Criminal Charges Highly Unlikely, An Official Says
The Justice Department has referred to the Senate ethics committee an investigation into whether Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.) or his staff leaked classified information, indicating that criminal charges are highly unlikely, a federal law enforcement official said yesterday. The referral Thursday means that it is up to the ethics panel to decide if any action is warranted against Shelby, who was [vice] chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence at the time of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The investigation concerned the 2002 disclosure to news reporters of two messages intercepted by the National Security Agency a day before the Sept. 11 attacks. Those messages contained the words "the match begins tomorrow" and "tomorrow is zero hour" but they were not translated from Arabic until Sept. 12 [
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