By Allan Lengel ticklethewire.com He’s back. Ex-Ill. Gov. Rod Blagojevich — a man who never saw a microphone he didn’t like — has filed a pretrial motion seeking what he says is missing evidence including records of a phone call between Blagojevich aide John Harris and then White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, the…
Coleen Rowley, a former FBI special agent and legal counsel in the Minneapolis field office, wrote a “whistleblower” memo in May 2002 and testified to the Senate Judiciary on some of the FBI’s pre-9/11 failures. She retired in 2004 and is now a writer and speaker. By COLEEN ROWLEY Minneapolis Star-Tribune A secretive, unaccountable, post-9/11…
By Allan Lengel ticklethewire.com WASHINGTON — Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mi.), a former FBI agent, criticized the decision by President Obama to dispatch FBI director Robert S. Mueller to Arizona after the mass shooting on Saturday, according to the radio station WHMI in Livingston County, Mi., outside Detroit. “He didn’t need to be in Arizona to…
By Allan Lengel ticklethewire.com An FBI agent testified Tuesday that a Neo-Nazi on trial in federal court in Chicago once posted potentially harmful information about a popular African American Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. The agent’s testimony came in the trial of Neo-Nazi William White, who is charged with advocating…
By The Chicago Tribune Editorial Jack Riley left El Paso, Texas, to become the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s top man in Chicago. Even though he’s 1,500 miles from the border now, Mexico’s war against drug cartels still matters to him. It should matter to all of us. More than 90 percent of the marijuana, cocaine…
By Allan Lengel ticklethewire.com Some of his constituents have called him a nut, so perhaps the latest act of federal defendant Rod Blagojevich makes sense…or at least some cents. Blagojevich joins Snooki, comic Lewis Black, and “Keyboard Cat” as a pitchman in the Wonderful Pistachios’s “Get Crackin’” ad campaign, the Chicago Reader reports. Meanwhile, the…
By Allan Lengel ticklethewire.com WASHINGTON — As expected, the White House gave the nod on Monday to Andrew Traver, a 23-year-veteran of ATF, as the nominee to head the agency. Traver has headed the ATF Chicago field division since 2004. From 2001 to 2004, he served as an assistant special agent in charge of the…
By Allan Lengel ticklethewire.com The father and son legal team that represented chatty ex-Ill. Gov. Rod Blagojevich have asked a judge to release them as the lawyers in the case, the Associated Press reports. A hearing is set for Friday in downtown Chicago in preparation for the retrial for the for Blagojevich, who was convicted…
