By Allan Lengel ticklethewire.com WASHINGTON — ATF has stepped into a big pile of manure and it hasn’t been doing a very good job of trying to clean off its boots. I’m referring to the dust up over Operation Fast and Furious , a program out of Arizona in which ATF let “straw purchasers” buy…
By Allan Lengel ticklethewire.com It’s off to prison for ex-FBI agent Carlos Ortiz Jr. who threatened to harm his estranged wife — an FBI analyst — and the head of the Dallas FBI. Chief U.S. District Judge Sidney A. Fitzwater in Dallas on Friday sentenced Carlos, 49, to two years in prison after he pleaded…
By Allan Lengel ticklethewire.com Imagine taxpayers spending millions of dollars collectively trying an Illinois governor, and in the end, the case all but collapses. The jurors only convict on one of 24 counts . They end up deadlocked on the rest. Imagine that. Yes,it’s not too hard, considering it happened in the first trial of…
By Allan Lengel ticklethewire.com WASHINGTON – Though the FBI and Justice Department are thoroughly convinced that scientist Bruce Ivins mailed the deadly anthrax letters in 2001, it seems almost inevitable now that some very costly and protracted public hearing will be conducted to review the whole case. Unfortunately, Ivins killed himself in July 2008 before…
By Allan Lengel ticklethewire.com WASHINGTON – What’s it going to take for the White House to figure out that the situation in Mexico — endless bloodshed over money, drugs and power — is an “emergency”? The ambush of two ICE agents on Tuesday in which one died? The deadly ambush last March of a woman…
By Allan Lengel ticklethewire.com I have mixed feelings about a ruling last week by the U.S. Court of Appeals in Boston. The court rescinded an $8.5 million judgment handed down two years ago against the government in the 1982 murders of two people by James “Whitey” Bulger, a notorious Boston mobster who was an FBI…
By Allan Lengel ticklethewire.com WASHINGTON — It’s unclear where it all stands. But Martin Weil of the Washington Post reports that an FBI agent was taken into custody following a fatal car crash Monday night in Prince George’s County, just outside of Washington. The Post reported that an 18-year-old man was killed in the two-car…
By Greg Stejskal ticklethewire.com ANN ARBOR, Mi. — In 1977, two nurses, Filipina Narciso and Leonora Perez, were convicted of poisoning patients at the Ann Arbor (Michigan) Veterans Administration Hospital (VAH) after one of the longest trials in U.S. history. The prosecution and verdict became a cause celebre in Ann Arbor, across the nation and…
