Slain FBI Agent Sam Hicks/fbi photo

In a surprise development, a woman who fatally shot Pittsburgh FBI agent Sam Hicks in 2008 is set to enter a guilty plea in federal court Tuesday morning, court records show.

U.S. District Judge Terrence F. McVerry set the plea date for Christina Korbe just three days after he ordered the federal jury administrator to summon 350 people to serve as the jury pool for the March 7 trial. The potential jurors were set to report to the courthouse on Feb. 14 for preliminary instructions.

Christina Korbe is charged with shooting Hicks to death. Hicks and other agents had come to the house to serve an arrest warrant for Korbe’s husband. She opened fire, killing Hicks. Her husband Robert Korbe has been sentenced to 25 years in prison on drug and other charges. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette first reported the plea agreement.

Authorities said when the agents came to the home, Robert Korbe ran in the basement to get rid of cocaine and his wife Christina opened fire from upstairs.

In November 2009, the Baltimore FBI building was named after Hicks, who had been a Baltimore cop before joining the FBI.

Coleen Rowley, a former FBI special agent and legal counsel in the Minneapolis field office, wrote a “whistleblower” memo in May 2002 and testified to the Senate Judiciary on some of the FBI’s pre-9/11 failures. She retired in 2004 and is now a writer and speaker.

FBI Agent Colleen Rowley/ photo ia.ucsb.edu

A secretive, unaccountable, post-9/11 homeland security apparatus has increasingly turned inward on American citizens.

The evidence includes everything from controversial airport body scanners to the FBI’s raids last September on antiwar activists’ homes in Minneapolis and Chicago. A federal grand jury investigation in Chicago was recently expanded.

Unless the erosion of proper legal safeguards is halted, we risk a return to Vietnam-era abuses on the part of the FBI and other security agencies.

Agents are now given a green light, for instance, to check off “statistical achievements” by sending well-paid, manipulative informants into mosques and peace groups.

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