Another scathing editorial about the FBI's performance in the Foley scandal.   This one from the Miami Herald: 

In refusing last summer to investigate the e-mails that former U.S. Rep. Mark Foley sent to a former congressional page, the FBI ignored its own child-safety guidelines, says a report from the Justice Department's inspector general. The Foley e-mails given to the FBI in July 2006 by a whistle-blower group didn't contain sexually explicit references, but their language indicated behavior that the FBI warns about in A Parent's Guide to Internet Safety on its website. The agency should review how it handles complaints about public officials.

The inspector general took the FBI to task for not reacting quickly to the e-mails, which were given to the agency by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). The report says the FBI also wrongly blamed CREW for not handing over additional information. Never happened, says the report.

While the agency clearly has more-pressing duties in the era of terrorism than tracking congressmen with a penchant for befriending House pages, the FBI dropped the ball.

Another slam at the FBI. This one from The St. Petersburg Times:

...[G}iven the tools at the FBI's disposal, it is unacceptable that the agency would treat the case as a hot potato to be passed from office to office. In the e-mails, Foley asks the boy his age, requests a photo and remarks that another was "in really great shape." Though those initial messages were not sexually explicit and officials concluded there was no sign of a crime at the time, the inspector general reasonably concludes that the FBI should have taken a closer look at Foley's behavior.

The inspector general found that agents bounced the e-mails from office to office as they haggled over who had responsibility for pursuing them. The Fort Pierce Republican abruptly resigned Sept. 29 following reports that he sent explicit instant messages to teenage boys. While the earlier messages may have lacked a smoking gun, they provided, as the inspector general said, "enough troubling indications on their face." At the very least the FBI should have passed its concerns to House managers or congressional watchdog agencies.

The report also noted the FBI misled the public by trying to blame a watchdog group for redacting the e-mails it passed along to the FBI. The inspector general found that the advocacy group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, had not withheld information, and that missing material was not behind the bureau's decision to drop the matter. Whether the culprit was laziness or fear or bureaucrats simply passing the buck, the FBI failed to do its job.

(Coincidentally, this same paper also had the notorious Foley e-mails well before they became public, but failed to report on the story as the Executive Editor explained last October.)

The Washington Post Editorial Board thinks the FBI "fell short" in the Foley scandal. They're right:

...[G]iven that minors were involved, the FBI should have done more. The messages were disturbing enough to the former page that he forwarded them to a congressional staffer with the comment that they were "sick" and "freaked me out." The FBI agents who looked at them concluded, variously, that they were "odd" and "inappropriate"; one who read them remembered thinking, "What a freak."

As the report by Inspector General Glenn A. Fine concluded, the e-mails "provided enough troubling indications on their face, particularly given the position of trust and authority that Mr. Foley held with respect to House pages, that a better practice for the FBI would have been to take at least some follow-up steps with regard to the e-mails" -- interviewing the former page, notifying House officials in charge of the page program or at the very least telling the group that had forwarded them to the FBI, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), that it did not plan to take any additional steps. "We are not the ethics police," the agent in charge of the cyber crimes unit told the inspector general. True, but as the report points out, the FBI's own guide to Internet safety points out that predators often "gradually seduce" their targets with attention and gifts.

All too characteristically, when Mr. Foley's misbehavior came to light, the FBI blamed its inaction on incomplete and "heavily redacted" information provided by CREW and the organization's alleged refusal to provide additional details. As the report makes clear, that was not accurate. It was the FBI's apathy, not CREW's recalcitrance, that was at fault here.

ConWebBlog examines the report on CNS about the IG report on how the FBI handled the Mark Foley investigation. LIke the Washington Times article earlier this week, the CNS report largely overlooked the criticism of the FBI's performance:

A Jan. 24 CNSNews.com article by Nathan Burchfiel on the Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General report on how the FBI handled the Mark Foley matter took a strangely pro-FBI spin, burying or ignoring mistakes made by the organization. Here's Burchfiel's lead;

The Federal Bureau of Investigation acted "within the range of discretion" in deciding not to investigate sexually charged Internet conversations between former Rep. Mark Foley and a former congressional page, the Justice Department has concluded.

