New Economic Perspectives-
FBI Director Robert Mueller is taking his victory lap as he steps down after 12 years of service. I have done three articles in a series that explains how the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) conned the FBI into adopting the Tea Party’s mythology about the causes of the crisis – virginal banks beset by ultra-sophisticated fraudulent hairdressers. The MBA created a faux definition of mortgage fraud under which the bank and its senior officers were always the victims instead of the perpetrators.
Mueller’s description of his tenure reveals that his obsession with one of the FBI’s tasks, anti-terrorism caused the FBI to fail catastrophically in many other tasks. The FBI is essential in a wide range of fields. We have, for example, roughly one million Americans employed in our criminal justice system. Only the 2,300 FBI white-collar specialists, however, investigate elite white-collar crimes and we have over 1,300 industries (not firms). We have over 500 fewer FBI agents working white-collar crime cases because Mueller transferred over 500 of them to national security tasks after 9/11. (Mueller sought to move the best 500-800 of those white-collar agents by permanently or temporarily reassigning them to national security, so the true loss of capacity against sophisticated financial frauds was far greater than the bare numbers suggest.) We can all understand that action, which was part of a transfer of over 2,000 FBI agents to national security that Mueller ordered in response to 9/11.