Well, this won’t help the U.S. Secret Service if it’s trying to shake it rep as a party-and-get-crazy agency.

Carol D. Leonnig and David Nakamura of the Washington Post report that three Secret Service agents on the presidential detail this week in Amsterdam were sent home and put on administrative leave Sunday after going out for a night of drinking.

The paper, citing “three people familiar with the incident,” said one of the agents was found drunk and passed out in a hotel hallway.

The Post wrote that hotel staff alerted the U.S. Embassy in the Netherlands after finding the unconscious agent Sunday morning, a day before President Obama arrived in the country.

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But the texts had nothing to do with the case against Diversified Business Services and Investments. Winmill has now turned to deciding just what to tell jurors about the death of Morse, who carried out the criminal investigation into the company.

“At this point we know she was texting,” Winmill said Tuesday morning. “It was innocuous banter back and forth with her husband. It was not in any way connected with the case.”

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An FBI agent who had testified in a criminal fraud trial in federal court in Idaho killed herself after testifying on March 19, the Idaho Statesmen reports.

FBI agent Rebekah Morse killed herself.

The paper reported that she may have lied under oath when she told Chief U.S. District Judge B. Lynn Winmill last week that she turned off her phone and wasn’t texting while on the witness stand.

The paper reported:

Morse, who carried out the criminal investigation into the company, testified at the trial March 18 and 19. She killed herself sometime the evening of Wednesday, March 19, or Thursday morning.

Transcripts of text messages obtained from Morse’s phone after her death appear to indicate she had sent a message or messages during the time she was on the stand, defense attorney Jeffrey Robinson said.

“She made a deliberate decision to say she wasn’t texting when she was texting from the witness stand,” Robinson said.

A juror notified a court clerk during a break on Wednesday that he or she had seen Morse texting two or three times, according to the court records.

Morse’s phone was taken from her under an order from Winmill and placed in a secured court evidence vault. It remained in the vault after Morse died.

To read more click here. 

Steve Neavling

FBI agents watched the video “hundreds and hundreds” times.

For those investigating the Boston Marathon bombing, the video was a eureka moment, the Boston Globe reports, citing a “60 Minutes” video.

Stephanie Douglas, executive assistant director of the FBI’s national security branch, said the video, which has not been released, shows a man in a white cap droping off a backpack and then failing to turn his head like everyone else when the bomb exploded.

He does not do what everybody else in that video does. He does not turn to his left,” Douglas said. “He instead just stands there for a second or two and walks very deliberately back the same direction that he came in.”

Authorities believe the man in the video was Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the bombing suspects.

Robert Mueller

Former FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III is joining the private sector.

The New York Times reports that Mueller, who served as director for 12 years before stepping down in September, is becoming a partner of the law firm WilmerHale.

“Bob brings to the firm his broad range of experience as a career prosecutor, an ability to lead the most sensitive investigations, his steady hand in a crisis and unquestioned integrity,” Robert Novick, co-managing partner of WilmerHale, said in a statement.

Mueller brings quite the background, which includes a Princeton degree, a Bronze Star for his service in Vietnam and years as the U.S. attorney in both San Francisco and Boston.

istock photo

Dargan Frierson, whose career with the FBI included keeping tabs on the Ku Klux Klan, died Saturday.

He was 92, the News & Record reports.

His son recalls his father working a “tough assignment.”

“I remember him getting calls in the middle of the night, having to drive down to the Eastern part of the state, where they had a bombing, Dargan Frierson Jr. said of his father. “But he did it every day. Put in those extra hours. He was a hardworking agent. He was courageous. He was a great father and grandfather.”

Dargan Frierson spent much of his career recruiting KKK members, including George Dorsett, chaplain of the United Klans of America.

Steve Neavling

No one knows about lie detector tests quite like William J. Warner.

A confession specialist for the FBI during his 22-year career, Warner published a fictionalized account of his work as a polygraph operator, the Orlando Sentinel reports.

The 58-year-old’s book, “Going Knee to Knee,” describes the art of getting a good interview.

“If you want them to profess their soul to you, they have to see that you care about them,” Warner said of his subjects. “It’s a challenge to be gentle with these types of people, to get the truth out of them.”

The book’s main character is Special agent Cy Donovan.

tsa.gov

The TSA has spent $1 billion on training airport security screeners to read body language.

Trouble is, critics charges there’s no evidence that the training prevented a single act of terrorism, the New York Times reports.

Scientific experiments show that people are terrible at spotting liars, and law enforcement is no exception. “There’s an illusion of insight that comes from looking at a person’s body,” says Nicholas Epley, a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago. “Body language speaks to us, but only in whispers.”

The conclusion follows an analysis of more than 200 studies, the Times reported.

“The common-sense notion that liars betray themselves through body language appears to be little more than a cultural fiction,” said Maria Hartwig, a psychologist at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City.

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