Washington – Bryan Wagner, a Littleton private investigator ordered to appear Thursday before a congressional panel investigating the Hewlett-Packard corporate spying scandal, joined several other witnesses in refusing to testify.
But Wagner – who was subpoenaed to talk about the alleged improper gathering of private phone records as part of HP’s probe of boardroom leaks – offered to help congressional investigators stop the abuses of “pretexting,” the practice of lying to gather personal information.
Wagner made news this week when The Wall Street Journal reported that he had bashed his computer with a hammer after getting a tip that he might be implicated in the HP affair.
Wagner has acknowledged gathering personal phone records for a company but denied knowing of any link to HP.
When he was asked about the computer after his brief appearance, a slight smile crept across Wagner’s face, and he said: “I have no idea what happened with the computer.”
The scandal went on display at Thursday’s day-long Capitol Hill hearing, with tawdry tales of purloined phone records, “tracer” e-mails and other devious tactics employed to ensnare an HP board member suspected of leaks to reporters.
Patricia Dunn, the former HP chairwoman who ordered the leaks investigation, told lawmakers she didn’t know about questionable tactics used in the investigation and refused to take responsibility for the outcome. And new chairman Mark Hurd admitted that he didn’t make the investigation a priority.
Members of the congressional panel compared HP’s tactics with those of Enron and WorldCom, which shook the corporate world.
“It was déjà vu all over again,” said Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colo., the top Democrat at Thursday’s hearing of a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee. “No one in the organization stops and says, ‘Are we doing the right thing?’ It was the same corporate mentality we saw in these other cases.”
Democrats asked why legislation passed by the committee clarifying that pretexting is illegal has disappeared from the House calendar.
In rumpled shirtsleeves, Wagner sat next to pinstriped HP lawyers who joined him in invoking Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination. But unlike witnesses with attorneys, Wagner said there are some things he’d like to tell the committee.
“I feel I have information that could help the subcommittee in their quest to really make this illegal, but there’s certain questions that I would not want to answer, of course,” Wagner said.
Subcommittee chairman Rep. Ed Whitfield, R-Ky., didn’t pursue the offer. DeGette said that once a witness has “taken the Fifth,” he can’t offer other information and that an attorney could have explained that to him.
But outside the hearing room, Wagner said phone companies could change their practices to foil pretexters. He suggested they could hire people such as him to learn ways to keep from sending phone records to people who shouldn’t have them.
Wagner allegedly used pretexting to get the phone records of George Keyworth, an HP board member who was later accused of leaks and ousted, and Keyworth’s wife, Marion.
Wagner said he did the pretexting while living in Nebraska, before moving to Denver earlier this year. He now has a new job, but he wouldn’t give details.
Dunn, the former HP chairwoman, said that she’d been assured that the investigations were undertaken legally. She said she believed that people’s phone records were “publicly available.”
“I do not accept personal responsibility for what happened,” Dunn said. “I am very sorry for what happened.”
But company e-mails show that as the investigation heated up, some HP officials got uncomfortable with the tactics.
A Feb. 6 e-mail released by the House committee from HP investigator Vince Nye to the company’s lawyer and ethics officer, Kevin Hunsaker, said: “I have serious reservations about what we are doing. If it is not totally illegal, then it is leaving HP in a position that could damage our reputation or worse.”
Also Thursday, HP general counsel Ann Baskins resigned from the company before joining Wagner at the witness table to take the Fifth.
Staff writer Mike Soraghan can be reached at 202-662-8730 or msoraghan@denverpost.com.
