LF: Report: DEA Blowing Money On Liars, Thieves, And Amtrak Employees

If the Drug War is US law enforcement's wildly-swinging fist, the DEA is its middle finger. Once the pointless brutality stops, the finger is extended to everyone -- especially taxpayers.

Even the agency's name inadvertently belies its twisted motivations: "Drug Enforcement Administration." Without further information, the name, on its own, seems to suggest a shoring up of the drug trade, rather than an adversarial force.

The DEA has a lot of skin in the drug game. Without the steady flow of drugs, it ceases to exist. It operates with a great deal of autonomy and is often excused its worst excesses because most people agree (without much thought) that drugs are bad.

The DEA controls a vast network of confidential informants. Actually, to state it more accurately, the DEA oversees… Never mind. The DEA pays a great deal of money to confidential informants. Beyond handing out cash, the DEA apparently does little else to keep its informants in line.

A just-released Inspector General's report [PDF] on the DEA's use of confidential informants finds the agency has no problem paying out vast sums of money to lying informants and that it maintains a small army of otherwise-employed citizens who moonlight as cash/drug-sniffing humans for the nation's top drug warriors.

This year's report builds on the lowlights of last year's examination of the DEA's informant program, in which the OIG basically stated the entire program runs without sufficient oversight. Nothing has changed in the interim. This report includes even more details of excess, abuse, and stupidity.

Fun fact: lying to prosecutors, judges, and the DEA itself isn't enough to prevent the agency from giving an informant even more chances to lie -- all the while being paid handsomely for making stuff up.

[W]hile DEA policy prohibits paying deactivated sources who were deactivated because of an arrest warrant or for committing a serious offense, we found two concerning instances of payments to previously-deactivated sources. In one case, the DEA reactivated a confidential source who previously provided false testimony in trials and depositions. During the approximate 5-year period of reactivation, this source was used by 13 DEA field offices and paid $469,158. More than $61,000 of the $469,158 was paid after this source was once again deactivated for making false statements to a prosecutor.

That's just one case. There are many more. The OIG notes that $9.4 million in tax dollars was shelled out to deactivated informants, suggesting that not working for the DEA is a great way to make a living.

Then there's the so-called "limited use" informants. These are Amtrak, airline, and parcel service employees the DEA pays to keep any eye out for cash and drugs. Lots of money is misspent here with even less oversight than goes into the paying-people-for-doing-nothing program.

Another area of concern is the DEA’s oversight of confidential sources it categorized as “Limited Use,” often referred to as “tipsters,” which DEA policy specifies are sources who make information available independently without direction by the DEA. The Limited Use category is regarded by the DEA as low-risk and therefore DEA policy requires the least supervision. Yet we found that Limited Use sources were some of DEA’s highest paid sources, with 477 Limited Use sources during the period of our review having received an estimated $26.8 million.
[...]
Some of these sources received significant payments for their assistance, including an airline employee who received more than $600,000 in less than 4 years, and a parcel employee who received over $1 million in 5 years.

Unsurprisingly, the DEA is very interested in cash, despite its supposed drug focus. Consequently, "limited use" informants need a bit more hands-on treatment to keep them zeroed in on seizable currency. As the OIG points out, the extra attention paid to handling "limited use" informants makes them no longer "limited use" -- and therefore supposedly subject to stricter oversight. Not that this happened either.

We believe that DEA Agents directed the actions of these sources extensively enough that they could not reasonably be understood to have acted “without direction” and therefore do not fit the definition or purpose of “Limited Use.”
[...]
We also found the DEA did not appropriately track all confidential source activity; did not document proper justifications for all source payments; and, at times, did not adequately safeguard traveler information.

The DEA is given billions of dollars to work with every year. Some of this goes to its informants, some of which are very unreliable. Apparently none of the budget goes towards recordkeeping.

Because DEA’s files do not detail the universe of information provided by its sources, it is unable to examine their reliability and whether they frequently or rarely provide useful information, or whether the information DEA agents acted upon resulted in identifying individuals involved in illegal activity or instead caused DEA to regularly approach innocent civilians for questioning. We are deeply concerned about this inability to assess source reliability, which seriously impairs DEA’s ability to oversee and manage the activity of these sources and the Confidential Source Program overall.

As if its lying informants weren't troublesome enough, the DEA also gave informants free reign to act as contractors and "hire" their own informants to work underneath them. Unlike other Ponzi schemes, the sucker here is at the top of the pyramid, rather than the bottom.

Additionally, we were extremely concerned to discover the DEA condoned its confidential sources’ use of “sub-sources,” who are individuals a source recruits and pays to perform activities or provide information related to the source’s work for the DEA. During our review of DEA files, we found evidence of sources who were paid based, in part, on the need to pay “sub-sources,” but the information in the files was insufficient to allow us to determine the full extent of such payments.

As for the lying, the DEA seems completely unconcerned that it may be doing little more than funding a network of bullshit artists.

[T]he DEA does not independently validate the credibility of sources used for intelligence programs or the accuracy of the information they provide…

And the DEA spends money like any entity blessed with piles of unearned cash.

Additionally, when we asked the DEA Intelligence Division to provide us with an itemized list and overall total of payments to intelligence-related confidential sources, it was unable to do so. We reviewed DEA records and estimated that, during the 5-year period of our review, the Intelligence Division paid more than $30 million to sources who provided narcotics-related intelligence and contributed to law enforcement operations, $25 million of which went to just 9 sources. Additionally, we identified one source who was paid over $30 million during a 30-year period, some of it in cash payments of more than $400,000. We concluded the Intelligence Division’s management and oversight of its sources was not commensurate with the large amount of payments it made to them.

The entire report is an indictment of the DEA's willingness to throw good money after bad, and its unwillingness to perform even the most perfunctory of oversight. The joke, of course, is that the report will not result in any indictments, even if the behavior detailed borders on fraudulent.

That money came from the drug dealers and drug traffickers via asset forfeiture. So quit your bitchin'.

from the nothing-like-spending-other-people's-money dept