Documents

ROCKVILLE -- Montgomery County prosecutors say a District Court clerk who had fallen behind in her work found a novel way out: She took the backlog home and burned it.Lisa Lynn Wolfe, 34, of Gaithersburg has been charged with destroying public records, malicious destruction of property and malicious burning.State's Attorney Douglas Gansler said Wolfe, who worked in the criminal traffic division, burned documents, including some with checks attached, beginning in January."The idea that you might not get caught is stupid," Gansler said.

When federal agents leapt from their cars and pointed guns at three Northern Virginia men poised to invade a home in Lutherville last week, it was the end of a long road -- literally.Agents had been investigating one of the men arrested Thursday, Yuem Ming Chan -- who calls himself Austin Chan -- for almost three years, trailing him from New York to a small brick rowhouse in Burke, Va., and finally to a secluded street in Lutherville.All three have been charged with conspiracy to rob and extort, and with weapons violations.

WASHINGTON -- FAA reports of violations by USAir, now known as USAirways, show that agents masquerading as passengers were able to smuggle guns, hand grenades and bombs past security guards and their scanners, or send the weapons in through exits.The documents were given to the New York Times last week in response to a 1996 Freedom of Information Act request.The Times sought the reports after the FAA announced in November 1996 that it would settle 84 charges against the airline for $450,000, but would give no details on them.

WASHINGTON -- The roughly 4,000 pages of additional documents related to Kenneth W. Starr's investigation of President Clinton won't be made public until tomorrow at the earliest, congressional officials said.Documents representing what is believed to be the final batch of evidence from the independent counsel had been expected to be released today. But the Government Printing Office, which is handling the duplicating chores, could not hit that target.Today, it may also be busy printing fat copies of the spending bills that represent the only work Congress is required to complete before its election recess.

A state grand jury investigating Larry Young has subpoenaed hundreds of records from the legislature's ethics committee, which examined the former state senator's outside business practices before recommending his expulsion, the co-chairmanof the committee said yesterday.The subpoena was served on the Joint Committee on Legislative Ethics late last week and orders the 12-member panel to provide its documents to the grand jury in Annapolis by Monday, said state Sen. Michael J. Collins, who co-chaired the ethics committee.

WASHINGTON -- Bob Schwenk is in mid-sentence when a co-worker pops in delivering the latest update on the Starr report."Going to be 20 illustrations coming in the next couple hours," the colleague tells him. A few minutes later, the phone rings. It's a bookbinder. "Hey John," Schwenk says, "more Starr documents coming this morning, around 10: 30ish. Start organizing."In the printing world, they're getting ready for D-Day.Schwenk is in what could best be described as the war room at the Government Printing Office, preparing for what is expected to be the final dump of documents from independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr's report on the Monica Lewinsky affair.

AROLSEN, Germany -- For 39 years, Walter Jeck has been pursuing what might be termed the paper chase of terror, mining through mountains of documents whose staggering details and dimensions illuminate the Third Reich's commitment to the bureaucracy of genocide.Here, he says, is a death book from the Buchenwald concentration camp, the names inscribed in ink on ruled paper, recording every victim who died of starvation or disease or was "shot while trying to escape."Here is Buchenwald's roll call, up-to-date until the final day before the Americans liberated it on April 11, 1945.

With a flourish suggesting secrets yet to be told, Lawrence X. Cusack 3rd waved several folders in the air, only to return them quickly to his satchel. Then he described them: enigmatic jottings on index cards, on torn pieces of White House stationery, in the margins of contracts, in President John F. Kennedy's hand.If what he says is true, those documents -- said to have been found among papers left by Cusack's late father, a trusted lawyer to the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York -- are worth a fortune, since they would alter the historical understanding of Kennedy by providing proof of certain indiscretions, including a long-rumored affair with Marilyn Monroe.

I had a hilarious joke that I was going to start this column with, but I can't find it. I can't find anything. We just moved into a new old house, and all our possessions, including dirty underwear and dust balls the size of adult cocker spaniels, have been carefully wrapped in paper and put inside cardboard boxes that were taped securely shut by professional movers (motto: "Just Try To Find Your Remote Control!").The one thing I can find is incomprehensible legal documents relating to the purchase of the house.

WASHINGTON -- A dispute over whether political connections influenced the Clinton administration's trade policy escalated yesterday, with senior Republicans demanding that the White House release a raft of sensitive documents removed from the Commerce Department by an outgoing official.The White House has refused to let Congress see some of the documents and has warned it might assert executive privilege to protect them. This is a rarely used device that allows presidents to keep certain communications secret.

