FBI allowed informants to commit 6,000 crimes in 2012

A newly disclosed document shows the number of crimes the US Federal Bureau of Investigation allowed its informants to commit in 2012 rose 5 percent from 2011 to nearly 6,000.

A letter from FBI officials to the US Justice Department, dated January 14, 2013, shows 56 field offices of the bureau authorized their informants to commit crimes on at least 5,939 occasions last year.

In the letter, which was obtained by The Huffington Post through a Freedom of Information Act request, it was not clear how many crimes each individual FBI field office authorized because the relevant information was redacted.

The Post’s report follows another exclusive report published in August by USA Today that revealed America’s top law enforcement agency authorized 5,658 crimes in 2011. According to the report, the crimes committed by FBI informants in 2011 ranged from buying and selling illegal drugs to bribing government officials.

Other federal law enforcement agencies in the US, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, do not submit a tally of crimes committed by their agents to the Department of Justice.

The Justice Department ordered the FBI to hand over tallies of crimes committed by its informants more than ten years ago, after it was revealed that the bureau’s Boston field office allowed mob boss James “Whitey” Bulger to operate a brutal crime ring in exchange for information.

While the FBI has been reporting crimes by its informants to the Justice Department for over a decade, USA Today’s report in August was the first public disclosure of such tallies.

“The million-dollar question is: How much crime is the government tolerating from its informants?” Alexandra Natapoff, a professor at Loyola Law School Los Angeles, told USA Today back in August. “I’m sure that if we really knew that number, we would all be shocked.”