Critics are unhappy, however, and called Tuesday for congressional hearings into the matter.

The article continued on that tack by describing exculpatory findings regarding the FBI. It's not until the 9th paragraph is it hinted that the report contains anything critical about the FBI's handling of the case. The Washington Post, meanwhile, led its article on the report with that criticism -- that the FBI should have taken "some follow-up steps" when it learned about the emails.

Also, similar to the Washington Times article, ConWebBlog notes that CNS failed to mention the finding that the FBI misled the media:

Burchfiel's article, however, offers no mention whatsoever of the report's other major finding -- that anonymous Justice and FBI officials had falsely told the media that the group that first forwarded the Foley emails to the FBI, Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington (CREW), that the messages supplied by CREW had been "heavily redacted" and that the group had refused to provide further information. In fact, according to the report, the only thing removed from the messages was the identity of the person to whom the communications had been forwarded, and that the "redactions in the e-mail did not factor into the FBI's decision to decline to investigate the matter."

We don't usually include the entire text of articles or editorials on the blog, but today we're making an exception for an editorial in The New York Times:

Mark Foley fled his seat in the House of Representatives last September when his sexual approaches to teenage pages finally reached the news media after years of a shameful cover-up in the halls of Congress. Now it turns out that the F.B.I. was just as phlegmatic about the scandal as Mr. Foley’s Republican colleagues. An inspector general’s report excoriates F.B.I. agents for brushing aside “troubling” evidence of the lawmaker’s flirtatious message-writing, and then falsely blaming their inaction on the watchdog group that tried to alert the government in the first place.

The report underlines the calculated indifference at the heart of the scandal. In their final hours in power, the Republicans who controlled the ethics committee issued a report that whitewashed the fact that key members of the Republican leadership and their staff members were aware of Mr. Foley’s long predatory history. The F.B.I. inspector general’s report showed the same indifference among law enforcement officials charged with investigating Mr. Foley’s actions. The report describes one F.B.I. supervisor who said he had read Mr. Foley’s e-mail notes and thought, “What a freak,” but who had then sent the evidence on a fruitless bureaucratic roundabout.

The lug-headed consensus was that there had been no real crime, when — as the inspector general pointed out — agents should have been urgently alerting the page program’s supervisors.

When the scandal finally became public, the F.B.I. falsely claimed that a watchdog group — Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics — had been uncooperative and withheld vital information. In truth, it had been entirely forthcoming in passing on full details from a former page who had complained about Mr. Foley’s lewd predilections.

The new Congress voted to overhaul protections by mandating that an oversight board of surrogates be enlarged to include a former page and a page’s parent. It will have an even balance of House members to end the majority control that helped bury the Foley scandal. The F.B.I. had better take stock, too, and treat Congress with less wariness.

You can listen to the discussion Melanie Sloan and Al Franken here. That's a great soundtrack too, isn't it?

Yesterday, the DOJ's Inspector General found that the FBI had misled journalists about CREW's role in the Mark Foley scandal.

Yet, The Washington Times headlined its article: "No misconduct found in FBI decision on Foley."

Interestingly, that article never addressed the section of the IG report that dealt specifically with the FBI misleading the media. The report stated:

[T}he information provided by the FBI and the Department inaccurately portrayed the information that CREW provided to the FBI, and inaccurately suggested that CREW’s actions were the cause of the FBI’s decision not to investigate the emails.

Not even a mention of the FBI's lying to the media. One would think that would matter to the media.

Yesterday, the Department of Justice's Inspector General released its report about the FBI's response to Mark Foley's e-mails to the 16-year old who had served as a House page. In the wake of that report, CREW wants the House Judiciary Committee to hold hearings on the FBI's practices and procedures in investigating potential child sexual predators. The Judiciary Committee has oversight jurisdiction over the FBI. 

CREW was vindicated by the IG report. While we found it disturbing that the FBI misled the media about our role, the most troubling aspect of the report is the IG’s account of the FBI’s internal decision-making process in regard to investigating the emails. The letter to Rep. Conyers and our news release can be found here:

On July 21, 2006, CREW forwarded to the FBI copies of the Foley emails. Upon learning in early October that the FBI had not begun an investigation into the Foley matter based on the emails CREW had provided, CREW asked for a review by the DOJ IG.