State Sen. Ulysses Currie, whose work for Shoppers Food Warehouse is being investigated by the FBI's public corruption squad, was paid more than $200,000 by the regional grocery chain over five years, according to documents unsealed yesterday. Federal authorities are looking at whether the Lanham-based supermarket company hired the leading Prince George's County Democrat to use the prestige of his office to secure favorable legislation and actions by state agencies, documents show. According to portions of a search warrant affidavit unsealed at the request of The Sun and other media organizations, Currie was paid about $207,000 between 2003 and 2007.

The NAACP can review Maryland State Police documents alleging racial profiling that the organization had been seeking, a judge ruled yesterday - a victory for the civil rights organization in a battle that has raged more than a decade. Baltimore County Circuit Judge Timothy J. Martin decided that a panel of three lawyers selected by the civil rights organization's Maryland conference will have 120 days to review the documents and select those they would like copied. The names of the officers and the complainants will be redacted from the copied documents.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland is suing the Maryland State Police to get records it believes may show local authorities aided the federal government in spying on peace activists during several annual protests outside the National Security Agency. Filed yesterday in Baltimore Circuit Court, the lawsuit alleges that state police have refused to disclose a record related to the surveillance despite public information requests. Court papers state that a "Baltimore Intel Unit" had monitored many individual peace activists as they gathered at the American Friends Service Committee and prepared to protest in 2003 at the NSA, based at Fort Meade.

WASHINGTON -- After fighting to keep them secret for more than three decades, the CIA released hundreds of documents yesterday that catalog some of the most egregious intelligence abuses of the Cold War, including assassination plots against foreign leaders and illegal efforts to spy on Americans. The records are part of a trove of jealously guarded documents long known within the agency as "the family jewels." Assembled in the early 1970s as part of an internal probe of potentially embarrassing or illegal activities, the records were subsequently turned over to Congress, prompting multiple investigations and sweeping intelligence reforms.

Managers of the Mid-Atlantic electricity grid repeatedly silenced a supposedly independent watchdog who was concerned that power generation companies could reap outsized profits in newly deregulated electricity markets, internal memos, e-mail and other documents show. Executives at PJM Interconnection, which runs wholesale electricity markets in Maryland and a dozen other states, blocked Joseph E. Bowring from issuing critical reports, pressured him to accept changes advantageous to power companies and worked to reduce his influence and resources, according to a sworn statement Bowring gave federal authorities on June 12. On one occasion, after determining that a generation company earned $20 million in "excess payments" over two weeks because it faced little competition at the time, Bowring wanted to formally complain to federal regulators, only to be thwarted by his PJM bosses, the statement said.

MIAMI -- The U.S. government obtained a crucial piece of evidence for its terror conspiracy case against Jose Padilla from a mound of documents dropped off at a secret CIA location in Kandahar, Afghanistan, by a tribal leader's driver, a covert agent testified yesterday. The CIA operative - who identified himself under oath as Tom Langston - did not identify the tribal leader, the truck driver or the area where the material was seized. The driver, Langston said, told him it had come from an office used by Islamic militants before they fled shortly before the U.S. invasion in December 2001.

WASHINGTON -- Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, believing there is more to learn about the firings of eight federal prosecutors last year, formally asked Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales yesterday to turn over additional documents concerning the terminations and threatened to issue subpoenas if the materials are not forthcoming. Specifically, the four senators want the internal rankings of all 93 U.S. attorneys that were made by the Justice Department over the years, as well as employment charts that Monica M. Goodling, a top aide to Gonzales, provided for top department officials as they decided which prosecutors to fire.

WASHINGTON -- Seeking information about detention of terrorism suspects, abuse of detainees and government secrecy, Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee are reviving dozens of demands for classified documents that until now have been rebuffed or ignored by the Justice Department and other agencies. "I expect real answers, or we'll have testimony under oath until we get them," Sen. Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, who will head the committee beginning in January, said in an interview this week.

A federal magistrate judge ordered three Baltimore Police Department employees yesterday to provide written statements about their roles in shredding internal documents that had been protected by a court order. Judge Paul W. Grimm also ruled that the city must provide more information justifying the future destruction of internal disciplinary files. In previous depositions in the case, a police sergeant said the two years' worth of files were destroyed because the department ran out of folders.

A Glen Burnie mother has been accused of getting drunk on vodka, then stabbing her 15-year-old daughter in the head with a butcher knife early yesterday after the girl stopped her from getting behind the wheel of her car, authorities said. "You would think this would be a great story about a daughter trying to protect her mother," said Officer Sara Schriver, a county police spokeswoman. "Instead, there are attempted-murder charges." The mother, Sherry Ann Allen, 34, of the 7700 block of Overhill Road, was also charged with two counts of child abuse, two counts of assault and other lesser offenses.