Hillary Clinton

By Steve Neavling
ticklethewire.com

Some veteran FBI agents say the bureau’s reputation has been permanently damaged by the handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation.

The New York Post reports that FBI Director James Comey reported to “unheard-of ground rules and other demands by the lawyers for Cinton and her aides that limited their investigation.”

“In my 25 years with the bureau, I never had any ground rules in my interviews,” said retired agent Dennis V. Hughes, the first chief of the FBI’s computer-investigations unit.

Among the complaints is that Comey offered immunity to several key witnesses, rather than compelling testimony through a grand jury.

The Post wrote:

The immunity agreements came with outrageous side deals, including preventing agents from searching for any documents on a Dell laptop owned by former Clinton chief of staff Cheryl Mills generated after Jan. 31, 2015, when she communicated with the server administrator who destroyed subpoenaed e-mails.

Comey also agreed to have Mills’ laptop destroyed after the restricted search, denying Congress the chance to look at it and making the FBI an accomplice to the destruction of evidence.

Comey’s immunized witnesses nonetheless suffered chronic lapses in memory, made unsubstantiated claims of attorney-client privilege upon tougher questioning and at least two gave demonstrably false statements. And yet Comey indulged it all.

What’s more, Comey cut a deal to give Clinton a “voluntary” witness interview on a major holiday, and even let her ex-chief of staff sit in on the interview as a lawyer, even though she, too, was under investigation.

Dahir Ahmed Adan

By Steve Neavling
ticklethewire.com

Dahir Ahmed Adan, who stabbed 20 people at a Minnesota mall, was different than most terrorists.

Just months before the Sept. 17 attacks, the 20-year-old academic standout became interested in Islam and began to distance himself from friends, the FBI said Thursday.

“We were told (he) had not previously shown an interest in religion,” Minneapolis FBI Special Agent in Charge Rick Thornton said at a news conference, the Associated Press reports. 

“The totality of Dahir Adan’s behavior and the actions suggest he may have been radicalized either with the influence of others or on his own,” Thornton said.

The shift was so sudden that Adan’s family believed he was doing as good as he used to do,” the attorney for Adan’s family, Abdulwahid Osman, said. “That is not the son they knew.”

Adan used two steak knives in the attack before he was shot and killed.

“We have numerous credible witness accounts of him asking victims during the attack if they were Muslim and at least one instance yelling ‘Allahu akbar’ while stabbing one of his victims and others heard him yelling ‘Islam Islam’ during the attack,” Thornton said.

New Jersey Transit train, via Wikipedia

By Steve Neavling
ticklethewire.com

A New Jersey Transit commuter train that crashed into a Hoboken terminal last week sped up and was going twice the 10 mph speed limit, the National Transportation Safety Board said Thursday.

The findings come from a data recorder and video from the front of the train, the Associated Press reports.

Less than a second before the crash, the train’s engineer used the emergency brake, the NTSB said.

The train was traveling 8 mph until about 38 seconds before the crash, when the throttle increased and train sped up to a maximum of 21 mph.

The train has an alert system that sounds an alarm when the train exceeds 20 mph. It’s still unclear whether the system worked.

Border Fence along Mexico and the U.S.

By Steve Neavling
ticklethewire.com

When it comes to catching to immigrants who illegally entered the U.S. from Mexico last year, only about half were caught, according to a Homeland Security report.

Homeland Security previously said about 81% of the people who entered the U.S. illegally were captured, Tribune news services report.  

But during the 2015 fiscal year, that number was 54%.

The 98-page report from May was not publicly released by Homeland Security, but the Associated Press obtained a copy.

The report found that 170,000 snuck in without being captured, compared to 210,000 in 2014 and 1.7 million in 2005.

The decline in illegal entries comes as the U.S. increased border security spending, which is now $14 billion a year.

“This is the first solid evidence we have that the border buildup of the last 20 years has indeed made some significant difference in deterring and reducing illegal entries across the southern border,” said Edward Alden, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

By Steve Neavling
ticklethewire.com

The FBI may be headed for another legal showdown with Apple.

Eight months after the FBI asked a court to order Apple to help hack into the encrypted iPhone of San Bernardino shooter Rizwan Farook, the bureau has obtained the iPhone of the man who stabbed 10 people in a Minnesota mall, Wired reports. 

Tahir Adan’s phone is locked with a passcode, and FBI agents are still trying to access the contents.

“Dahir Adan’s iPhone is locked,” FBI special agent Rich Thorton told reporters, “We are in the process of assessing our legal and technical options to gain access to this device and the data it may contain.”

Thornton didn’t reveal the model of iPhone or its operating system.

Apple declined to help the FBI break into Farook’s phone, prompting the bureau to hire an outside entity to access the phone.

Other Stories of Interest

• FBI Announces Arrests of 28 in Crackdown of Violent Gangs
• Metro Detroit Woman, 94, Shares Memories of Job at FBI
• FBI Looks to Hire Hundreds of College Graduates
• To Stop Homeland Attacks, Take a Page from Secret Service
• Justice Department Launches Investigation into Alabama’s Prisons