I ran across this list on Quora A writer named "Terry Terhune: had written it and it was brilliant. I also remember how the F.B.I handled the Richard Jewell and the Centennial bombing in the Olympics in Atlanta in 1996 and they crucified him with "accidental leaks" to a friendly local AJC reporter and the resulting feeding frenzy as they tried to set this poor guy up as the bomber when he was the hero to begin with was beyond the pale. The FBI has done a lot of good stuff, the "G" men were legendary, but I wonder of the luster is worn a bit. I don't want to bash them, because you need a federal agency that can cross state lines to go after bad guys who cross state lines to get away from State agencies. I am not sure what it will take. The Following is the quote I pulled of Quora:
It
won’t affect the FBI directly as a Federal Law Enforcement Agency,
however, it will in how the FISA Court has recently said that they now
can’t trust the Bureau and wants to examine all prior FISA applications
to see if they were intentionally duped like they were in the Carter
Page FISA application. It will affect the general public perception that
the FBI can’t be trusted.
The
FBI’s current director, Christopher Wray, recently said his first
priority is to “try to bring a sense of calm and stability back to the
bureau.” However, the FBI is facing one of the greatest tests of its 110
years. It must fix a culture of internal problems, rebuild its
trustworthiness with the law enforcement community. Worst yet, this
comes at the same time many Americans are asking themselves: Can the
American trust the FBI after the McCabe findings have shaken the FBI.
The FBI has massive power, and as a result, it has strict rules. Lying
to FBI investigators is considered a dire breach in an organization
built on trust. The referral to the U.S. Attorney’s office, which
emerged after the report was released will probably result in charges
against McCabe of making a false sworn statement. He has challenged the
findings, disputing even the most basic elements, like how many people
were in the room. The IG said it did not find many of his objections
credible, with some elements contradicted by notes taken
contemporaneously by other agents. McCabe previously called his firing
part of a “war on the FBI” and the Russia investigation. However, viewed
against the facts of Horowitz reports, McCabe’s rule-breaking is part
of a much larger internal problem. Horowitz found that bureau
investigators had allowed employees with negative polygraph results to
keep their top-secret clearances for months or even years, posing
“potential risks to U.S. national security.” In one instance, an FBI IT
specialist with top-secret security clearance failed four polygraph
tests and admitted to having created a fictitious Facebook account to
communicate with a foreign national, but received no disciplinary action
for that. Horowitz found that the FBI was getting information it
shouldn’t have had access to when it used controversial parts of the
Patriot Act to obtain business records in terrorism and
counterintelligence cases.
Just
as troubling are recent FBI missteps not yet under the IG’s microscope.
At 2:31 p.m. on Jan. 5, the FBI’s round-the-clock tip center in West
Virginia received a chilling phone call. The caller gave her name and
said she was close to the family of an 18-year-old in Parkland, Fla.,
named Nikolas Cruz. Over 13 minutes, she said Cruz had posted photos of
rifles he owned and animals he mutilated and that he wanted “to kill
people.” She listed his Instagram accounts and suggested the FBI check
for itself, saying she was worried about the thought of his “getting
into a school and just shooting the place up,” according to a transcript
of the call. The FBI specialist checked Cruz’s name against a database
and found that another tipster had reported 3½ months earlier that a
“Nikolas Cruz” posted a comment on his YouTube channel saying, “I’m
going to be a professional school shooter.” But neither tip was passed
on to the FBI field agents in Miami or local officials in Parkland.
After Cruz allegedly killed 17 people with an AR-15 rifle at his old
school just six weeks later, the bureau admitted that it had dropped the
ball and ordered a full review. “You look at this and say, ‘You’ve got
to be kidding me,'” says Anderson, the former FBI official.
The
Parkland shooting was only the latest in a string of devastating
misses. After Omar Mateen shot and killed 49 people at the nightclub
Pulse in Orlando in June 2016, the FBI said it had investigated him
twice before on terrorism suspicions, but shut the inquiries for lack of
evidence. The year before, after Dylann Roof shot to death nine
African-American parishioners at a South Carolina church, the FBI
acknowledged that lapses in its gun background-check system allowed him
to illegally buy the .45-caliber handgun he used in the massacre. In
2011, the FBI received a tip from Russian intelligence that one of the
Boston Marathon bombers had become radicalized and was planning an
overseas trip to join radical Islamic groups. The FBI in Boston
investigated him but found no “nexus” to terrorism.
The
Orlando shooting provoked more problems for the bureau. In late March,
when the shooter’s widow, Noor Salman, was acquitted on charges of
aiding and abetting him and obstructing justice. The jury foreman
pointed to inconsistencies in the FBI’s accounts of the disputed
admissions that agents said Salman had made, according to the Orlando
Sentinel. The judge also reprimanded the bureau after an FBI agent
contradicted the government’s earlier claims that Salman and Mateen had
cased the club.
The
serious concerns about FBI testimony in a major terrorist prosecution
underscore a larger question: Are people less likely to believe what the
bureau says these days? A federal judge threw out all the criminal
charges against renegade Nevada cattleman Cliven Bundy, his two sons and
a supporter who had been in an armed standoff over unpaid grazing fees.
Judge Gloria Navarro accused the government of “outrageous” and
“flagrant” misconduct, citing failures by both prosecutors and the FBI
to produce at least 1,000 pages of required documents. The judge said
the FBI misplaced–or “perhaps hid”–a thumb drive revealing the existence
of snipers and a surveillance camera at the site of the standoff.
