LANL: The Real Story

ROGER SNODGRASS, roger@lamonitor.com, Monitor Assistant Editor

Key Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee pursued their complaint against the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration on Wednesday.

Reps. Joe Barton, R-Texas, the committee chair, and Ed Whitfield, R-Ky., chair of the investigations subcommittee, sent a letter to Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman asking him to seek the resignation of Administrator Linton Brooks or to have him fired by President Bush.

On Tuesday, Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, expressed his concerns about the revelations that NNSA failed to notify over 1,500 agency and contract employees that their personal identity information had been compromised, and that Brooks had failed to notify Bodman about it for more than nine months.

Grassley's letter to Bodman added three new instances of potentially compromised personal information, including sensitive data on 4,000 contractor employees at Hanford Site, discovered on June 2 in an illegal drug laboratory in Washington state; ten stolen laptop computers from a Department of Energy office in Germantown, Md. on June 12; and a stolen computer from the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee on May 28.

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