Exhibit A - The Second Bryant Letter

Office of the Assistant Attorney General

November 20, 2002

The Honorable Anthony Weiner
U.S. House of Representatives
Washington, DC 20515

Dear Congressman Weiner,

This responds to your letter of January 7, 2002, which expressed concern about the Department's response of September 10, 2001, to your earlier request for additional information pertaining to classified documents in U.S. v. Jonathan Pollard. Your letter of June 11, 2001 asked for "the classification for each portion of each of the five classified documents; the declassification schedule for each such portion; and the number of people who have been accorded access to any of the classified documents since Mr. Pollard was sentenced."

In response to your June 11 letter, the Department's Security and Emergency Planning Staff, the custodian of the original classified court records, requested that a declassification review be conducted for the five documents by the Department of Defense pursuant to Section 1.6(e) and Part 3 of Executive Order 12958. The Department of Defense is the original classification authority for the five documents, and they must make any revisions to the classification of the documents. The declassification review should determine the current classification level, if any, of each paragraph of each document. For your further assistance, we gave you the Department of Defense point of contact for the declassification review, which was Stewart Aly, Assistant General Counsel, OGC/DOD, Rm. 3C975, 1600 Defense Pentagon, Washington, DC 20302-1600, Telephone: 703-695-6804.

With regard to access, we responded by indicating that we could only provide the number of visits recorded in the log of the Security and Emergency Planning Staff. There were 25 such instances of access recorded between November 19, 1993 and January 12, 2001. In some instances, a single individual accessed the document on more than one occasion. As a point of clarification, I should note that this log refers only to access to the Weinberger affidavit, which is classified Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information. No log has been maintained with respect to access to the other documents in the custody of this Department. We cannot provide the number of instances of access to copies of the documents occurring at other agencies, such as the Department of Defense, or by defense and prosecution teams during the course of litigation.

We regret that you are unsatisfied with our response to your request. However, we believe we have provided all the information we can and have taken measures, such as referring the documents to the Department of Defense for their action, that we hoped would be helpful to you. I hope this information will be of assistance to you.

Sincerely,
(Signed)

Daniel J. Bryant
Assistant Attorney General

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