LA Times Looking at the Tip of the ICEberg

Yesterday I received a few emails from an LA Times reporter who is covering the Frank Johnston trial in Los Angles and apparently interested in investigating corruption at Immigration and Customs Enforcement.  My guess is that the LA Times wants to discredit ICE so the agency does even less immigration enforcement than the little it does now.  But I digress.

ICE/HSI SAC Los Angeles has had more than their share of problems .  In case you’re not familiar with Frank Johnston, here’s some background on the trial that the LA Times reporter is covering.

Johnston, a retired supervisory special agent for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (now HSI) and his wife, who also worked for ICE in Los Angeles, were arrested in 2010 on charges of stealing from the government and lying to federal investigators.

An indictment handed down by a Los Angeles federal grand jury alleges that Frank Eugene Johnston and his wife, Taryn, stole almost $600,000 that she received in salary and benefits from ICE, even though she had done virtually no work for the agency during her last six years of employment.

Frank Johnston retired from ICE in August 2009 after 31 years in federal law enforcement. His wife previously worked as an immigration enforcement agent and then as an intelligence research specialist, prosecutors said.

According to the indictment, the alleged scheme dates back to 2002, when Frank Johnston became his wife’s supervisor at U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, assigning her to an isolated workplace blocks from the agency’s main Los Angeles office.

Soon after, Taryn Johnston stopped going to work and her husband rubber- stamped her time sheets, which “frequently also claimed premium pay for overtime and holiday hours,” according to the indictment filed this week in U.S. District Court in downtown Los Angeles.

As part of the scheme, the couple asked the only other employee at the satellite office to log into Taryn Johnston’s work e-mail account, review her e- mails and forward some to her personal account.
Frank Johnston is charged with federal wire fraud, false statements and theft of government property, specifically $582,281.27 in salary and benefits paid to his wife by INS and ICE for work she did not perform, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

The indictment charges Taryn Johnston with lying to ICE investigators by telling them that she had worked the hours for which she was paid. She is also charged with lying to investigators when she denied giving an ICE agent her computer log-in information so he could access her work e-mail account and forward messages to her personal account.

Frank Johnston was already convicted of obstruction of justice and making false statements in December 2011.  His conviction was for giving bogus information to both a Justice Department prosecutor and a federal judge in Florida.

In that case, Johnston said a convicted felon was providing “ongoing cooperation” in two criminal investigations being conducted in Los Angeles.  In fact, the convicted felon was not actually providing any information to investigators, and the false statements caused a delay in the start of a prison term for the felon.

Johnston was paid as much as $4,000 a month in “consulting fees”  while deceiving agents, attorneys and a federal judge by claiming that Syrian-born Abdulahad Touma was working as a confidential informant, prosecutors told the court.

If convicted of all charges, Johnston faces a maximum sentence of 465 years in federal prison, and his wife faces a maximum 10-year term.

I think it’s safe to say that Johnston will die in prison.  The LA Times should be investigating and reporting on the widespread corruption in ICE that does not involve Johnston. 

The LA Times would better server its readers by pointing out that the government will not solve the country’s current economic and social problems.  Government is the problem.  Both our Founding Fathers and Californian Ronald Reagan were well aware of this fact.  But the majority of the people in California still don’t get it. Neither does the LA Times.

Every HSI agent is familiar with numerous incidents of senior officials in ICE doing exactly what Frank Johnston did, paying employees to sit at home and not work, then lying about it.  ICE  regularly pays Senior Officials NOT to work to sit at home and do nothing except wait for a bigger annuity, while drawing full pay, including 25% premium pay.  All of them had disgraced the badge and instead of being fired and/or arrested, they were simply sent home to draw full salary and then retire with bigger annuities. See former Dallas SAC John Chakwin for details.

Waste, fraud, mismanagement and corruption  is widespread in many of the bloated and inefficient federal bureaucracies. The federal government is too big to function.  Every once is a while, OPR or the DHS IG bag some low hanging fruit like Frank Johnston.  Then the DOJ “piles on” so it appears that corruption won’t be tolerated in the federal government. 

The truth is, many of the most egregious offenders like former ICE Los Angeles SAC Robert Schoch are still on the job .  Schoch is a GS-14 Program Manager in Houston, where he receives the second highest locality pay in the country. Schoch’s “friend”, former GS-14 Jen Silliman is in Tampa as a GS-13.  Silliman and Schoch had a personal relationship that dated back to 2002 when both were assigned to INS/HQ.

The LA Times should do some investigative reporting so they can inform their readers about the fact that the federal government is the most inefficient and out of control entity in America. 

The United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is a cabinet department, created in knee jerk response to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.  The primary responsibilities of DHS is protecting the borders of the United States and immigration management and control.  In fiscal year 2011 DHS was allocated a budget of $98.8 billion. And the United States doesn’t regularly enforce Immigration laws.  See California for details.  In fact, the DOJ is suing a number of states, to PREVENT the enforcement of U.S. Immigration law.

With more than 200,000 employees, DHS is the third largest Cabinet department, after the Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs. Homeland security policy is coordinated at the White House by the Homeland Security Council. Other agencies with significant homeland security responsibilities include the Departments of Health and Human Services, Justice, and Energy.

In other words, DHS has very little to do with Homeland Security and the FBI is in fact, the “homeland security” investigative agency within the federal government.  DHS is basically the Coast Guard, FEMA, legacy INS and legacy Customs with a much larger budget. Go figure?