FBI Director Robert Mueller is all over the news, a leading character in stomach-turning tales of misdeeds and malfeasance. As he attempts to bail himself out, one of the most serious breaches in his sinking ship hasn't attracted much attention.
Some background: In 1998, special agent Jane Turner of the FBI's Minneapolis office filed an internal sex-discrimination complaint, effectively ending her career. A campaign of retaliation, which included a sudden decline in her job-performance ratings and a transfer from a field assignment to a desk job, eventually led to Turner's retirement in 2003. On February 5, 2007, a federal jury decided Turner's civil-rights lawsuit against the FBI in her favor, awarding her $565,000 in damages.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) wants to know how Mueller plans to "hold supervisors accountable for the acts of retaliation," but Mueller isn't saying. Perhaps he fears an increasingly obvious conclusion: After five years at the helm of the FBI and innumerable squandered opportunities to address the problems plaguing the bureau, Mueller must go.
Grassley, a longtime guardian of whistleblowers' rights and a Judiciary Committee member, wrote to Mueller on February 26, requesting that the director answer a series of pointed questions about the Turner case. That letter ends with a request that Mueller respond in writing by March 7, which was last Wednesday. (Read the AP story here.) A thorough Web search reveals no news coverage or press releases concerning Mueller's response, if there was one.
It's hard to imagine what he could possibly say to defend his employees' actions. I want to emphasize here that the point of this diary is not to criticize the tens of thousands of FBI employees who keep us safe every day from evil that we never have to worry about because we never even know about it. But Mueller seems to have been absent the day he was supposed to learn about Caesar's wife.
In 2004, Turner told her story to Steve Perry of the Minneapolis/St. Paul City Pages, who went on to explore the FBI's attitude that as an institution, the bureau is above accountability. He makes it clear that ostracizing and demonizing a whistleblower is just the tip of the iceberg that is the FBI's cavalier attitude toward oversight and accountability. Beneath the surface are disgraceful violations of the American people's trust, such as the illegal activities the Justice Department's Inspector General brought to light last week.
Still unresolved is the sickening tale of the FBI's investigation into the disappearance of items from the site of the World Trade Center. In 2002, as Turner was looking into an allegation concerning a company in the Twin Cities area, a glass Tiffany globe that turned out to have been recovered from Ground Zero caught her eye--on the desk of a coworker. smintheus wrote an informative diary about this last summer.
The local media have closely followed Turner's story, which (as best I can tell) appears not to have received much in-depth coverage outside of Minnesota. A good number of papers, mostly in the Midwest, reported the February 5 verdict; the New York Times and Washington Post (again, as best I can tell) did not. Dan Browning of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune reported (archived here) that jurors cried as they hugged Turner outside the courtroom.
Tad Vezner of the St. Paul Pioneer Press concluded his story about the February 5 verdict (archived here) by quoting Turner's lawyer Stephen Cohn: "One can only hope the FBI can reform its ways." But the FBI has shown no signs that it is inclined or even able to reform on its own. Now is the time for the Judiciary Committee--which is chaired by Pat Leahy (D-Vt.), like Grassley a committed advocate for whistleblowers--to start making some noise. It's too late for Jane Turner, but not for her fellow truth-tellers, who put their reputations, their careers, and their lives on the line every day.