Academic

FBI Director Mueller on sting operations

By Tung Yin

FBI Director Robert Mueller recently spoke out in defense of undercover sting operations:

"We have been tremendously successful in thwarting attacks," Mueller said at a news conference. "We are very careful in these investigations. ... They are absolutely essential if we are to protect the community against terrorist attacks."

Mueller said undercover operations are necessary to many FBI probes, not just those related to counterterrorism, and he noted that defendants have claimed in a string of cases since Sept. 11, 2001, that they were the victims of entrapment.

"There has not been yet to my knowledge a defendant who has been acquitted in asserting the entrapment defense," Mueller said, crediting "substantial oversight" such probes have.

That's actually a decent argument, that entrapment claims have been raised numerous time before and have not succeeded.  Of course, there's always a first time, and I'm not sure if any of the previous sting cases have been tried in a jurisdiction with a jury pool as favorable to the defense as the Portland area.

Assuming the news report linked above accurately and completely covered the substance of his comments, Mueller was quite a bit more circumspect than Attorney General Holder has been.  Notice that Mueller spoke generally about sting operations, and did not appear to say anything specific about Mohamed Mohamud's case.  Holder, on the other hand, spoke directly about Mohamud's case.  And what he said wasn't just the usual boilerplate "we believe we will prevail at trial" or "we're confident in our case."  Rather, he declared that if you thought this was a case of entrapment, you didn't understand the facts or the law.

Full post as published by The Yin Blog on January 06, 2011 (boomark / email).