Opinion ID: 184613
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Law Enforcement Exception

Text: 33 This defense the government asserts for the benefit of the defendants in the Office of Inspector General--not those in the Operations Center. It is argued that as law enforcement officers the former were entitled to use and disclose the contents of Berry's conversations even had they been intercepted illegally because they neither participated in nor sponsored the interception. 18 U.S.C. § 2517 (1994) in part provides: 34 (1) Any investigative or law enforcement officer who, by any means authorized by this chapter, has obtained knowledge of the contents of any wire, oral, or electronic communication, or evidence derived therefrom, may disclose such contents to another investigative or law enforcement officer to the extent that such disclosure is appropriate to the proper performance of the official duties of the officer making or receiving the disclosure. 35 (2) Any investigative or law enforcement officer who, by any means authorized by this chapter, has obtained knowledge of the contents of any wire, oral, or electronic communication or evidence derived therefrom may use such contents to the extent such use is appropriate to the proper performance of his official duties. 36 (Emphasis added.) 37 As might be expected, Berry disputes that State Department employees working in the Office of Inspector General are investigative or law enforcement officers within the statute's meaning. The statute defines such officers as those empowered by law to conduct investigations of or to make arrests for offenses enumerated in this chapter,18 [331 U.S.App.D.C. 71] U.S.C. § 2510(7) (1994) (emphasis added), such as bribery, murder, and robbery. See 18 U.S.C. § 2516(1) (1994). Admittedly, these are not the normal targets of Inspector General investigations. But the Foreign Service Act authorizes the Office to investigate complaints concerning the possible existence of an activity constituting a violation of the laws or regulations. 22 U.S.C. § 3929(f)(1) (emphasis added). That language sweeps so broadly as to compel us to conclude that the Inspector General defendants are investigative officers within the meaning of the Act. 38 The more difficult question, on which there is an apparent circuit split, is whether it can be said that these defendants, who clearly used the intercepted conversations, obtained knowledge of the contents by any means authorized by this chapter. The only explicitly authorized means under the statute are judicially approved wiretaps, see 18 U.S.C. § 2518 (1994), and the scattered statutory exceptions throughout Title III. Yet, as Berry concedes, and as the Ninth Circuit has recognized, see Chandler v. United States Army, 125 F.3d 1296, 1300 (9th Cir.1997), if an investigative or law enforcement officer is given the contents of an interception under the impression that the interception was legally obtained, then use or disclosure, too, would be authorized by the statute. That is so because the prohibition on use or disclosure only applies to those knowing or having reason to know that the information was obtained through the interception of a ... communication in violation of this subsection. 18 U.S.C. § 2511(1)(c) & (d). In this case, however, it is undisputed that the Inspector General's office knew of the circumstances under which Berry's conversations were intercepted and its employees were well aware--they had been warned by counsel and the FBI--that the interceptions might be illegal. 39 The government nevertheless maintains that there is no limitation on a law enforcement officer's use or disclosure of illegally intercepted information so long as he was not involved in or did not procure the interception. It refers to such an officer as having clean hands. Although the text of § 2517(1) & (2) does not appear hospitable to the government's construction, it relies on a Fifth Circuit case, Forsyth v. Barr, 19 F.3d 1527 (5th Cir.1994), in which the court perceived a distinction between the sections' wording and that of a companion provision, 18 U.S.C. § 2517(3) (1994), which uses the phrase intercepted in accordance with the provisions of this chapter (emphasis added), rather than means authorized by this chapter. Section 2517(3) bars recipients of illegally intercepted information from testifying as to that information. The government argues, and the Fifth Circuit agreed, that Congress in § 2517(3) indicated that it knew how to explicitly bar information on the ground that it was illegally intercepted without regard to any other consideration. Therefore, in § 2517(1) & (2), Congress must have meant means authorized by this chapter to be, in some sense, less restrictive. Although the government never indicates what means authorized by this chapter affirmatively signifies, it contends, that whatever it means, it does not ban the use of information known to be illegally intercepted in a case like ours. We disagree. The Fifth Circuit in Forsyth relied on a portion of Title III's legislative history, the Senate Report which said: 40 Neither paragraphs (1) nor (2) [of § 2517] are limited to evidence intercepted in accordance with the provisions of the proposed chapter, since in certain limited situations disclosure and use of illegally intercepted communications would be appropriate to the proper performance of the officers' duties. For example, such use and disclosure would be necessary in the investigation and prosecution of an illegal wiretapper himself. 41 Id. at 1544 (emphasis removed) (quoting S. REP. NO . 90-1097, reprinted in 1968 U.S.C.C.A.N. 2112, 2188). It appears to us, however, that in that passage the authors of the Report understandably contemplated that if an illegal interception were prosecuted, it would be necessary for officers to use the contents of that interception but still did not wish the officers to testify about it because the testimony would further injure the privacy of the speaker. See also Chandler, 125 F.3d at 1302 ([T]he illegal interceptor [331 U.S.App.D.C. 72] has no standing to invoke the act as a shield for his own violation.). We simply do not understand the Fifth Circuit's use of that special example in the legislative history to justify a broader knowing use of illegally intercepted conversations against one of the speakers. 8 42 Nor are we persuaded by the reasoning of the Sixth Circuit in United States v. Murdock, 63 F.3d 1391 (6th Cir.1995). The court seems to have relied only on policy notions rather than the language of the statute in accepting the government's clean hands argument. (To assume that an officer who knowingly uses illegally intercepted conversations has clean hands is to assume the conclusion.) Instead, we agree with the Ninth Circuit's decision in Chandler. There, the court held that Army investigators were not shielded by the law enforcement exception when they used a tape they had reason to know was illegally intercepted. Chandler, 125 F.3d at 1302. The Ninth Circuit, as do we, rejected Murdock because its interpretation did not square with the statute's language.