The FBI was so uncooperative in the Waco investigation that special counsel John C. Danforth threatened FBI Director Louis J. Freeh with a search warrant to gain access to relevant documents, Danforth said yesterday in an interview with The Washington Post.
Danforth, a former U.S. senator from Missouri who conducted a 14-month investigation into the 1993 deaths of 75 Branch Davidians in Waco, Tex., said that he could not be sure that he received all the records from the FBI because of the agency's poor record keeping and its "spirit of resistance" to outside scrutiny.
But Danforth also said that additional records would not change his conclusion that federal agents did not fire shots at members of the heavily armed religious cult or start the deadly blaze that engulfed their compound.
"It was like pulling teeth to get all this paper from the FBI," Danforth said during an interview in the Washington offices of Bryan Cave LLP, the St. Louis-based law firm in which he is a partner and which assisted in the investigation.
"Can I say to you that there isn't some box of paper somewhere that we never found? I can't say that to you," he said later. "Do I think there is any chance that it would be paper that would have any effect on our findings? I think there is no chance that it would have any effect on our findings because the evidence was so overwhelming."
An FBI official said that many of the problems encountered by Danforth were due to strained relations with one key lawyer in the FBI's general counsel office, and that the problem was fixed once Freeh intervened. The bureau also had trouble locating and retrieving many documents because of outmoded filing and computer systems, the official said.
"Freeh's intent was always to have full cooperation with Danforth," the official said. "He said that on multiple occasions."
Danforth's comments came on the same day that lawyers for Oklahoma City bomber Timothy J. McVeigh asked for a stay in McVeigh's execution because the FBI failed to turn over 4,000 pages of records in that case.
Danforth was appointed special counsel in the Waco probe by Attorney General Janet Reno in 1999 after officials disclosed that potentially incendiary tear gas canisters were fired on the Davidian compound on the final day of the standoff -- contrary to years of denials from the Justice Department and the FBI. Danforth's investigation concluded that the canisters did not start any of the fires that consumed the compound, landing 75 feet from the main building hours before the fires started.
Danforth, an ordained Episcopal minister who served in the Senate for 18 years, said his St. Louis-based investigation "had a lot of difficulty" getting documents from the FBI. The problem came to a head in late 1999 when his office threatened to get a search warrant from a federal judge, he said.
Danforth said that he agreed in a phone conversation with Freeh not to seek a warrant if 14 postal inspectors would be allowed to search bureau files themselves. The search netted hundreds of pages of documents that had not been turned over, investigators said.
Freeh sent a clear message that FBI employees should cooperate with the Waco probe, Danforth said, "but I think there was a spirit of resistance elsewhere in the FBI." Earlier in 1999, Reno had sent U.S. marshals into FBI headquarters to seize other Waco-related documents.
Danforth said his experience in the Waco investigation makes him doubt the pledges of Freeh and Attorney General John D. Ashcroft that every FBI document in the McVeigh case has been located. "I bet that Timothy McVeigh at some point in time, I don't when, will be executed, and after the execution, there will be some box found somewhere," he said.
Danforth, who had scheduled yesterday's interview with The Post before the new McVeigh documents came to light, said there is no evidence whatsoever of "dark acts" by federal agents in the 51-day standoff with the Branch Davidians, who killed four officers and wounded 20 others. He said that "conspiracy theorists" will always find fault with the investigation, but that most Americans realize the government did not cause the Davidians' deaths.
Danforth, a Republican, also staunchly defended Reno in a controversy that dogged her throughout her tenure. Danforth said he penned a note to Reno earlier this year commending her handling of the Waco situation.
"She did a very conscientious job of trying to minimize the bad things that could have happened," Danforth said. "She did the right thing."