Coleen Rowley — the FBI whistleblower who was Time magazine’s Person of the Year in 2002 — “is considering a race for Congress in Minnesota’s 2nd Congressional District, the former FBI whistle-blower told the Associated Press Monday,” reports the Duluth News Tribune.
“‘I’m very concerned about the direction we’re going in with civil liberties, the secrecy, the use of alerts to manipulate public opinion,'” Rowley told the media.
Rowley, 50, would run as a Democrat in the seat currently held by GOP Rep. John Kline. Kline’s 2004 opponent, Teresa Daly, said she has not made a decision [to run].
Rowley, who retired from the FBI last year, said she’s spoken to people to get their input, both inside and outside of politics, but has been put off by some suggestions that she get a “makeover.”
A makeover? Ach! More below, with an ACLU photo of Rowley:
“I’ve butted heads with a few people — anyone who tells me I have to spruce up my hair and buy a new wardrobe,” Rowley said, declining to identify the source of this unwanted advice. “I haven’t worn makeup since I was 21. You have to be authentic and genuine in serving the populace.” …Rowley was named one of Time magazine’s People of the Year for 2002 after she criticized the agency for ignoring her pleas in the weeks before Sept. 11, 2001, to investigate terrorism suspect Zacarias Moussaoui more aggressively. He was the only person charged in the United States in the attacks.
Rowley said she hopes to make a decision on a congressional race by early next month. In 2003, DFL activists encouraged her to run against Kline, but she declined. One reason was she would have had to quit the FBI a year before she could receive her pension.
Rowley said she would run as an “independent-minded Democrat,” focusing on issues such as international security and civil liberties.
Here’s a snippet from the Center for Cooperative Research’s notes on Crowley and the Minnnesota FBI office’s work:
Minnesota FBI agent Coleen Rowley, upset with what she considers lying from FBI Director Mueller and others in the FBI about the handling of the Zacarias Moussaoui case, releases a long memo she wrote about the case two weeks before 9/11.
She also applies for whistleblower protection. Time magazine calls the memo a “colossal indictment of our chief law-enforcement agency’s neglect” and says it “raises serious doubts about whether the FBI is capable of protecting the public—and whether it still deserves the public’s trust.”
Three days after 9/11, Mueller made statements such as “There were no warning signs that I’m aware of that would indicate this type of operation in the country.” Coleen Rowley and other Minnesota FBI agents “immediately sought to reach [Mueller’s] office through an assortment of higher-level FBI [headquarters] contacts, in order to quickly make [him] aware of the background of the Moussaoui investigation and forewarn [him] so that [his] public statements could be accordingly modified.” Yet Mueller continued to make similar comments, including in a Senate hearing on May 8, 2002.
[Time, 5/21/02; New York Times, 5/30/02]
Finally, after Rowley‘s memo becomes public, Mueller states, “I cannot say for sure that there wasn’t a possibility we could have come across some lead that would have led us to the hijackers.” He also admits: “I have made mistakes occasionally in my public comments based on information or a lack of information that I subsequently got.”
Time magazine later names Rowley one of three “Persons of the Year” for 2002, along with fellow whistleblowers Cynthia Cooper of WorldCom and Sherron Watkins of Enron.
The ACLU has more on Crowley.
