“I knew that I had to get the electronic evidence to outside investigators,” he told me. A day before his early arrival at the office, McConnell had learned of an order to delete the screenshots on his computer. They sent a lawyer to Key West with nondisclosure agreements, but McConnell refused to sign. officials had been trying to stop McConnell from revealing the agency’s activities. The scope of the scheme was corroborated in hundreds of pages of e-mails, transcripts, and other documents obtained by The New Yorker.įor weeks, C.I.A. and the F.B.I.: the former received information obtained during operations, and the latter reported increased arrests and was able to secure additional federal funding as a result. This is activities beyond your view, fundamentally affecting what happens in American courts.”īut the scheme benefitted the C.I.A. “This should worry Trump voters who talk about a ‘deep state.’ This is the quintessential deep state. “This was undisclosed information, from an agency working internationally with different rules and standards,” Nancy Gertner, a retired federal district judge and a senior lecturer at Harvard Law School, told me. Since the country’s founding, judges, jurors, and defendants have generally had the right to know how evidence used in a trial was gathered. agents were found to have performed experiments with LSD on unwitting Americans and investigated Vietnam War protesters, restrictions were imposed that bar the agency from being involved in domestic law-enforcement activities. Critics call such concealment “intelligence laundering.” In the nineteen-seventies, after C.I.A. agents, in violation of federal law and Department of Justice guidelines, had concealed the information’s origins from federal prosecutors, leaving judges and defense lawyers in the dark. investigations were actually from a secret C.I.A. But McConnell had learned that more than a hundred entries in the database that were labelled as originating from F.B.I. The entries are typically submitted to Helios by the Drug Enforcement Administration, the F.B.I., and a division of the Department of Homeland Security. Every year, entries in the Helios database lead to hundreds of drug busts, which lead to prosecutions in American courts. McConnell had uncovered what he described as a “criminal conspiracy” perpetrated by the C.I.A. Then he printed backup copies and, following government procedures for handling classified information, sealed them in an envelope that he placed in another envelope, marked “ SECRET.” He hid the material behind a piece of furniture. McConnell e-mailed the images to a classified government hotline for whistle-blowers. On a computer approved for the handling of classified information, he loaded a series of screenshots he had taken, showing entries in a database called Helios, which federal law enforcement uses to track drug smugglers. On the second floor, he punched in the code for his office door, then locked it behind him. McConnell, a prosecutor at the Department of Justice and a former marine, left his phone in a box designed to block electronic transmissions, and passed through a metal detector and a key-card-protected air lock to enter the building. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.īefore dawn on January 23, 2019, Mark McConnell arrived at the Key West headquarters of the military and civilian task force that monitors drugs headed to the United States from the Southern Hemisphere.
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