Remember, the DEA corruption story stems from a memo written in December 2004 by a Department of Justice attorney named Thomas M. Kent. In the memo, Kent not only alleges that DEA agents in Bogotá are corrupt, but that some high-level officials within DEA, and its parent agency, DOJ, have worked to cover up that corruption.

In particular, officials with DOJ’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) are charged with whitewashing the investigation into the allegations raised in Kent’s memo – an investigation that took place prior to Kent writing the memo.

In the Scene’s story, the unnamed DOJ source reportedly said an investigation into the corruption allegations was conducted by OIG in 2002 -- prior to Kent writing his memo. That investigation, the unnamed DOJ source said, supposedly found the corruption allegations to be baseless.

The e-mail from the Nashville Scene reporter:

Bill,

You alerted me to an important error in my story: my DOJ source didn’t say anything about the year 2002.

The sentence that reads “One insider says that an investigation was done by the Inspector General’s office in 2002, and Kent’s charges all proved false,” should say that an investigation was done by the Inspector General’s office “after Kent sent his December 2004 memo.” The erroneous date appeared due to a mistake in the editing process; we will have our web site folks append a correction first thing in the morning, if not sooner.

In the meantime, please alert your readers. On behalf of myself and all of us at the Nashville Scene, I apologize for the confusion.

Sincerely,
John Spragens

Spragens honesty is admirable. He’s just trying to do his job.

However, the veracity of his anonymous source still appears to be questionable, even with the date of the supposed OIG investigation being changed to a date after Kent wrote his memo.

Here’s why.

If a new investigation was launched after Kent wrote the memo, which accuses OIG itself of being part of the cover-up, how can OIG conduct a credible investigation into those charges?

More importantly, a new OIG investigator would have to be appointed -- in light of the fact that the investigator on the initial probe was removed from the case, according to Kent’s memo.

This new investigator, in order to investigate the cover-up and corruption allegations properly, would, at a minimum, have to re-interview all of the complaining parties and witnesses, including the whistleblowers -- because, after all, the prior investigation was allegedly tainted.

However, that never happened, according to Sandalio Gonzalez, who was serving as the associate special agent in charge of DEA’s Miami field division when the Bogotá corruption charges outlined in Kent’s 2004 memo first surfaced. (Gonzalez later moved on to serve as the special agent in charge of DEA’s El Paso, Texas, field division. He retired from DEA last year.)

“The information in the [Kent] memo is accurate as far as what I know from my involvement in some of the cases and reflects a climate of cover-up in the executive branch,” Gonzalez recently told Narco News.

He also told Narco News that no one from DEA’s Office of Professional Responsibility (essentially Internal Affairs) or the OIG bothered to re-interview the key whistleblowers in the DEA corruption case after Kent’s memo was written in December 2004.

If that’s the case, and Gonzalez certainly was in a position to know, it looks like DOJ shadow man has struck again.