He is 100% usless and inconsequential. The position is a cypher, a PR sop.. REALLY not worth the salary he's paid.
How do I know this?
Mere
DAYS after he released a report excoriating the FBI for overstepping their authority in spying on peaceful activists, Quakers and the like..
. . . the FBI executed raids
all over the Country doing the
same damn thinghttp://readersupportednews.org/off-site-news-section/44-44/3435-fbi-raids-target-midwestern-anti-war-activistsMore from FBI whistleblower Coleen Rowley
An agent gains "stats" for serving subpoenas, national security letters for records, executing search warrants, contacting confidential sources, etc., whether or not any relevant evidence is obtained via this "work" and whether or not it leads to prosecution or preventing a crime. It is a well known fact that nearly 1,000 people were rounded up and detained (mostly in New York City) immediately after 9-11. None of those detained were ever identified as "terrorists" but that's when these career enhancing "stats" began to be awarded for each detention, arrest, subpoena, search warrant, etc.
The IG, however, has only reviewed FBI "terrorism" investigations thus far from 2002 to 2006. What happened in Iowa City in 2008 shows the FBI did not cease its improper investigations after 2006. Documents obtained through FOIA showed the FBI and its local law enforcement partners targeted students and anti-war activists in Iowa City, following them to parks, food co-ops, libraries, bars and restaurants, etc., over a 9 month period with little factual justification other than the allegation that the group was plotting to protest the Republican National Convention. The FBI even managed to secretly search the anti-war members' personal trash.
It would therefore seem that someone should quickly contact the IG and ask for review of those cases since 2006. Additionally "whistleblower complaints" can be made concerning fraud, waste, abuse and illegality by citizens to the Office of Special Counsel.
Friday's raids in Minneapolis occurred after the prior Attorney General Guidelines were erased that used to require a level of factual justification before domestic groups could be spied on. Additionally, the Patriot Act and an earlier 1996 law
broadly prohibiting "material support to terrorism" were allowed to stand even though these laws make speech advocating human rights a terrorist crime. The final problem is the law enforcement mindset first seen back in 2003 from a spokesman for the California Anti-Terrorism Information Center (CATIC) who was forced to defend his agency's unjustified targeting of anti-war protesters without any factual evidence. CATIC Spokesman Van Winkle, apparently without thinking too hard, reasoned that evidence wasn't needed to issue warnings on war protesters. "You can make an easy kind of a link that, if you have a protest group protesting a war where the cause that's being fought against is international terrorism, you might have terrorism at that (protest)," said Van Winkle, "You can almost argue that a protest against (the "war on terror") is a terrorist act."