FBI: We should have done more on Foley

Really? No kidding. But then again, hindsight is 20/20. And to be fair, they weren't the first folks to flub the whole thing.

Here's a link to the ABC News Blotter where they once again claim to have broken the story. But, we all know now that they didn't. In fact, they sat on the emails for months doing nothing about it. They probably would have sat on it indefinitely had they not seen Wonkette slamming the emails I posted on Stop Sex Predators.

At least the Inspector General of the FBI has acknowledged the mishandling of the emails that were submitted to them by CREW, but it's half-hearted.

While finding no official misconduct on the part of FBI officials, the inspector general said "the e-mails provided enough troubling indications on their face" to have warranted follow-up steps.

Instead, the inspector general found, the supervisory agent decided there was no evidence of criminal wrongdoing and "placed the e-mails in her in box and took no further action" even though she found the e-mails "odd."

What I really wonder is if the FBI agent backed off from looking further into the emails because they were from a Congressman. That is a question that should have been answered in the IG's report.

I know from my own experience that the main stream media held the bar higher because Foley was a member of Congress. They seemed to be looking for a "smoking gun." ABC News didn't cover the original emails on their nightly news, only their website. Once they got the explicit instant messages, they finally reported widely on the scandal. That is all a part of the 'Culture of Washington' that I have talked about so much. For the media, it's mostly the 'CYA' mode of operation.

It's a good thing the blogosphere is around to be the true "fourth estate" of modern media.