By Allan Lengel

WASHINGTON – Thirty-five unhappy former and current FBI agents are suing the bureau for age discrimination, claiming it adopted a policy limiting the years agents can serve as squad supervisors, Courthouse News Service reported. Agents claim the policy was designed to squeeze out older agents.

The news service reported that the agents — all GS-14 squad supervisors in the field offices — claimed in the lawsuit that they were given a choice to retire early, accept a demotion and loss of pay or get transferred to some remote post.  They are asking for a number of things  including the restoring of their pay grade.

The Courthouse News Service reported that all 45 former or current agents were forced to drop from GS-14 to GS-13 on the government pay scale. GS-14 salaries start at $105,211; GS-13 salaries start at $89,033, according to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.

“Plaintiffs contend that the FBI initiated the policy because of a perception by FBI managers that older agents who had held a supervisory position for several years had become stagnant and needed to be replaced with younger agents,” the complaint states, according to the news service.

“At the time the policy was adopted, FBI management knew that all of the supervisors subjected to the term policy would be over the age of 40,” the suit says, according to the news service.

The lawsuit said that the policy limited the supervisors to five years at the position, the news service reported. But after pushing out hundreds of older agents, the FBI modified the policy so younger agents could stay on as supervisors for seven years, the suit said.

The FBI did not immediately return a phone call from ticklethewire.com for comment.  A Justice Department spokeswoman did not immediately have a comment.

READER COMMENTS

Comment from fedupgman | [e]
Time December 15, 2010 at 10:55 am

This policy definitely was and is flawed and it would make much more interesting reading to obtain the internal discussion documents as this harebrained idea came to life. But age discrimination? Good luck with that.

By Allan Lengel

WASHINGTON — America profits from the murderous ways of the Mexican cartels when it comes to supplying weapons.

Washington Post reporters James V. Grimaldi and Sari Horwitz, in a year long investigation, uncovered the names of the top 12 U.S. gun dealers of guns traced to Mexico in the past two years, with eight coming from Texas, three from Arizona and one from California.

The Post reports that Houston appears to be the number one city for guns traced to Mexican crimes.

“One of the reasons that Houston is the number one source, you can go to a different gun store for a month and never hit the same gun store,” J. Dewey Webb, special agent in charge of the Houston field division of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives told the Post. “You can buy [a 9mm handgun] down along the border, but if you come to Houston, you can probably buy it cheaper because there’s more dealers, there’s more competition.”

To read more click here.

W. Lee Rawls/ u of va. photo

WASHINGTON – W. Lee Rawls, who served as chief of staff and senior counsel to FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III until 2009, died earlier this month of acute leukemia in Washington, the Washington Post reported. He was 66.

The Post reported that he had previously served as assistant attorney general for legislative affairs under President George H.W. Bush and, from 2003 to 2005, as chief of staff to then-Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.)

In the course of his career, Rawls also served as  vice president of the lobbying firm Van Scoyoc Kelly, and led government relations efforts for Pennzoil and the Biotechnology Industry Organization, the Post reported.

He also taught at the National Defense University in Washington and the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, the Post reported.

To read more click here.

By Allan Lengel

WASHINGTON — Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers about the Vietnam War in 1971,  defended WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

“If I released the Pentagon Papers today, the same rhetoric and the same calls would be made about me,” Ellsberg said, according to the news organization Democracy Now! “I would be called not only a traitor—which I was then, which was false and slanderous—but I would be called a terrorist… Assange and Bradley Manning are no more terrorists than I am.”

Ellsberg, a former U.S. military analyst who was working for the RAND Corporation, ignited a controversy when he released the Pentagon Papers, a top secret document that discussed government policy about Vietnam.

He was charged under the Espionage Act of 1917. He was put on trial in federal court in Los Angeles in 1973, but U.S. District Judge William Matthew Byrne, Jr. ended up dismissing the case due to government misconduct.

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