June 13, 2013

A flawed federal law enforcement agency?

Thomas Lifson

 

The federal government maintains a bewildering number of armed law enforcement agencies, including the 295 armed Social Security special agents, for whom 174,000 .357 Sig 125 grain bonded jacketed hollow point bullets were recently put up for bid.

A much larger armed police force consists of about 2000 agents in the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security. According to the New York Post, that police force is seriously compromised because numbers of people with hidden criminal backgrounds have been hired. This makes them unable to participate in criminal prosecutions. S.A. Miller and Geoff Earle report:

The State Department has hired an alarming number of law-enforcement agents with criminal or checkered backgrounds because of a flawed hiring process, a stunning memo obtained by The Post reveals.

The background problems are severe enough that many of the roughly 2,000 agents in State's Bureau of Diplomatic Security can play only limited roles in agency efforts to police bad conduct and prosecute wrongdoers.

The problems in the bureau are the latest revelation in an exploding scandal that also involves accusations that members of former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's security detail and those of the US ambassador to Belgium solicited prostitutes overseas.

The reason these background problems cripple an agent's effectiveness:

"Too many people entering the [Diplomatic Security and Information Management] communities end up as subjects of [Special Investigation Division] investigations and HR adjudications, become Giglio-impaired and can play only limited roles thereafter," according to the memo.

"Giglio" refers to a US Supreme Court case dealing with jury notification that witnesses have made deals with the government to induce testimony.

Some Diplomatic Security field offices "have major problems just waiting to be discovered," the memo adds.

An IG spokesman said he couldn't comment on internal documents, but State has said it prosecutes misconduct, and that the internal draft reports contain "unsubstantiated information."

An ugly picture is emerging of a corrupt federal government. Internal mechanisms for policing these police were rendered partially disabled, according to these reports.

If we don't police the police, we will end up with no liberty.

Update: It's even worse. Via Gateway Pundit:

The PJ Tatler reported, via Free Republic:

The State Department whistleblower is Aurelia Fedenisn. She worked in the department's inspector general's office until her retirement in December 2012. According to USA Today, she has sought protection as an official whistleblower after the State Department directly threatened her, once at her home. It threatened her with criminal charges when she turned over documents to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) showing evidence that the department had watered down her report, in which she alleged that the department at the highest levels had scuttled eight investigations into a range of criminal wrongdoing.

Dallas lawyer Damon Mathias, who represents Fedenisn, said Fedenisn hired him after two diplomatic security agents spoke in a threatening manner to her teenage children at her home in a Virginia suburb of Washington. The agents arrived at the home to talk to Fedenisn about documents Fedenisn had given to Cruz and told the teens that they demanded to speak to their mom immediately, Mathias said...

...Mathias says Fedenisn's claim is that agents from State's Diplomatic Security and other divisions engaged in very questionable and possibly criminal conduct; the Inspector General has been hampered in performing its oversight role; "and the findings they wanted to put in the report end up being left out," Mathias said. "So you have a coverup of the coverup."

When Fedenisn and her lawyers met with lawyers for the Office of the Inspector General, the government lawyers demanded she hand over the documents or they would refer the matter to the Department of Justice and Fedenisn would face criminal prosecution, Mathias said.

"They made it clear that they would go after her criminally," he said.

"We refused to turn over the documents" and Fedenisn is now seeking whistle-blower protection, he said.

 

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/06/a_flawed_federal_law_enforcement_agency.html at June 16, 2013 - 10:21:59 AM CDT