FBI Beefs Up Staff
Specifically, the staff that looks at campaign finance and other election related crimes!
Federal law-enforcement officials say they witnessed a dramatic jump in campaign-finance and other election-related crimes in the 2004 presidential election year and are determined to beef up their policing of candidates running for federal and local office around the country this year.
Illegal fundraising schemes appear to have grown in number and sophistication as candidates have needed to raise more and more money to be competitive. Several members of Congress have recently found themselves caught up in fundraising controversies.
In the past year and a half, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has reassigned nearly 200 agents to the problem of public corruption, bringing to 600 the total number of agents working on public-integrity cases.
Whoops. Methinks that bipartisan culture of corruption better be watching their backs!
Chip Burrus, assistant director of the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division, who is in charge of all public-corruption investigations, explained the new emphasis on election crimes in an interview Monday.
“We kept getting a lot of reports from the field regarding different schemes that were coming up that involved election issues,” he said. “These schemes are getting a lot more complicated than they ever have been before.”
Burrus said that the bureau had previously designated “two or three agents” 30 days before Election Day to respond to allegations of voter fraud. Often, these agents couldn’t do much before the election for fear of being accused of interfering in the election.
“We always seemed to be chasing the problem instead of getting ahead of it,” he said. “Now we have agents looking for this stuff every day,” instead of waiting until late September or October.
Well, this is actually very good news, I think. It would be nice to get the Hill cleaned up, for everyone's sake. I think that just knowing that the FBI is more active will begin to curb the worst of the corruption pretty fast. A few high-profile perp-walks tend to focus the minds of some of the less ethical.
