FBI

I’ve been trying to stay out of the tabloid mania that is John Edwards, but this caught my interest today:

Young also said another copy has been turned over to the FBI, which has been investigating the money that exchanged hands during Edwards' second White House campaign.

An FBI spokeswoman declined to comment.

Unless that video tape shows Edwards paying this lady then why in the hell does the FBI even need it? Edwards has admitted everything, including fathering the child, and having sex isn’t illegal, so what could this possibly add to the investigation? I can’t think of any reason.

Just received a breaking news alert from the Washington Post regarding this:

The FBI illegally collected more than 2,000 U.S. telephone call records between 2002 and 2006 by invoking terrorism emergencies that did not exist or simply persuading phone companies to provide records, according to internal bureau memos and interviews. FBI officials issued approvals after the fact to justify their actions.

E-mails obtained by The Washington Post detail how counterterrorism officials inside FBI headquarters did not follow their own procedures that were put in place to protect civil liberties. The stream of urgent requests for phone records also overwhelmed the FBI communications analysis unit with work that ultimately was not connected to imminent threats.

A Justice Department inspector general's report due out this month is expected to conclude that the FBI frequently violated the law with its emergency requests, FBI officials confirmed.

There is a lot to digest in the 4 page article, so I’ll just direct you over to the Washington Post’s site to read the rest.

After hearing news that the FBI said Sarah Palin wasn’t under any kind of investigation I got thinking. I can’t recall anytime in history when the FBI either confirmed or denied an ongoing investigation. Well that’s until it hits the courts and becomes part of the public record. So why are they confirming that Sarah Palin isn’t under any investigation? Something seems a little odd about that. I’m not saying the news lied or that the FBI did. I just find it odd that they are willing to now confirm or deny rumors of ongoing investigations. Is this some sort of new policy?

Here is what you get from a Bush run government:

The FBI was aware for years of "pervasive and growing" fraud in the mortgage industry that eventually contributed to America's financial meltdown, but did not take definitive action to stop it.

"It is clear that we had good intelligence on the mortgage-fraud schemes, the corrupt attorneys, the corrupt appraisers, the insider schemes," said a recently retired, high FBI official. Another retired top FBI official confirmed that such intelligence went back to 2002.

The problem, according to the two FBI retirees and several other current and former bureau colleagues, is that the bureau was stretched so thin that no one noticed when those lenders began packaging bad mortgages into bad securities.

"We knew that the mortgage-brokerage industry was corrupt," the first of the retired FBI officials told the Seattle P-I. "Where we would have gotten a sense of what was really going on was the point where the mortgage was sold knowing that it was a piece of dung and it would be turned into a security. But the agents with the expertise had been diverted to counterterrorism."

One tracked mind Bush only thought “terra terra”, all the while something just as bad was happening here at home. The incompetence of Republican leadership drove us down this scary road of uncertain economic futures and they didn’t care. Yeah America hasn’t been attacked, but America may never be what we once knew either. Instead we could be reduced to the same as a third world nation.

Despite all that, what really gets me is how much Bush said he was “protecting the people”. Well the people needed protected from these fraudsters and Bush was MIA. The single job Bush claimed he was doing he failed at. That is his legacy. And on top of that his own party that supported him so blindly for the last eight years is trying to block any help for our nation. I’m sure Osama wants to send a big thank you letter to the Republican leadership and George Bush. They made his job pretty damn easy.

That's what we are becoming, and it's all in the name of "terror":

The FBI acknowledged Wednesday it improperly accessed Americans' telephone records, credit reports and Internet traffic in 2006, the fourth straight year of privacy abuses resulting from investigations aimed at tracking terrorists and spies.

The breach occurred before the FBI enacted broad new reforms in March 2007 to prevent future lapses, FBI Director Robert Mueller said. And it was caused, in part, by banks, telecommunication companies and other private businesses giving the FBI more personal client data than was requested.

[SNIP]

An audit by the inspector general last year found the FBI demanded personal records without official authorization or otherwise collected more data than allowed in dozens of cases between 2003 and 2005. Additionally, last year's audit found that the FBI had underreported to Congress how many national security letters were requested by more than 4,600.

So are we going to have a big debate over giving the FBI immunity? What if I just happened to intercept a phone call or someone's internet traffic. I would end up in jail! Why is the FBI suddenly above the law?

Today's Washington Post:

When the FBI asked Congress this spring to provide $3.6 million in the war spending bill for its Gulfstream V jet, it said the money was needed to ensure that the aircraft, packed with state-of-the-art security and communications gear, could continue to fly counterterrorism agents on "crucial missions" into Iraq.

Since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the bureau has made similar annual requests to maintain and fuel the $40 million jet on grounds that it had a "tremendous impact" on combating terrorism by rapidly deploying FBI agents to "fast-moving investigations and crisis situations" in places such as Afghanistan.

But the jet that the FBI originally sold to lawmakers in the late 1990s as an essential tool for battling terrorism is now routinely used to ferry FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III to speeches, public appearances and field office visits.

So we are using a state of the art jet, designed to monitor and combat terrorism, to taxi around the FBI director.

Well this sounds somewhat familiar to me. As matter of fact, this story strikes a very similar note to this one:

In June of 2006, [Michael] Leavitt [Secretary of Health and Human services] came under criticism for misappropriation of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Gulfstream III Emergency Response aircraft to, primarily, promote the newly reformed Medicare plan.

Critics argue that Leavitt irresponsibly has used the aircraft since January of 2006, logging over $700,000 worth of flight time in the 14 seat private jet. Leavitt’s office maintains that the use of the aircraft was necessary and legal since the Senate Appropriations Committee approved his use of the aircraft, and commercial services could not meet the deadlines required by his engagements. During two recent emergencies that the CDC has required use of the aircraft, they were forced to privately charter a different plane since the CDC’s GIII was in use by Leavitt.[1]

So we have top people in the Bush administration misusing equipment meant for the safety of our nation. If a citizen of this country interferes with an emergency vehicle (police car, fire truck, ambulance, etc.), they are charged with interfering with emergency response. Why aren't top government officials held to the same standards?

This is nothing more than abuse of tax payer dollars by the part who is supposed to stand for smaller government. Just remember - the Republicans won't question this behavior though (and most likely try to block any Democratic investigation into it). This doesn't have the priority of something so wasteful, as say; the Clintons Christmas card list.

More very damaging reports coming out. This brings us back to the whole wiretapping issue, and it appears the FBI may have broken the law. That is not some left-wing conspiracy, that is the report from the Justice Department's Inspector General:

The FBI repeatedly failed to follow the strict guidelines of the Patriot Act when its agents took advantage of a new provision allowing the FBI to obtain phone and financial records without a court order, according to a report to be made public Friday by the Justice Department's Inspector General.

The report, in classified and unclassified versions, remains closely held, but Washington officials who have seen it tell ABC News it documents "numerous lapses" and describe it as "scathing" and "not a pretty picture for the FBI."

FBI Director Robert Mueller is scheduled to brief Congress on the report at noon.

This is going to be another huge story. Impeachment time now?