evidence: Partisan web sites reported that Obama's Department of Justice had forced the deletion of the names of more than 500,000 fugitives with outstanding arrest warrants from the NICS database. The reports centered around an exchange between Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-California) and acting FBI Deputy Director David Bowdich during a 14 March Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on School Shootings and Safety, quoted as follows by the Daily Wire blog: "It's my understanding that under federal law fugitives cannot legally purchase or possess guns," Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) began. "We've heard from local law enforcement that the Justice Department has issued a memo that forced the FBI NICS background check database to drop more than 500,000 names of fugitives with outstanding arrest warrants because it was uncertain whether those fugitives had fled across state lines." [...] As previously alleged, the guidance had the immediate effect of causing the names of some 500,000 subjects to be conditionally purged from the existing NICS database because they did not meet all of the above criteria. Below are charts from the FBI showing the total numbers of active "fugitive from justice" records at the end of 2016 vs. the end of 2017: