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FBI Launches Internal Investigation Into Its Own Twitter Account (thinkprogress.org)
An anonymous reader shares a report on ThinkProgress: The FBI has launched an internal investigation into one of its own Twitter accounts. The account at issue, @FBIRecordsVault, had been dormant for more than a year. Then on October 30 at 4 a.m., the account released a flood of documents, including one describing Donald Trump's father Fred Trump as a "philanthropist." But it wasn't until two days later, when the account tweeted documents regarding President Clinton's controversial pardon of Marc Rich that the account began to attract significant attention. The account has not been active since that tweet. ThinkProgress has learned that the FBI's Inspection Division will undertake an investigation of the account. Candice Will, Assistant Director for the FBI's Office of Professional Responsibility, said she was referring the matter to the FBI's Inspection Division for an "investigation." Upon completion of the investigation, the Office of Professional Responsibility will be referred back to the Office of Professional Responsibility for "adjudication."
It doesn't really matter what happened 16 years ago. This is a federal agency tweeting out partisan tweets a week before the election. That is a violation of the Hatch Act. If they wanted to make a stink of it, the FBI could have released that information at any time over the past 18 months. But a week before the election is a violation of the Hatch Act.
The Hatch Act of 1939, officially An Act to Prevent Pernicious Political Activities, is a United States federal law whose main provision prohibits employees in the executive branch (of which the FBI is part of) of the federal government from engaging in some forms of political activity.
I thought they already explained this: the Twitter account automatically tweets when a certain number of FOIA requests have been reached for a set of documents. I'm guessing that a bunch of FOIA requests from early in the election season finally went through, so you're getting tweets just now that are all related to Clinton.
Who is the "they" that explained it this way? It's trivially easy to disprove. Just look at the Fred Trump document. it appears to be a 1991 release of data in response to a 1966 FOIA request, containing information covering the years 1962-1988. The only thing new is "adding" the document to this WWW-based "vault." I'm sure similar metadata could be retrieved form the Clinton documents. This is just a blatant Hatch Act violation.
It doesn't matter that he sold pardons? You don't want us to know what kind of people we're voting for, because it might make us vote against corruption? Glad to know where you stand on this, CTR.
It's an automatic Twitter feed. The Hatch Act is to outlaw people using their authority to influence an election, not to prevent the FBI from doing their job. The reason there's more activity now is that you no longer need to go clear to the top, or inform them, when releasing FOIA materials. And people are now submitting tons of FOIA requests that are going through because they're no longer being censored by the top brass who were covering these things up all this time. If they hadn't covered this crap up for so many decades, there would be nothing to out. If she hadn't lied to Congress and hidden her emails, there would be nothing to out.
Besides, how could you prove any intent to sway the election? I mean, if this doesn't count as intent, just how would you prove that releasing FOIA materials as authorized by law was intentionally swaying an election? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bC1Mc6-RDyQ
This is specifically authorized by law. Lying to Congress is against it.
Wait, when you say "deleted" what you really mean is "stored on mis-filed backup tapes" - right?
And when you say "not made public" you mean because they weren't asked to be released to the public, right? They were handed over to the requesting legal bodies, no crimes were found, and the issue dropped...
Wikipedia is such a lousy source, why not turn to CNN?
BTW, The "Bush Secret Server" was a public email server, did not carry classified information, and was used in an effort to COMPLY with federal regulations (The Hatch Act), not to subvert the FOIA act...
Ken