FBI raid federal agency investigating US Attorney Scandal

The FBI just raided the Office of Special Counsel, a federal agency that launched an independent investigation into the US Attorney scandal.

Here's what I wrote back in January about Scott Bloch and the Office of Special Counsel:

The head of the Office of Special Counsel sent a letter to Attorney General Mukasey complaining that his independent probe into the US Attorney firings has been stymied for political reasons.

In a 5-page letter to Mukasey, J. Scott Bloch wrote that his office had been asked to suspend its probe until Main Justice had completed its own US Attorney investigation. (The Washington Post doesn't say which official asked the OSC to step aside, or what the official rationale was.)

Bloch observed in the letter that waiting on Main Justice would put off the OSC's report until the very end Bush presidency, when it would be too late to take any meaningful action.

The OSC has already embarrassed the administration by revealing that Bush officials broke the law when they subjected General Services Agency employees to political briefings [...]

I wonder if the raid is payback for the recent resignation of the head of the GSA, loyal Bushie Lurita Doan?

It might also have something to do with Bloch's upcoming report on the US Attorney scandal.

Bloch's office was raided today in connection with his alleged obstruction of justice during a 2006 inquiry into Bloch's personnel practices.

Bloch hired techs from the private company Geeks On Call to wipe the hard drives of some office computers, instead of using the government IT service. The computers belonged to OSC employees who claimed they had been inappropriately dismissed. The insinuation is that Bloch was trying to hide information from federal investigators looking into the firings. He says he was trying to get rid of a virus and didn't delete any files relevant to the investigation.

Update: More the personnel-related accusations that sparked the investigation that Bloch is accused of obstructing. The decision to pursue that investigation was to be put directly to the President, according to the article.

Comments

[voxy]

geez when will these guys learn to replace their OWN hard drives and ooopsie lose the other one??? And still the evidence of wrongdoing only disappears if it's BUSH related.
SOP, they just compromised his integrity. He needs to pass that work down to a clean second in command and let the games continue.

[SD]

Plame is complaining.

[mudkitty]

Please elaborate, SD.

[me]

It could easily be spurious. There are three ways to wipe a disk, I understand.
1. Delete the files or format. These are pretty much the same, and the files are still there, even if you write over them a couple of times. There's special equipment that can retrieve them, even though the computer itself can't get to them.
2. Wipe it with a wiping program. This writes garbage over files lots of times, making it difficult (maybe impossible) to get the files back.
3. Put it through a furnace via a grinding machine.

If you're getting rid of a virus, you only need to do step one. If steps two or three haven't happened, the claim he was getting rid of data is spurious, especially if he requested an IT company to do it, since they'd know the difference.