by Bridget Johnson:

A congressional probe into the Fort Hood massacre is now directed at the top of the Federal Bureau of Investigation as questions brew over whether a senior FBI official misled lawmakers in testimony before a House Appropriations subcommittee.

Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.), chairman of the subcommittee on Commerce, Justice and Science responsible for funding the FBI, had asked Director Robert Mueller to come testify at an Aug. 1 hearing on the Webster Commission report into the November 2009 shootings, but the bureau sent Mark Giuliano, the FBI’s executive assistant director for national security.

The trial of Army Major Nidal Hasan, accused of killing 13 at Fort Hood, is expected to begin next week. Proceedings have been delayed by the question of whether or not the court can force him to shave his beard for trial.

In all, Wolf singled out six troubling statements from the FBI official as “potentially misleading, uninformed or incomplete.”

At the hearing, Wolf grilled Giuliano on whether political correctness led to agents being gun-shy about aggressively pursing Hasan’s links with Islamic extremists.

“The report did not find political correctness was in any way, shape, or form responsible for his lack of going forward with the interview,” Giuliano responded.

But the Webster Commission report, requisitioned by the FBI and led by former FBI Director William H. Webster, says on two pages that the San Diego officers who reported suspicions about Hasan were told by officials in Washington that “political sensitivities” were a factor in the office’s decision not to investigate Hasan further.

“I repeatedly asked Mr. Giuiliano to cite the section of the report that found that there was no political correctness ‘in any way, shape, or form,’ but he refused. When I confronted him about misleading the committee, he admitted that I was correct on that point,” Wolf wrote in the letter to Mueller. “Later in the hearing reversed again and said that he and I just ‘disagree’ on that point.”

Wolf also noted that Giuliano’s assertion that Hasan and al-Awlaki never met in Virginia has been countered by numerous media reports stating that Hasan met his mentor in 2001 when the cleric presided over his mother’s funeral. “Please confirm for the record whether or not Maj. Hasan and Aulaqi met while he served as imam for the Dar al Hijrah mosque in Falls Church, Virginia,” Wolf asked. “If so, please provide a summary of the FBI’s full understanding of their encounters, including the funeral.”

The third point of contention involves the FBI official classifying al-Awlaki, a radical cleric who became a recruiter for al-Qaeda in Yemen, as a “propagandist.”

Giuliano characterized the terrorist as such when refusing to answer a committee question on whether violent Islamic extremism was at the root of the Fort Hood massacre.

Under questioning from ranking member Chaka Fattah (D-Pa.), Giuliano said that al-Awlaki “changed and he changed a lot over the years. When he went to prison in Yemen in, you know, ’06, ’07 and as he came out and came back up online in early ’08, he still had somewhat of a moderate tone but – but began to be more of a propagandist, began to show more radical tendencies, but we could not and the [Intelligence Committee] did not see him as operational or in an operational role at that time.”

“This statement, quite simply, is fundamentally false,” Wolf wrote, citing a 2008 Washington Post article in which a U.S. counterterrorism official said there was good reason to believe al-Awlaki “has been involved in very serious terrorist activities since leaving the United States” — the same time period in which the FBI official said he “still had somewhat of a moderate tone.”

Al-Awlaki also had amassed a lengthy record of radical writings by this time, including praise of the 9/11 hijackers and Palestinian suicide bombers — far from a “moderate” tone. He even wrote of his own radicalization path, beginning with the mujahadeen in Afghanistan in the early 1990s, for al-Qaeda’s Inspire magazine shortly before his death.

The Webster Commission report, Wolf pointed out, specifically notes that at least certain sections of the bureau perceived the threat posed by Awlaki around 2009 as more serious than a mere “propagandist” or radicalizer, and the Treasury Department noted al-Awlaki’s operational role in terrorist activities in announcing his July 2010 placement on the sanctions list.

Citing additional evidence from an NYPD analysis on al-Awlaki, which showed even more terror ties, Wolf said that as early as 14 years ago the FBI was keeping a sharp eye on the radical cleric — which made Giuliano’s assertions all the more confusing.

“Given this public information demonstrating Aulaqi’s long history with al-Qaeda-affiliated groups and multiple bureau investigations, please confirm for the record whether the bureau viewed Aulaqi only as ‘propagandist’ with a ‘moderate tone’ as late as 2008, or in fact regarded him as a more complex and substantial threat than Mr. Giuliano described?” Wolf wrote.

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