Justice Dept. defends widespread DEA wiretapping

The Justice Department offered its first defense this week of a once-vast eavesdropping program carried out by drug agents in the Los Angeles suburbs over the objection of government lawyers who feared it was illegal.

The Justice Department urged a judge not to throw out wiretaps agents used to arrest an accused marijuana trafficker, saying the surveillance was “authorized in accordance with state and federal law.” That defense came in a filing Monday in federal court in Louisville.

The Kentucky case is the first major challenge to a surveillance program by the Drug Enforcement Administration and prosecutors in Riverside County, Calif., so large that it once accounted for nearly a fifth of all U.S. wiretaps.

The challenge follows an inves- tigation last year by USA TODAY and The Desert Sun that found the DEA and prosecutors in Riverside County, outside Los Angeles, constructed a vast and legally questionable wiretapping operation that secretly intercepted millions of calls and text messages with the approval of a single state court judge. Justice Department lawyers refused to use the results in federal court because they did not think the surveillance could withstand a legal challenge.

Federal law bars the government from seeking court approval for a wiretap unless a top prosecutor has personally signed off on that request. The only exception is when the district attorney is “absent” and has authorized someone else to act in his place.

Riverside County’s former district attorney, Paul Zellerbach, has acknowledged that he allowed lower-level lawyers to do that job.

Rather than defend that practice, the Justice Department argued Monday that defense lawyers had failed to prove that Zellerbach was working on the days his subordinates approved the wiretaps prosecutors hope to use.

However, the government’s filing included copies of a calendar kept by Zellerbach’s assistant, and most of it suggests he was at work on the days the wiretaps were approved.