by Elissa Salamy at ABC 7 On Your Side
A watchdog group says government agencies paid informants millions of dollars in recent years to collect insider information and in some cases, authorized informants to commit crimes to get the job done. Open the Books say they found evidence of thousands of informants in the government.
“There are three agencies with the biggest budgets that employ tens of thousands of informants every single year, and it’s the FBI, it’s the DEA, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the ATF,” said Open The Books’ Adam Andrzejewski to The National Desk’s Jan Jeffcoat. “The top-line budget in recent years was up to $550 million, which is a half-billion dollars.”
Andrzejewski says Open the Books found at least two informants were “minted as millionaires over a five and six-year period.”
“There was a parcel employee, think UPS, FedEx. There was an Amtrak employee that made up to a million dollars as a federal human confidential source and informant,” said Andrzejewski.
According to Andrzejewski,…
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