Profile: Jonathan Fried

A Canadian government official tells the US House Judiciary Committee that Canada is reluctant to cooperate with the committee’s inquiry into the alleged theft of a version of the PROMIS software by the US Justice Department and its subsequent passage to Canada. This is in response to a letter sent on February 26, 1991, in which the committee asked Canadian Ambassador Derek Burney for help determining what version of the software the Canadian government was using. The official, Jonathan Fried, counselor for congressional and legal affairs at Canada’s Washington embassy, says that “Canadians had been burned once before by Congress,” and imposes conditions on Congressional questioning of Canadian officials. The conditions are that interviews of individuals be conducted only in the presence of lawyers for the relevant departments and their superiors and that no Canadian public servants would be witnesses in any foreign investigative proceedings. The committee accepts these conditions in mid-March, and identifies the two Canadian officials it wants to speak to (see November 1990 and January 1991). [US Congress, 9/10/1992]