A
related case in Oregon, growing out of the 2016 takeover of a wildlife
refuge by Bundy’s sons and their followers, has not gone well for the
FBI either. An agent at the scene, W. Joseph Astarita, is now charged
with five criminal counts after prosecutors say he falsely denied
shooting twice at an occupation leader who was fatally shot by police,
who said he appeared to be reaching for his handgun during a roadside
encounter. The Bundy sons and five supporters who helped in the takeover
were found not guilty of conspiracy and weapons charges, in another
jarring setback for the government.
The
on-going string of not guilty verdicts as a sign that jurors and judges
are less inclined to take what the FBI says in court at face value. The
evidence support that conclusion. The court statistics shows a
surprisingly low rate of success for the thousands of cases the FBI
investigates and sends to the Justice Department for possible
prosecution. The Justice Department has won convictions in fewer than
half the cases the FBI referred for prosecution, with a conviction rate
of 47% the data showed. That fell well below the average of 72% for all
other government agencies. Prosecutors themselves have rejected many of
the FBI’s referrals before they ever got to court. The bureau’s low
success rate in these cases has remained largely unchanged in recent
years.
In
a national case, Gina Nichols, says she never had strong impressions
one way or the other about the FBI until her daughter Maggie Nichols,
who was a member of the national gymnastics team, reported three years
prior that team physician Larry Nassar had molested her. Gina waited
anxiously for the FBI to contact her and interview Maggie. But no one in
the FBI did so for over a year as the case languished among different
FBI field offices in Indianapolis, Detroit and Los Angeles. Nassar is
believed to have molested dozens of additional victims over the course
of that same time frame.
The
FBI had opened an internal inquiry to determine why the Nassar
investigations appear to have dragged on for so long. John Manly, a
Southern California lawyer representing many of the female victims, says
he is angry that no one from the FBI has contacted the victims to
explain the delay. “Knowing that the best law-enforcement agency in the
world knew exactly what he was up to and did nothing can’t be explain
that to them,” Manly says. “You’ve got people who were really hurt here
and the FBI took their time until the heat was on them.”
Then
there is Mueller’s Russia probe has found that Moscow’s operation
against the 2016 election first got under way in 2014, but the FBI
failed to grasp the scope and danger of what was unfolding. The bureau
missed the significance of the damaging 2015 hack of the DNC database.
Then when the Russian operation began to heat up in the summer of 2016,
the FBI was always a step behind the Russians, struggling to understand
intelligence reports they were getting about possible connections
between Moscow and Trump aides. The bureau also sat on the disputed
“dossier” prepared by former British intelligence officer Christopher
Steele. Then now we find out that the FBI knew Carter Page was a CIA
agent and intentionality left the exculpatory evidence out of the FISA
application thereby duping a FISA Judge. The FBI then sought three
additional renewals of the highly classified FISA warrant. To make
matters worse, Carter Page was never charged or indicted because he was
actually telling the truth that he was spying on the Russians for the
CIA and not colluding with them to help Trump won the 2016, election.
A
report released by the House Intelligence Committee found that the FBI
was slow to confront the election meddling, especially in its failure to
notify U.S. victims of Russian hacking quickly enough. The committee
also charged that the bureau’s decision to surveil former Trump campaign
adviser Carter Page was influenced by politics and biased FBI agents.
At the same time, the IG has pointed to text messages between FBI
special agent Peter Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page, which were critical
of Trump as well as many Democrats to argue the bureau is fundamentally
rotten to the core and needs a complete overhaul to fix their serious
internal cultural problems.
The
most important thing is how can the FBI be fixed when they don’t even
follow their own internal regulations they teach new agents at Quantico
as noted in their Bible called the Domestic Investigations and
Operations Guide “DIOG. In the FBI’s handling of the Clinton email probe
ahead of the 2016 election, Comey acted without telling the Justice
Department what he planned to do. He then stripped the case from a field
office and kept it in the headquarters and had the same agents working
on it and all other high profile cases and the Russian collusion probe
at the same time. Comey is the main culprit who came under fire in the
IG report for breaking with Justice Department rules and norms by
assuming authority usually held by prosecutors and speaking in public
about a case that did not produce criminal charges. What was disclosed
is Comey allowed the Bureau to be weaponized by the Obama
Administration.
At
FBI headquarters, agents and supervisors are currently saying that they
are keeping their heads down and focusing on their jobs and
investigations while the building is crumbling around them and the
criticism of the Bureau is blowing the shingles off the roof.
Trump’s
attacks on the FBI was proven to be true after the IG released his
reports. Some worry that the damage to the FBI may take years to fix.
Trump’s public attacks on the Bureau is having an effect on the public’s
confidence in the FBI. The serious problems of the FBI and their sad
state of affairs is on a severe lack of leadership and transparency at
headquarters in owning up to recent blunders and gross misconduct. Those
damaging failures have just about pushed an incredible organization
over the brink. For now, everyone inside and out who cares about the
reliability of law enforcement in America is left hoping that the Bureau
can rebuild itself as a premier law enforcement agency.
And most LEOs at the local level can't stand the FBI, hate to work with them...
ReplyDeleteHey Old NFO;
DeleteI know, there is a common comment that cooperation with the Feebies is a one way street. They take your information but pass none back to you.
I cant help but wonder how many people with Dr.Scholls foot powder went to prison for cocaine, after the FBI lab confirmed it was cocaine..
ReplyDeleteHey Justin;
DeleteI wonder about that also, If I ever have any doing with the feebies or any law enforcement, it will be with a good lawyer. I have seen people get railroaded by either being too trusting or by being too cheap and going with "Court Appointed".