Tens of thousands of people wanted by law enforcement officials have been removed this year from the FBI criminal background check database that prohibits fugitives from justice from buying guns.

The names were taken out after the FBI in February changed its legal interpretation of “fugitive from justice” to say it pertains only to wanted people who have crossed state lines.

What that means is that those fugitives who were previously prohibited under federal law from purchasing firearms can now buy them, unless barred for other reasons.

Since the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) was created in 1998, the background check system has prevented 1.5 million people from buying guns, including 180,000 denials to people who were fugitives from justice, according to government statistics.

It is unclear how many people may have bought guns since February who previously would have been prohibited from doing so.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) says Senate Republicans plan “to work on a bipartisan basis” with Democrats on legislation relating to background checks. (The Washington Post)

Attorney General Jeff Sessions sent a memo Wednesday to the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives instructing them to take several steps to improve NICS.

The system, he said, is “critical for us to be able to keep guns out of the hands of those . . . prohibited from owning them.”

The criminal background check system has come under scrutiny in recent weeks after the Air Force said it failed to follow policies for alerting the FBI about the domestic violence conviction of Devin P. Kelley, who killed more than two dozen churchgoers in Sutherland Springs, Tex., this month. Because his conviction was not entered into NICS, Kelley was allowed to buy firearms.

Two years ago, Dylann Roof, who killed nine people at a historic black church in Charleston, S.C., was able to buy his gun after errors by the FBI and local law enforcement led to his name not being entered into criminal record databases when he was arrested and had admitted to drug possession.

The interpretation of who is a “fugitive from justice,” a category that disqualifies people from buying a gun, has long been a matter of debate in law enforcement circles — a dispute that ultimately led to the February purging of the database.

“Any one of these potentially dangerous fugitives can currently walk into a licensed gun dealer, pass a criminal background check, and walk out with a gun,” Robyn Thomas, executive director of the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, wrote in a letter to FBI Director Christopher A. Wray on Wednesday. The Giffords organization, founded by former Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, called on the FBI and ATF to “correct this self-inflicted loophole” and recover all guns illegally purchased this year because of the purge of names from the database.

Rifles for sale at a gun shop in Merrimack, N.H. (Dominick Reuter/AFP/Getty Images)

For more than 15 years, the FBI and ATF disagreed about who exactly was a fugitive from justice.

The FBI, which runs the criminal background check database, had a broad definition and said that anyone with an outstanding arrest warrant was prohibited from buying a gun. But ATF argued that, under the law, a person is considered a fugitive from justice only if they have an outstanding warrant and have also traveled to another state.

In a 2016 report, Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz urged the Justice Department to address the disagreement “as soon as possible.” Late last year, before President Trump took office, the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel sided with ATF and narrowed the definition of fugitives, according to law enforcement officials. The office said that gun purchases could be denied only to fugitives who cross state lines.

After Trump was inaugurated, the Justice Department further narrowed the definition to those who have fled across state lines to avoid prosecution for a crime or to avoid giving testimony in a criminal proceeding.

On Feb. 15, the FBI directed its employees in the Criminal Justice Information Services Division to remove all entries of fugitives from justice from the background check database and said that “entries will not be permitted” under that category until further notice. Before the FBI memo, there were about 500,000 people identified as fugitives from justice in the database — and all of those names were removed.

Now there are 788.

“Even if the FBI’s revised definition of fugitive from justice is assumed to be legally correct, purging the NICS database of every single individual previously identified as a fugitive from justice was an unjustifiable, alarmingly overbroad, and dangerous decision,” the Giffords group’s Thomas and Robin F. Thurston of the Democracy Forward Foundation wrote in the letter to the FBI.

Federal law enforcement officials say that about 430,000 names of wanted people removed from the database were from Massachusetts.

Commissioner James Slater of the Massachusetts Department of Criminal Justice Information Services said that the reason that his state had so many fugitives in the FBI database is that state policy required sending the bureau the names of all people with an outstanding warrant, whether it was for misdemeanors or felonies.

Because Massachusetts state law prevents fugitives from buying guns, those individuals have now been added back to the federal database under the “state prohibitor” category and will be prevented from purchasing a firearm, he said.

Of the 70,000 others whose names have been purged, the FBI is working with the states to identify which people might have crossed state lines and could be put back into the federal database for that or other reasons.

“The Justice Department is committed to working with law enforcement partners across the country to help ensure that all those who can legally be determined to be prohibited from receiving or possessing a firearm be included in federal criminal databases,” said a Justice Department official who would discuss the matter only on the condition of anonymity.

Sessions in his memo directed the FBI and ATF to work with the Defense Department and other government agencies to improve reporting and identify any other measures that could be taken to prevent guns getting into the wrong hands.

David Chipman, a former ATF official who now works as a senior adviser to the Giffords group, said that, given the confusion over the definition of a fugitive, Congress should pass a new law that makes clear whether people with outstanding arrest warrants can buy a gun.

“I would imagine 99 percent of Americans don’t want people who have a warrant out on them to be able to buy a gun,” Chipman said. “I can’t believe there is a constituency for wanted people. Wanted people are particularly dangerous. They’ve already proven that they’ll break the law.”

(The Washington Post)

Rep. Joe Barton (R-Tex.), who apologized Wednesday for a lewd photo of him that circulated on the Internet, told a woman to whom he had sent sexually explicit photos, videos and messages that he would report her to the Capitol Police because she could expose his behavior, according to a recording reviewed by The Washington Post.

