FBI Agents Abroad Find Commercial Sex An Unfortunate "Cultural Thing," End Up Resigned Or Retired

Kudos to National Public Radio, our government-supported media, for reporting on a FOIA disclosure that details the sexual hijinks of FBI officials "on assignment overseas." 

Does that mean posted overseas, and therefore under the authority of a Chief of Mission, AKA The Ambassador, or just traveling overseas TDY? From the NPR report, I'm not sure. 

Here it is: New DOJ watchdog report details FBI officials' misconduct with foreign prostitutes.

Six FBI officials working on assignment overseas solicited or had sex with prostitutes, including at a karaoke bar, a massage parlor, and a gentlemen's club, and then were not forthcoming when questioned by investigators, according to a document released by the Justice Department's internal watchdog.

The DOJ's Inspector General's Office made public in 2021 a barebones, one-page summary of its findings that FBI officials had accepted "commercial sex" while on duty abroad, but it did not disclose any details on the misconduct itself.

Now, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, the Inspector General's office has released what's known as a Report of Investigation that dates to Oct. 20, 2021. The 37-page document is heavily redacted, including all references to the identities of the FBI officials as well as the country or countries where the misconduct took place, but it provides a wealth of new details about the six officials' actions.

It seems that our heroes, the traveling FBI agents, frequently accepted opportunities for commercial sex offered to them by their overseas law enforcement counterparts. 

Thinking of this from the government point of view, I wonder if those offers created a protocol problem in that they put our officials in the position of having to accept a gift in order to avoid embarrassment to the host government? Could be.

One of the offenders quoted in the OIG report seems to be making that sort of excuse.

In that same section of the report, an FBI official whose name is blacked out told investigators that he has paid for commercial sex but there have been "zero occasions" where a foreign country has "tried to leverage him as a result of their providing him with a prostitute, adding this is a 'cultural thing unfortunately.'"

I can see how that might happen. It's after work, the locals take our FBI agent out to a cop bar for drinks, then show him the local sights, and end the night with a freebie sent up to his hotel room compliments of his new buddies. 

That's been known to happen even within CONUS, "unfortunately." How much more likely that it will happen among benighted foreigners? 

Once back home, however, there were consequences imposed for that misguided cultural exchange.

The officials' actions violated multiple FBI policies, including failing to report contacts with foreign nationals, and failing to report their own misconduct as well as their colleagues' misconduct.

The report says three of the officials implicated in the report resigned, two retired and one was removed from his position.

Let that be a lesson to federal law enforcement officers in general. From now on, leave the tricky overseas cross-cultural stuff to intelligence community people who have the aptitude and training for it. 

 

Lots of Old-Man-Yelling-At-A-Cloud Energy But No Rebuttal of Special Counsel's Report

 

There have been only 21,000 views of Joe Biden's most ill-advised press conference, despite 2 million White House YouTube subscribers? 

Are internet surfers having trouble locating it, or something? 

Well, at least CNN has seen it, and CNN actually posted this response: Fact check: Biden makes three false claims about his handling of classified information:

Biden was combative, forcefully rejecting Hur’s claims that he has a poor memory. But the president was also repeatedly inaccurate, making three claims that were clearly contradicted by [Department of Justice special counsel] Hur’s report.

Specifically, CNN notes three times POTUS made what can only be characterized as false claims concerning where his "willfully retained" and shared classified documents have been all these years, how they were stored, and what level of sensitivity they had. 

This is black-and-white stuff. POTUS was not exonerated by the report - quite the opposite - and his emphatic denials at that presser did not rebut anything in the report. 

Hur decided not to prosecute for the embarrassing reason that a jury might take pity on forgetful and belligerent Grandpa Biden and overlook his culpability. That's a great legal dodge, but a strong political hit since that old man yelling at a cloud is the Chief Executive of the USA. 

That press conference will leave a big mark.

