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."

Comments

Is that what you call it, "controversial"?

[melted]

Is that what you call it, "controversial"? I'd sure hope that pardoning a convicted criminal at the last possible moment in exchange for a couple of million in "donations" is more than just "controversial". What does Bubba need to do in order for people to finally admit he has no moral compass? Publicly behead someone?

Re:Is that what you call it, "controversial"?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Is that what you call it, "controversial"?

[msauve]

The Hatch Act only applies to people. An automated Twitter feed is not a person.

Electronic voting

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps its time to investigate:

1. Electronic voting, all those open Wifi connections, and crap Windows 95 based terminals with exposed USB ports. Do you really want Putin to choose the next president?
2. Encryption, NSA allowed zero day exploits to go unpatched, and there has been an undermining of encryption. This has made USA less secure and it needs to be fixed. Quit talking shit about Syrian terrorists blowing up babies and start considering all those REAL political, business and industrial secrets that have been exposed to nasty foreign powers and their puppet agents.
3. Baltic states in particular have online voting and a large Russian population among which agents could be hidden. That's very very foolish. They need to look at the soldiers Russian planted in Ukraine to shit stir and realize their online voting is a liability, not an embrace of modern technology. It would be trivial to rig an election in Latvia the way its rigged in Russia.

This goddamned year

[pushing-robot]

I swear there's been a secret coup and The Onion has taken over the world.

Re:What is there to investigate?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, the computer script controlling the account is clearly partisan.

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. Nothing "partisan" or "evil" about it: just a script reading a bunch of finished FOIA requests that were probably started a year ago during the leadup to the Democratic primaries.

In other news...

[ClickOnThis]

FBI launches investigation into FBI investigation-launches. Investigators are investigating where to investigate investigators for the investigation. They're thinking Buffalo.

Meanwhile in news that actually fucking matters

[CajunArson]

Looks like the FBI has disclosed that not only was Clinton's email server almost certainly hacked, but the hacking got so blatant that even Clinton's own part-time staff who did the incompetent setup of a Microsoft Exchange server were able to figure out that something was going on and shut it down temporarily while she was still using it.

http://townhall.com/tipsheet/g...

Re:What is there to investigate?

[sh00z]

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.

Sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose?

[Ungrounded Lightning]

"The department also has a policy of not taking unnecessary action close in time to Election Day that might influence an electionâ(TM)s outcome. These rules have been followed during Republican and Democratic administrations."

So I guess it was "necessary" for the FBI to leak, four days before the election that George (H. W.) Bush was himself in-the-know on Iran-Contra?

Clinton's campaign made great hay with this particular October Surprise. That was the election where Clinton displaced Bush, denying him a second term and giving us the FIRST Clinton Presidency.

Ross Perot pulled down more than three times the difference between Clinton and Bush. Clinton was 7% short of a popular-vote majority.

Any bets on whether at least a third of Perot's votes, or at least enough of those (plus conservative voters who just didn't vote for president) to flip a few states and their electoral votes, were people who would have voted for Bush but were disgusted by this and voting for Perot as a protest?

Re:What is there to investigate?

[kenh]

Bush White House email controversy : 22 million emails deleted, those recovered not made public

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...