The top watchdog for the Homeland Security Department told a House oversight panel today that turf battles over internal corruption investigations have subsided and his agency is not backlogged with employee misconduct cases, but he deflected questions about an ongoing criminal investigation of a Texas branch office.
Facing an overwhelming backlog of corruption probes, the Department of Homeland Security's watchdog agency will unload almost half of its investigations of employees suspected of wrongdoing, officials said last week.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s watchdog agency is in turmoil amid allegations that its agents in Texas were told to falsify reports ahead of an office inspection last fall, according to an internal e-mail and interviews.
Several agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, including the former head of the agency's intelligence office, are subjects of an internal inquiry into alleged personal misconduct, sources say.
It’s often done in secret. Law enforcement investigators seek access to private user information stored by websites, routinely imposing a gag order that prohibits the Internet company from telling anyone about the demand.
So-called “needs assessments” are critical for determining where a community is vulnerable to catastrophe or terrorism. The federal government has required them of states in order to justify how they planned to use the $29 billion in homeland security grants Washington has handed out since Sept. 11. What safety and law enforcement equipment might be necessary to fill known security gaps?
It’s a world apart from New York City, different in almost every conceivable way. But Oklahoma City is essentially the only other place in America that’s experienced something comparable to the Sept. 11 attacks. The incident is added almost as an afterthought in discussions about terrorism to remind us that the threat is domestic in nature, too.
