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The news is full of tut-tutting about the terribleness of President Trump, and now Joe Biden, supposedly mishandling a few classified documents by having them in their possession, which is usually a matter of them wanting to write their memoirs, so far as we know. Now a new book came out yesterday by James Bamford, called SpyFail, telling us how little care the FBI has taken with its own classified documents. Its clumsy maneuvers, bad personnel hiring practices, and misplaced priorities pretty well gave away the store of U.S. secrets targeting China.According to BusinessInsider, which ran a long and interesting...

The following is an excerpt from "SPYFAIL: Foreign Spies, Moles, Saboteurs, and the Collapse of America's Counterintelligence" by James Bamford. An alleged spy within the FBI may be largely responsible for unraveling the CIA's Chinese spy network. The FBI's website carries a stark warning. "The counterintelligence and economic espionage efforts emanating from the government of China," it says, "are a grave threat to the economic well-being and democratic values of the United States. Confronting this threat is the FBI's top counterintelligence priority." But far worse is the threat to the lives of scores of courageous Chinese agents who have volunteered...

An embattled former Obama administration appointee -- who was part of a group of attorneys accused of being terrorist sympathizers for defending "enemy combatants" -- has been hired for a post at the US Attorney's Office in Brooklyn, officials confirmed today. Tali Farhadian was one of several private attorneys who created a rift between Republicans last spring when the Obama Administration assigned them to posts within the Justice Department. Although Farhadian was handling unrelated matters in Attorney General Eric Holder's office, a political watchdog group accused Obama of overloading the agency with officials sympathetic to enemy combatants. Their appointments even...

WASHINGTON -- Government records show that the administration was encountering unprecedented second-guessing by the secret federal surveillance court when President Bush decided to bypass the panel and order surveillance of U.S.-based terror suspects without the court's approval. A review of Justice Department reports to Congress shows that the 26-year-old Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court modified more wiretap requests from the Bush administration than from the four previous presidential administrations combined. The court's repeated intervention in Bush administration wiretap requests may explain why the president decided to bypass the court nearly four years ago to launch secret National Security Agency spying on...

June 7, 2004 -- Consider the undisclosed location disclosed. In the weeks after the 9/11 attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney hid out at "Site R," an underground bunker seven miles from Camp David, deep beneath Raven Rock Mountain on the Maryland-Pennsylvania border, says intelligence expert James Bamford in a new book due out tomorrow. In "A Pretext for War," Bamford describes Cheney's secure location as "a secret world of five buildings, each three stories tall, computer-filled caverns and a subterranean water reservoir," according to a review in the June 14 issue of Time magazine.