FBI shirks duty

27 Jan 2007 // The FBI had a special obligation when first presented with troubling e-mails that then-U.S. Rep. Mark Foley of Florida sent to a former teenage page. The agency should have known that politics and the odd content of the e-mails put the agency in a unique position to dig further and ensure that the powerless were adequately protected from the powerful. But a report this week by the Justice Department's inspector general shows the nation's top law enforcement agency dodged its job and tried to shift the blame for shirking its responsibility.

There is enough finger-pointing in the Foley case to go around. Members of Congress and their staff members did not effectively deal with the situation, either.

But given the tools at the FBI's disposal, it is unacceptable that the agency would treat the case as a hot potato to be passed from office to office. In the e-mails, Foley asks the boy his age, requests a photo and remarks that another was "in really great shape." Though those initial messages were not sexually explicit and officials concluded there was no sign of a crime at the time, the inspector general reasonably concludes that the FBI should have taken a closer look at Foley's behavior.

The inspector general found that agents bounced the e-mails from office to office as they haggled over who had responsibility for pursuing them. The Fort Pierce Republican abruptly resigned Sept. 29 following reports that he sent explicit instant messages to teenage boys. While the earlier messages may have lacked a smoking gun, they provided, as the inspector general said, "enough troubling indications on their face." At the very least the FBI should have passed its concerns to House managers or congressional watchdog agencies.

The report also noted the FBI misled the public by trying to blame a watchdog group for redacting the e-mails it passed along to the FBI. The inspector general found that the advocacy group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, had not withheld information, and that missing material was not behind the bureau's decision to drop the matter. Whether the culprit was laziness or fear or bureaucrats simply passing the buck, the FBI failed to do its job.