According to the report, once CREW sent the emails to a special agent in the Public Corruption Squad, they were forwarded to the Crimes Against Children Squad and then to the Cyber Crimes Squad. The IG found that the supervisory agents in neither of these squads had substantial experience with child sexual predators.

Because the emails did not contain sexually explicit language, the supervisory special agent in Cyber Crimes did not believe they merited investigation or even notifying anyone outside of the FBI of their existence, explaining to the IG, “we are not the ethics police.”

In contrast, the IG found that the emails “provided enough troubling indications on their face, particularly given the position of trust and authority that Foley held with respect to House pages, that a better practice for the FBI would have been to take at least some follow-up steps with regard to the emails.” The IG stated that if the Bureau did not believe an interview with the former page was warranted, the FBI “should have considered notifying the House authorities in charge of the page program,” or “[a]t the least . . . the FBI should have notified CREW, the complainant in this case, that the FBI had declined to open an investigation.”

Melanie Sloan, executive director of CREW said today, “based on the FBI’s handling of the Foley matter, there are serious questions on how the FBI conducts its investigations into potential child predators. CREW asks that Chairman Conyers hold a hearing on FBI’s practices as soon as possible, in order to help prevent other children from being victimized.”

Finally, Sloan noted that the supervisory special agents might have looked to the FBI’s own materials, such as the pamphlet, “A Parent’s Guide to Internet Safety” before dismissing the emails as insignificant.

Florida newspapers have paid extra attention to the Mark Foley scandal. Several newspapers in the state were provided the e-mails in question but chose not to write about them. The papers are covering the failure of the FBI to respond appropriately.

Palm Beach Post: "Justice report faults FBI on Foley, says agents should have done more"

The Justice Department on Monday released a report criticizing the FBI for failing to take action to ensure the safety of congressional pages after receiving copies of e-mails sent by former U.S. Rep. Mark Foley.

In the 31-page report, Inspector General Glenn Fine said that although the failure to begin a formal investigation was "not misconduct," agents had enough information to "have raised enough concerns to warrant some action."

Fine also found that the FBI misled reporters by saying the e-mails they received were incomplete, with much of the writing blotted out. That was not true, Fine said.

St. Petersburg Times: "Report: FBI flubbed Foley case"

When an FBI supervisor saw the initial e-mails between Rep. Mark Foley and a former teenage page, the supervisor's first thought about the congressman was "What a freak."

But the supervisor and several agents at the FBI believed they did not have enough evidence to pursue an investigation of the congressman. Once they concluded Foley had not committed a crime, they gave up.

A report from the Justice Department's inspector general said there were enough red flags about Foley's behavior that the FBI should have kept investigating.

"We believe the FBI should have considered taking some steps to ensure that any minors in the congressional page program were not at risk of predatory behavior by Foley," Inspector General Glenn Fine wrote in the report, which was released Monday.

The report from the DOJ's Inspector General on the FBI's role in handling the Mark Foley scandal garnered intense media coverage.  It isn't often that there's an acknowledgement that the Bureau misled reporters.  From today's MIami Herald:

The FBI -- which warns parents on its website about ''individuals who attempt to sexually exploit children'' via the Internet -- should have sounded alarms over questionable computer messages sent to a former teenage page by disgraced former Rep. Mark Foley, an inspector general's report concluded Monday.

The agency should have interviewed the page or alerted the House page program or, ''at the very least,'' told the whistle-blower agency that provided it with the messages that it was declining to investigate, said the 31-page report by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine.

''We believe the FBI should have considered taking some steps to ensure that any minors in the congressional page program were not at risk of predatory behavior by Foley,'' the report states.

The report also found that FBI officials misled reporters about the whistleblower group that provided the messages. The FBI, it said, suggested to reporters that its decision not to investigate the matter was partly because the group gave it messages that were ''heavily redacted'' and that it refused to cooperate further.

But the report shows that Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington provided messages that had the name of the page and a House employee to whom the message was sent. It chastises the FBI for not telling CREW that it wasn't going to investigate the matter, suggesting that CREW might have pursued it further.