The Bush administration never volunteers anything and they tend to stonewall investigations, punish whistleblowers, and destroy leakers. So, this is probably much worse than it sounds.
An internal FBI audit has found that the bureau potentially violated the law or agency rules more than 1,000 times while collecting data about domestic phone calls, e-mails and financial transactions in recent years, far more than was documented in a Justice Department report in March that ignited bipartisan congressional criticism.
The new audit covers just 10 percent of the bureau’s national security investigations since 2002, and so the mistakes in the FBI’s domestic surveillance efforts probably number several thousand, bureau officials said in interviews. The earlier report found 22 violations in a much smaller sampling.
Mistakes. Mistakes were made. This is the new mantra. Does anyone get fired? These aren’t mistakes. This is a culture of corruption. We need a new Church Commission.
