Talk about irony: The FBI, which was willing to use deadly force over Donald Trump allegedly mishandling classified documents, has been systematically mishandling similar information for years, according to bombshell findings released Thursday by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz.
The DOJ-IG said it discovered the FBI’s mishandling of classified information while auditing a contract related to how the bureau destroys electronics containing “sensitive-but-unclassified” information, as well as classified national security information.
According to Horowitz’s audit, the FBI labels computers that handle such information when it sends them to a facility to be destroyed. However, it does not label internal hard drives extracted from those computers. The FBI also doesn’t properly track thumb drives and disk drives containing information of varying classification levels, according to Horowitz.
Compounding the security risk is the fact that those unmarked internal hard drives, thumb drives and disk drives often end up in a physically unsecured warehouse.
Horowitz said that when his staff visited an FBI “Media Destruction Team” facility last October, they found “non-accountable” hard drives and other electronic storage devices sitting in an open pallet-sized box. Horowitz said he’s not disclosing details about the facility since it’s not secured.
“A [property-turn-in] staff member told us that the pallet for the loose media was unsecured for extended periods, sometimes spanning days or even weeks because PTI would wrap the pallets and move them to the Facility shelves only when the box reached full capacity,” the Inspector General said.
During the same visit last October, Horowitz said his staff also found a container from January 2022 that identified its contents as “non-accountable.”
“Notably, the container’s shrink wrapping was torn, and boxes inside were visibly open and contained hard drives marked Secret,” he said.
Hellbound and Down 