"Wake Up, Mister Jalamneh, it's Time For Your Shot"

"Hamas confirmed that Jalamneh was one of its members. The Jenin Brigade, which includes a number of Palestinian armed resistance groups, said in a statement that two of the three men were members of Islamic Jihad" (it says right here). 

This week's killing of a Hamas leader inside a West Bank hospital generated a lot of amateur commentary of the Geneva Convention-sort. Do the laws of war really prohibit troops from posing as doctors to attack an enemy in a hospital? 

Put precisely, the question is: was the Israeli action a "ruse of war" - and perfectly legitimate - or a "perfidy" of the sort the Convention prohibits?

Frankly, who cares? Modern conflict against sub-state adversaries inside dense urban terrain renders quaint any of the notions that govern war between nation states. 

Israeli troops (or maybe they were civilian agents) entered a hospital posing as medical staff or patients to carry out the highly targeted assassination of a Hamas leader and two associates who were themselves posing as patients. Was that ruse or perfidy?

It doesn't matter. Whichever, it was occurring on both sides. Hospitals lose their protected status under the laws of war when they are used for military purposes. Any surviving Hamas leaders ought to be on notice that they need to avoid hiding in hospitals - or using hospitals as arms depots, or hostage prisons, etc., etc. - if they want to stay on the good side of the Geneva Convention. 

 

Socializing Costs to Maximize Private Profit (In the Name of Compassion, Of Course)

UK news media has observed outrage over Democrat-run Maine town's luxury digs for migrants, which is more than most of our domestic news media have done. The key quotes, from my main point of interest:

Maine State Housing Authority budgeted nearly $3.5 million to cover the rents of 60 migrant families in five buildings in Brunswick for two years. 

They are expected to eventually get permission to work and start earning to pay their own way. 

The state is also allocating $100,000 to help dozens of Brunswick migrants process their asylum applications and secure work permits. 

A bus service is in the works to help the migrants get into town.

In other words, the Maine State Housing Authority and other official bodies are providing a bald-faced example of government picking up the social costs of that cheap labor some businesses love so much, especially those in the construction, agriculture, retail, and hospitality industries. 

California has gone a giant step further and, starting last week, will enroll all undocumented immigrants in Medi-Cal, California's version of the federal Medicaid program for people with low incomes. Even states that haven't taken that step are nevertheless facing financial collapse due to their own mandates to provide emergency room treatment, primary care, dental care, and childbirth to illegal migrants. 

Some state hospital systems, such as Denver's, are now asking for federal government bailouts to rescue them from their own decisions. Or, phrasing it more generously, to share their compassion with taxpayers in all 50 states.  

I suspect that the 22,000 illegal migrants whom Denver reports used its hospital system without charge in the past year just might be employed somewhere or other. Perhaps we might ask those employers to share a bit of that compassion before passing the bill along to the rest of us? 

Say, wasn't there once a great ruckus raised by the populist left over businesses that dumped the social costs of low-wage jobs on to the taxpayer? I believe there was. Socializing costs to maximize private profit was once an issue. For example, this:

“When big companies use the Walmart loophole to force workers on to Medi-Cal, taxpayers pick up the tab,” said California Labor Federation head Art Pulaski. Medi-Cal is the state’s health care program for the poor, elderly and disabled. 

“Today we are putting legislators on notice that it’s time to hold big corporations accountable to pay their fair share for health care like the rest of us.”

That fine statement was issued back in 2013. You could say the same thing today only now the problem is coming from our elected officials instead of Wal-Mart.

 

Sadder But (Maybe) Wiser, HRC's Seminar Students Give Her a Poor Review

HRC word cloud - WaPo (2015)

What's with kids today? Some disappointed students took to the news media this week to criticize Hillary Clinton for putting on an "uninspiring class" at Columbia University, and also "failing to loosen up" (sic, really? Loosen up? Hillary?). 

You can read about it here. Some choice quotes:

The student said it felt like Clinton became less relatable as the semester continued.

