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FBI official David Cardona said in an interview...“We have to work those cases which we think pose the greatest threat,” he said. “In this case, it’s a threat to the financial system and Wall Street.”
The Justice Department under Attorney General John Ashcroft failed in 2001 to treat counterterrorism as a top priority, the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks said in a report issued on Tuesday
The top priorities were reducing gun violence and combating drug trafficking. It made no mention of counterterrorism.
"The FBI's new counterterrorism strategy was not a focus of the Justice Department in 2001," the staff report said. Then-acting FBI Director Thomas Pickard said he appealed to Ashcroft for more money for counterterrorism but on Sept 10, 2001, one day before the attacks on New York and Washington that killed nearly 3,000 people, Ashcroft rejected the appeal.
On Sept. 11, 2001, only about 1,300 agents, or 6 percent of the FBI's total personnel, worked on counterterrorism. "Former FBI officials told us that prior to 9/11, there was not sufficient national commitment or political will to dedicate the necessary resources to counterterrorism," the report said.
Since Sept. 11, 2001, FBI resources have been shifted substantially to deal with the domestic terrorist threat instead of white-collar crime, according to an article published in The New York Times this weekend. Now, the agency is understaffed as it tries to investigate impropriety involving the financial meltdown.
The Bush administration is rejecting FBI pleas for more agents to investigate crimes that helped trigger the global financial meltdown, bureau sources said this week.
Dec. 22 (Bloomberg) -- The FBI has engaged in “triage,” taking agents off terror and other crimes to respond to a cascade of financial frauds such as the alleged Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme, The Federal Bureau of Investigation was forced to reallocate its manpower in New York to deal with recent frauds involving subprime mortgages, auction-rate securities and Madoff, who prosecutors said confessed this month to bilking investors out of $50 billion, FBI official David Cardona said in an interview.
After Governor George W. Bush moved to the White House, Mr Lay - a close friend of the Bush family for years - is thought to be the only executive to have a private meting with Vice-President Dick Cheney when he was formulating the new president's energy policy. Enron also backed Mr Bush's appointment of Pat Wood - the Texas Public Utility Commissioner - to head the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). TPJ says Mr Bush's greatest "gifts" to Enron came when he was Texas governor: deregulating state electric markets in 1999, going light on corporate air polluters, and supporting laws protecting businesses from lawsuits.
Bush's proposed budget calls for increasing FBI funding in 2009 by $451 million, to $7.1 billion. That includes funding 280 additional agents for national security programs, but adding none for criminal programs.