Five and a half years ago, Thomas Wales was murdered in Seattle. He was shot, through the window of his home, as he sat working at his computer late at night.

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The killing took place on October 11, 2001. If the ruins of the World Trade Center had not still been smoking at the time, and if the nation’s attention had not been completely (and naturally) riveted by that event, Tom Wales’s death would likely have become major national news. He was 49 years old, and he had spent the previous 18 years as a federal prosecutor in Seattle, mainly working on white-collar crime cases. He was gregarious, modest, humorous, charming, vigorous, very active in community efforts, widely liked and admired. A significant detail is that one of the civic causes for which Tom Wales worked was gun safety and at the time of his death was head of Washington Cease-Fire.

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No one has been charged or arrested in his killing. But among the strange aspects of the case is that law enforcement officials fairly quickly began acting as if they knew exactly who they were looking for. For instance, a story last year in the Seattle Times said this about the case:

Agents have focused on a Bellevue airline pilot as their prime suspect. The pilot had been targeted by Wales in a fraud case that concluded in 2001.

Other reports over the years have emphasized that this same “prime suspect” was a gun enthusiast and zealous opponent of anyone he considered anti-gun. If – as is generally assumed – Wales was murdered for reasons related to his gun safety efforts and his past prosecutions, he would be the first federal prosecutor killed in the line of duty.

As best I have been able to tell from a distance, through the years law-enforcement and political officials from Seattle and Washington state have frequently complained that federal officials in Washington DC were not putting enough resources or effort into the case. The same Seattle Times story mentioned above goes into one of the disagreements. Everyone on the Seattle side of the story remembers that the Department of Justice in Washington DC sent no official representative to his funeral.

Until now, the heartbreak of the Tom Wales case, and the Washington-vs-Washington disagreement over how intensively the search for his killer was being pursued, had seemed entirely separate from Seattle’s involvement in the eight-fired-attorneys matter. John McKay, the U.S. attorney in Seattle who was among the eight dismissed, appeared to have earned the Bush Administration’s hostility in the old-fashioned way: by not filing charges of voter fraud after an extremely close election that went the Democrats’ way. But this weekend’s story in the Washington Post, based on testimony by Alberto Gonzales’s former deputy Kyle Sampson, suggests that McKay’s problems may have begun with his determination to keep on pushing to find Tom Wales’s killer.

December 6, 2001

The Justice Department has refused to let the F.B.I. check its records to determine whether any of the 1,200 people detained after the Sept. 11 attacks had bought guns, F.B.I. and Justice Department officials say.

The department made the decision in October after the F.B.I. asked to examine the records it maintains on background checks to see if any detainees had purchased guns in the United States.

Mindy Tucker, a spokeswoman for the Justice Department, said the request was rejected after several senior officials decided that the law creating the background check system did not permit the use of the records to investigate individuals.

Congressional testimony by Attorney General John Ashcroft last December that the F.B.I. could not legally use records of gun background checks to investigate terrorism suspects conflicted with a formal opinion by his own legal staff, a report issued yesterday by the General Accounting Office shows.

In testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Dec. 6, Mr. Ashcroft defended his policy of refusing to allow the Federal Bureau of Investigation to check its records to determine whether any of the 1,200 people detained after Sept. 11 had bought guns. Mr. Ashcroft asserted that the law which created the National Instant Check System for gun purchases ''outlaws and bans'' use in criminal investigations.

Mr. Ashcroft said the law ''indicates that the only permissible use for the National Instant Check System is to audit the maintenance of that system.''

But the General Accounting Office report contains an opinion by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, dated Oct. 1, which seems to allow the checks under some conditions. ''We see nothing in the NICS regulations that prohibits the F.B.I. from deriving additional benefits from checking audit log records as long as one of the genuine purposes'' is auditing the use of the system, the report says.

Moreover, the Office of Legal Counsel added, it was further convinced such checks were legal because the bureau of investigation had been ''using this method'' all along.

The opinion was written after the bureau asked the Justice Department for permission to examine the records on background checks to see if any detainees had purchased guns.

It is unclear who in the Justice Department read the opinion. But sometime in October, the department rejected the F.B.I.'s request.