-- snip --

The student said she believed Clinton could have "been more honest" with the students.

"Usually whenever you start to… get to know [politicians] more on a personal basis, you start to like them a little bit more because they become more humanized. Over the course of the semester, though, I feel like Hillary Clinton became more of a politician than she was at the end."

I'm shaking my head ruefully. She thought Hillary would be relatable and honest? Has it been her experience that politicians become humanized when you sit in a chair and listen to them? 

Those students could have saved themselves whatever money Colombia charged them for that seminar if they had just done a careful read of the word cloud above. You see how the words UNETHICAL and LIES stand out? That's how WaPo readers saw HRC when she was running for President. 

She hasn't gotten any better behaved or more honest since then. Today you'd probably find BITTER in the center of that cloud, but no other changes.

Write it off, you naïve college kids. Consider yourselves lucky to have learned a big life lesson early. 

No Kidding, AMCITs Often Engage in 'Client Aggression' At Consular Hardline Windows

Why the ACS section also has hardened glass: Entitled AMCITs pic.twitter.com/quNkpIkwWF

— diplomattitude (@diplomattitude) December 31, 2023

In the halcyon pre-Inman days of embassy security there were no physical barriers at all between Consular Officers and their clients, whether foreign or domestic. "Hardline" walls, doors, and especially windows started to be introduced around 1985-ish, often to furious opposition. 

Those of us who implemented the new requirements had only one reliable ally, and that was the low-level officer who had to sit behind the new windows. The bosses often railed against those windows - which, in fairness, had problems that were yet to be solved, such as poor sound transmission* - but I noticed that the poor officers who had to sit behind them were silently grateful. 

Now, as to AMCITs versus foreigners, any experienced Consular guy that you asked back then told you that the worse threat came from AMCITs. That was so true that when we didn't have the security money to install hardline glass at every consular window at a given post, we prioritized installing it in ACS sections, because those were often the only places the staff had been physical threatened and/or assaulted. 

Being a numbers guy, I researched this phenomenon with CA/EX in order to document the incidence of assaults on Consular Officers - "client aggression" was the term back then - and justify prioritizing security resources on ACS sections. It was counterintuitive maybe, but easily provable, that THAT was where the threat was.

* About that poor sound transmission, consider that office equipment located behind the hardline in those days, especially printers, was incredibly loud. Consider also that there were no privacy booths for most interviews. Add just the slightest touch of deafness on the part of the officer conducting an interview, and you got this kind of thing: "What? Eh? Tell me again, only louder, about all the personal stuff that compels you to come here today, and please disregard the rows and rows of your fellow foreigners who are sitting just feet away from you on that side of the hardline. Now proceed."

   

Are Self-Interested Domestic and Foreign Parties Spreading Dis-Info About You? That's A Job For Miss Dismal!

#Update
Minister of Defense Ministry and Security Head and clearance Affairs Commission Mawlawi Mohammad Yaqoob says; Efforts are being made by self-interested domestic and foreign parties to produce wrong information and send it to different directions through different channels pic.twitter.com/2lPkLK5ZBh

— Afghanistan 24/7 (@AfghanUpdates) December 31, 2023

This whole mis, dis, and mal information problem just keeps spreading. Now it's the Taliban who are suffering from malicious parties spreading 'wrong' information about them. 

"Welcome to the party, pal," as they say in my favorite New Years Eve movie. [As a public service, please be aware that if you start that movie at exactly 9:58:13 tonight, you'll see Hand Gruber drop off Nakatomi Plaza and hit the ground at midnight. Better than the Times Square ball drop!]

Someone should let the Taliban know that we in the USA have developed robust countermeasures against just such wrong information. I confess to being a little unclear as to exactly who it is who defines 'wrong' from 'right' (and patriotic!) information, but once that wrong stuff is identified we have no end of mysterious and inextricable official justice that we can sic on those malicious parties, be they foreign or domestic. 

Click on the Miss Dismal link to learn more.