Just hours after the FBI announced that, with absolute certainty, it had determined that North Korea was behind the Sony hack, a “theory” that has become the butt of global jokes, we learned, in a far less prominent release, that according to an internal inquiry, FBI evidence if “often mishandled.” According to the NYT, “F.B.I. agents in every region of the country have mishandled, mislabeled and lost evidence, according to a highly critical internal investigation that discovered errors with nearly half the pieces of evidence it reviewed.
The evidence collection and retention system is the backbone of the F.B.I.’s investigative process, and the report said it is beset by problems.
It gets better: according to the report, the F.B.I. was storing more weapons, less money and valuables, and two tons more drugs than its records had indicated. Almost as if the FBI was siphoning off cash, while hoarding guns and blow.
The report’s findings, based on a review of more than 41,000 pieces of evidence in F.B.I. offices around the country, could have consequences for criminal investigations and prosecutions. Lawyers can use even minor record-keeping discrepancies to get evidence thrown out of court, and the F.B.I. was alerting prosecutors around the country on Friday that they may need to disclose the errors to defendants.
A majority of the errors identified were due in large part to human error, attributable to a lack of training and program management oversight,” auditors wrote in the report, which was obtained by The New York Times.
F.B.I. officials on Friday said that they decided on their own to conduct the review after discovering during an internal audit that there might be issues with the record keeping for evidence.
In other words, there was human error, as well as willful “record keeping” lies.
