Posted on 08/08/2013 7:30:14 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
In another exclusive about the investigatory practices of the executive branch, Reuters uncovered an IRS manual that instructed its agents to concoct phony investigative trails when using tips from the DEA’s Special Operations Division. The manual, found in an archive of Reuters’ parent company, mirrors the instructions given to DEA agents building cases for prosecution:
Details of a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration program that feeds tips to federal agents and then instructs them to alter the investigative trail were published in a manual used by agents of the Internal Revenue Service for two years.
The practice of recreating the investigative trail, highly criticized by former prosecutors and defense lawyers after Reuters reported it this week, is now under review by the Justice Department. Two high-profile Republicans have also raised questions about the procedure.
A 350-word entry in the Internal Revenue Manual instructed agents of the U.S. tax agency to omit any reference to tips supplied by the DEA’s Special Operations Division, especially from affidavits, court proceedings or investigative files. The entry was published and posted online in 2005 and 2006, and was removed in early 2007. The IRS is among two dozen arms of the government working with the Special Operations Division, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency.
An IRS spokesman had no comment on the entry or on why it was removed from the manual. Reuters recovered the previous editions from the archives of the Westlaw legal database, which is owned by Thomson Reuters Corp, the parent of this news agency.
As Reuters reported Monday, the Special Operations Division of the DEA funnels information from overseas NSA intercepts, domestic wiretaps, informants and a large DEA database of telephone records to authorities nationwide to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans. The DEA phone database is distinct from a NSA database disclosed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
The dates provide the first objective indication that the practice was in place for quite a while and apparently rather open at one time, at least at the IRS — as was the SOD in the DEA and its collection of phone data. Its removal also suggests that either the practice stopped, or more likely, the government decided that openly discussing how to falsify investigative trails could make it a wee bit difficult to win convictions in court.
Actually, the DEA says these practices have been in place since the Clinton administration, “in near-daily use.” They claim to use it to protect sources and methods, but it’s the latter that’s the issue. There is a valid argument for trying to protect human sources at risk of death and violence by constructing an evidentiary profile so that their testimony is not required for conviction, as long as that profile doesn’t misrepresent the government’s actions in the investigation to cover up any violations of a defendant’s constitutional rights. Those kinds of “methods” should not be protected by dishonest representations in court about the investigations, but that appears to be exactly what the manual trained agents to do.
How many Americans ended up convicted thanks to dummied-up investigatory trails in order to protect the government’s snooping on phone activity, by the IRS as well as the DEA? Perhaps Congress would like to provide us that answer — fast.
I got a little surprise when I saw the dates - 2005 to 2007. Maybe the Patriot Act got a little too much attention or misuse by the various agencies.
The potential of a lot of cases to be overturned is the first thing that comes to mind.
Impeachment File on Communist, Benghazi Coward “B. Hussein Obama,” formerly known as Barry Soetoro, currently a Legal Citizen of the Sovereign Nation of Indonesia.
A former federal agent in the northeastern United States who received such tips from SOD described the process. "You'd be told only, ‘Be at a certain truck stop at a certain time and look for a certain vehicle.' And so we'd alert the state police to find an excuse to stop that vehicle, and then have a drug dog search it," the agent said.
"PARALLEL CONSTRUCTION"
After an arrest was made, agents then pretended that their investigation began with the traffic stop, not with the SOD tip, the former agent said. The training document reviewed by Reuters refers to this process as "parallel construction."
You just have to appreciate the process name, "parallel construction." Isn't that how you construct a railroad?
I think my mother is correct. We need to stop using the word “Scandal” and call them what they really are, “Crimes”. In this case, there are massive crimes against the whole of the American people and the constitution.
Isn’t there a legal doctrine called “fruit of the poisoness tree” where legally obtained evidence can’t be used if it was originally found using illegally obtained evidence?
My knowledge of the law basically involves being a thug at one time in my life, but pretty sure this is correct.
The sheer volume of the crimes is staggering. This doesn’t bode well for our Republic.
It’s beocome so commonplace that people no longer question the lies. I saw a post the other day where a LEO was arguing that a LEO wasn’t lying, he was “bluffing.” While I think “bluffing” may be allowed in poker, this is more akin to stacking the deck. The standard recourse to a stacked deck was shooting the offender. If that is what it will take, then the public has already lost.
C'mon FREEPERS someone has the original text. Please link.
re: “Did the IRS also use the cover-up techniques of the DEA?”
Is this a trick question?
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