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Bell ordered newly appointed FBI Director William Webster to investigate the hiding of the documents and take disciplinary action, ranging from reprimands to dismissals, against 68 agents who had carried out illegal acts under orders from Gray, Felt and Miller.
After Bell's announcement, many Americans raised questions about the propriety of striking so hard at high law-enforcement officials who were trying—however misguidedly—to do their job in a crisis situation. Similar reservations were raised when former CIA Director Richard Helms was charged with two misdemeanor counts for, in effect, lying to a Senate committee in denying that his agency had tried to stop Salvador Allende Gossens' 1970 election as President of Chile. Helms pleaded no contest but justified his actions on national security grounds.
Moreover, many FBI agents remain unhappy at the disciplinary measures faced by their colleagues. Some were particularly upset with Bell's treatment of J. Wallace LaPrade, 51, an assistant FBI director and head of the bureau's New York office. According to investigators, he was vulnerable to perjury charges for denying to a grand jury in January 1977 that the FBI had acted illegally in the Weatherman cases. Bell stripped LaPrade of his New York command and called on him to resign, but LaPrade refused, hired a lawyer and took his case to the public.
LaPrade charged that the FBI, with Carter's approval, is still conducting "warrantless investigations" similar to those of the early 1970s. Asked LaPrade: "Will another political power in Washington desire to prosecute today's actions five years from now?" LaPrade would not elaborate on his charges, but a Department of Justice spokesman indicated that he was referring to "warrantless investigations [that] are only directed against foreign intelligence or agents of foreign powers"—which is legal.
Meanwhile, the Society of Former Special Agents has begun collecting $100 from each of its 7,200 members, all of them ex-FBI agents, to help pay defense costs in the court trials ahead.