FBI drops its quest for papers of reporter

The son of the late Jack Anderson said Wednesday that the longtime investigative reporter's family is pleased with the FBI's abandonment of its efforts to recover government documents leaked to his father.

"This takes the pressure off, and now we can proceed with the plan of archiving them and making them available for scholarly research," said Kevin N. Anderson, a lawyer in Salt Lake City. He said the family plans to donate the remainder of the available documents to George Washington University, which already has ownership of an archive of about 200 boxes of Jack Anderson's works.

The documents, which some officials said might have contained classified information, were among the late columnist's confidential papers. They touched off a dispute last spring between the FBI and the journalist's family.

At the heart of the disagreement were concerns about government investigations of reporters and whether such inquiries might violate constitutional protections of the press.

"I appreciate that the presses rolled on this and as my father would have said, 'When the media shines the light on the government's wrongdoing, the cockroaches go scurrying for cover,"' Kevin Anderson said.

In blunt answers to a 147-page questionnaire from the Senate Judiciary Committee, dated Nov. 30, Acting Associate Attorney General James H. Clinger said the FBI was no longer seeking any of Anderson's documents.

"Under which statute do you seek to reclaim the Jack Anderson documents?" asked the committee in its questionnaire, which was posted Wednesday on the Web site of the Federation of American Scientists.

Answered Clinger: "The FBI met with the Anderson family in an effort to review the files with their consent. At this time, the FBI is not seeking to reclaim any documents."

An FBI spokesman declined to comment Wednesday evening. Clinger's letter was addressed to outgoing Senate Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa. It did not explain why the FBI had dropped the probe, and a Republican aide to the committee said Wednesday that was also unclear to lawmakers.

The letter can be found at: www.fas.org/irp/congress/2006_hr/fbi-qfr.pdf.

Anderson died in December 2005 at age 83 after a career in which he broke several big scandals and earned a place on former President Richard Nixon's "enemies list." Authorities on several occasions tried to find the source of leaked information that became a staple of his syndicated column.

Not long after his funeral, FBI agents called Anderson's widow to say they wanted to search his papers.