perjury and ---------------- Page 3 an attempt to continue to cover up errors in the NFRTR. Specifically, Mr. Schaible told a completely different story in the 1997 BATF internal report than he did under oath in federal court. In the BATF report, Mr. Schaible stated under oath that the registration documents I was referring to were thought to have been destroyed some 8 years ago by contract employees, not BATF employees. Yet, my question involved the May 21, 1996, testimony, which Mr. Schaible gave under oath in Federal Court, and referred specifically to the BATF employees that Mr. Schaible stated could have destroyed the documents in question during a time frame considerably more recent than 8 years ago. I have repeatedly gone over each word of each document, and I can find no obvious explanation for this blatant discrepancy. I understand that David N. Montague, Esq., a private attorney representing the defendant in this case, has separately contacted you regarding this matter. For the above reasons, and the documented evidence I have presented in my 1996 and 1997 testimonies, as well as in testimony I plan to give on April 3, 1998, before the Subcommittee on Treasury, Postal Service, and General Government Appropriations, it is my considered judgement that the Government should consider removing the NFRTR from custody of the BATF, and to permanently reassign its functions to the Department of Justice. I wanted to tell you and your staff of my intentions to make this recommendation now because it is a short legislative session. Specifically, because the Committee on the Judiciary has oversight responsibilities in this area, some consultations between Committee and Subcommittee staff may be necessary, and I wanted to assist in putting this matter on the table by coming forward early. Very truly yours, (signed---Eric M. Larson) Eric M. Larson P.O. Box 5497 Takoma Park, Maryland 20913 Telephone: (301) 270-3450 e-mail: larsone@erols.com cc: The Honorable Dan Burton, Chairman House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight The Honorable Jim Kolbe, Chairman Subcommittee on Treasury, Postal Service and General Government