The woman spoke to The Post after the lewd photo was published Tuesday by an anonymous Twitter account. She shared a secretly recorded phone conversation she had with Barton in 2015 in which he warned her against using the explicit materials “in a way that would negatively affect my career.”

The woman described encounters and contact spanning a five-year period that began online after she posted a message on Barton’s Facebook page in 2011, leading to the sexually explicit exchanges and ultimately a pair of physical sexual encounters in Washington and Texas. Over time, she said, she became aware of and corresponded with multiple other women who engaged in relationships with Barton, who represents a suburban Dallas district and is one of the most senior Republicans in the House.

The woman, who is not married, spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect her privacy.

In the 2015 phone call, Barton confronted the woman over her communications with the other women, including her decision to share explicit materials he had sent. In that context, he mentioned the Capitol Police, a comment the woman interpreted as an attempt to intimidate her.

“I want your word that this ends,” he said, according to the recording, adding: “I will be completely straight with you. I am ready if I have to, I don’t want to, but I should take all this crap to the Capitol Hill Police and have them launch an investigation. And if I do that, that hurts me potentially big time.”

“Why would you even say that to me?” the woman responded. “The Capitol Hill police? And what would you tell them, sir?”

Said Barton: “I would tell them that I had a three-year undercover relationship with you over the Internet that was heavily sexual and that I had met you twice while married and had sex with you on two different occasions and that I exchanged inappropriate photographs and videos with you that I wouldn’t like to be seen made public, that you still apparently had all of those and were in position to use them in a way that would negatively affect my career. That’s the truth.”

In a statement late Wednesday, Barton said a transcript of the recording provided by The Post may be “evidence” of a “potential crime against me.”

He said that he received word Wednesday that the Capitol Police are opening an inquiry. While there is no federal law prohibiting the disclosure of intimate photos of adults without consent, the Dallas Morning News on Wednesday reported that the Twitter photo of Barton could violate a 2015 Texas law banning so-called “revenge porn,” which is the portrayal of another person’s intimate body parts and distributing the images without consent.

“This woman admitted that we had a consensual relationship,” Barton said. “When I ended that relationship, she threatened to publicly share my private photographs and intimate correspondence in retaliation. As the transcript reflects, I offered to take the matter to the Capitol Hill Police to open an investigation. Today, the Capitol Police reached out to me and offered to launch an investigation and I have accepted. Because of the pending investigation, we will have no further comment.”

The woman said she never had any intention to use the materials to retaliate against Barton.

A request for comment from the Capitol Police was not immediately returned late Wednesday.

Earlier Wednesday, Barton acknowledged “sexual relationships with other mature adult women” that he said took place while he was “separated from my second wife, before the divorce.”

“Each was consensual,” he said in a statement. “Those relationships have ended. I am sorry I did not use better judgment during those days. I am sorry that I let my constituents down.”

Barton, 68, is the fifth-longest serving Republican in the House, now in his 17th term. He is a former chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and now serves as vice chairman of the panel.

The Texas native has built a reputation on Capitol Hill as a fierce advocate for the oil and gas industry and a reliable vote for conservative legislation. A member of the Freedom Caucus, Barton regularly receives top scores from socially conservative groups such as the Family Research Council that analyze members’ stances on positions such as abortion and gay rights.

But he is not known as an outspoken culture warrior. In 1998, amid the scandal over President Bill Clinton’s affair with a White House intern, Barton was quoted in the Los Angeles Times saying, “I personally don’t care a fig about what he does in his bedroom with his wife or any other sexual partners he may have, but I do care if he lies under oath.”

Barton was still married to his second wife when his relationship with the woman began. His wife filed for divorce in April 2014, according to court records; the divorce was made final in February 2015. A spokeswoman for Barton did not respond to a question about when his separation began.

Besides the recording of the phone call, the woman shared text and social media messages she exchanged with Barton, as well as a 53-second cellphone video Barton recorded of himself while masturbating. The conspiracy theory website Infowars obtained a copy of the video and published it Wednesday night, though the video appeared to have been removed from the site later.

The lewd Twitter photo that Barton acknowledged on Wednesday appears to have been captured from that video. The woman said she did not post the image herself. She shared phone numbers for Barton that match his personal and government-issued cellphones. Barton was not abusive or coercive in his interactions, the woman said, but said she felt he was “manipulative and dishonest and misleading” in his dealings with her and other women.

“It’s not normal for a member of Congress who runs on a GOP platform of family values and conservatism to be scouring the Internet looking for a new sexual liaison,” she said, explaining her motive for coming forward.

The woman said Barton first reached out to her in 2011 after she posted a comment about politics on his Facebook page. As the two struck up a friendship, they would exchange messages for hours, including when he was on the House floor or in committee meetings, she said.

Soon, Barton began flirting, making suggestive comments and sending explicit messages, she said. She described feeling uncomfortable with his advances at first.

“He says to me, ‘Do you want me to send you a picture of myself?’ I said, ‘Oh no, no. Please do not do that.’ It kind of started there,” she said.

In the spring of 2012, the woman flew to Washington, where he gave her a tour of the Capitol building, she said. The two slept together during that visit, and he reimbursed her in cash for her flight, she said.

In 2014, she visited him in Texas, where the two slept together for the second and final time, she said. He again paid for her travel, she said. “I was in it for the politics connection,” the woman said of their relationship.“I was kind of unwittingly drawn into it with him because of just the amazement of having a connection to a congressman,” she said.

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