"Senate Looks into Former CIA Head's Pardon," 2/16/01 Dallas Morning News, p. 6A. (Washington Post)
    The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence launched an inquiry Thursday into former President Bill Clinton's pardon of former CIA chief John Deutch, sending a letter to CIA Director George Tenet to determine whether he or anyone else in U.S. intelligence was consulted.
    A senior intelligence official responded Thursday night that no one in the CIA knew of the pardon in advance.  The official said that Mr. Deutch's CIA security clearances - suspended in August 1999 as punishment for home computer security violations - have been permanently revoked.
    Mr. Clinton pardoned Mr. Deutch on Jan. 20 for mishandling hundreds of highly classified documents on unsecured home computers linked to the internet.
    The pardon caught Justice Department officials by surprise.  It came less than a day after Mr. Deutch had signed a plea agreement in which he admitted to a misdemeanor and agreed to pay a $5,000 fine.
    As a result of the pardon, said Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., chairman of the intelligence committee, "Deutch essentially walked away from what is one of the most egregious cases of mishandling classified information that I have ever seen short of espionage."
    Mr. Deutch could not be reached for comment.

"In Final Act, Clinton Issues Pardons," January 20, 2001 Associated Press.  Clinton pardons John Deutch but not Wen Ho Lee.

"Prosecutors negotiating to get guilty plea from ex-CIA chief: The deal would have Deutch admit a misdemeanor for keeping U.S. secrets on a home computer," January 20, 2001 Orange County Register (AP)
    Prosecutors have offered former CIA Director John M. Deutch a deal under which he would plead guilty to keeping government secrets on unsecured home computers but receive no prison time, officials said Friday. 
    However, Deutch might be barred from regaining his security
clearances, they added. 
    Deutch, CIA director from May 1995 to December 1996, stored
and processed hundreds of files of highly classified material on unprotected home computers that he and family members also used
to connect to the Internet, according to an internal CIA investigation. The Defense Department's inspector general found similar conduct during Deutch's prior service at the Pentagon. 
    Justice Department prosecutors were offering Deutch a deal under which he would plead guilty to one misdemeanor count of
transferring classified information to an unauthorized location,
according to three government officials familiar with the case. 
    Although that charge carries a top penalty of a $1,000 fine and up
to one year in jail, Deutch would avoid incarceration, the officials
said, requesting anonymity. He also would avoid more serious
felony charges of mishandling government secrets. 
    Now a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Deutch was stripped of his security clearances by CIA director
George Tenet in 1999. As a former deputy defense secretary,
Deutch also had Pentagon clearances, but he gave them up last
year. 
    Officials said with a guilty plea, Deutch likely would be barred from regaining those clearances and that that had been discussed in the negotiations. 
    Officials said a deal could be concluded soon but probably not
before the Clinton administration ends today. 

"Pentagon Can't Find Deutch Disks," 10/9/00 Washington Post  
    Pentagon investigators have been unable to locate computer diskettes that ex-CIA Director John Deutch used to store a journal when working at the Defense Department, officials say. 
    The journal contained classified information.  Deutch has declined to be interviewed about the whereabouts of the disks, created during his tenure as deputy defense secretary in the mid-1990s, officials said.  
    "There's no way to tell what their ultimate disposition might have been without talking to Dr. Deutch, and he has declined requests for our investigators to talk with him on this or other topics," Rear Adm. Craig Quigley, a Pentagon spokesman, said.  
    The investigation of the missing diskettes comes after CIA officials already concluded that Deutch improperly recorded government secrets in a private journal about his government experiences. 
    He stored the journal on electronic storage cards during his tenure as head of the spy agency.  
    While the storage cards he used at CIA have been recovered, the Pentagon was unable to locate the diskettes Deutch created during his Defense Department days, when he began the journal, officials said Monday.  
    The Pentagon has been conducting a damage assessment to determine if his action jeopardized national security. The Justice Department also is investigating whether any criminal charges are warranted.  
    Deutch's lawyer on Monday declined comment, citing the investigations.
    Deutch cooperated with the CIA probe, and earlier this year apologized for sloppy handling of classified information.  
    At CIA's urging, Pentagon criminal investigators began their own inquiry in February into Deutch's handling of classified information when he was the No. 2 defense official from 1993 to 1995.  They concluded he began compiling the journal during his tenure at the Pentagon and stored it on diskettes.  
    "Dr. Deutch was known to transport these floppy disks in his shirt pocket," the investigators wrote in their report, which was obtained by The Associated Press.  
    The investigators also found Deutch began to experience technical problems with the disks at the end of his tenure at the Pentagon, prompting him to change to higher-capacity storage cards at CIA.  The electronic cards can store hundreds of times more information than a single floppy disk.  
    According to the final draft report, Pentagon investigators also found Deutch "declined departmental requests that he allow security systems to be installed in his residence," where he sometimes worked on classified documents. His home computers were sometimes used to access the Internet.  
    The missing diskettes are likely to focus new attention on the government's ability to protect its most important secrets an issue that has received extensive scrutiny in the aftermath of the Wen Ho Lee case at the Energy Department nuclear weapons labs.  
    Lee was accused of downloading 10 computer tapes of nuclear weapons design secrets from the labs. Unable to locate seven tapes, the government charged Lee with 59 felonies and kept him in solitary confinement for nine months while trying to build a case against him. The government eventually reached a plea bargain in which Lee pleaded guilty to a single count of mishandling nuclear secrets. He also agreed to tell what he did with the information he admits to having downloaded onto tapes and unsecure computers.  
    The government has not charged Deutch with any wrongdoing.  
    The Pentagon investigators who probed Deutch raised concerns about lax Pentagon computer security.  They noted that some computers the ex-official used were donated to schools without the hard drives being destroyed.
    When investigators located the computers, they were able to recover significant Pentagon information.  None of the information was classified, but the investigators warned that such lax security could result in "the improper release and use of classified or sensitive information.  
    "Current policy on what is required to dispose of these types of hard drives is not clear. We recommend that the department implement policy that requires the destruction of all computer hard drives, classified and unclassified, before the computer is disposed of outside the DOD," investigators wrote.