Congress isn’t the only place where public corruption is on the rise.
More than 1,000 federal, state and local government employees across the country have been convicted in government corruption cases over the past two years, including hundreds of crooked police officers and others who have dipped into the taxpayers’ till, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III said yesterday.
The numbers underscore the extent to which public corruption has become a primary, if little-noticed, focus of FBI criminal investigators, taking its place alongside preventing terrorism as one the bureau’s fundamental missions.
All told, public-corruption investigations have surged by 30 percent in the past four years, to more than 2,000, officials said. The FBI now dedicates more than 600 agents and 15 percent of its criminal investigative resources to government graft.
“Public corruption is the top criminal priority for the FBI,” Mueller told the Senate Judiciary Committee, adding later: “If we do not investigate these cases, they perhaps will not be investigated.”
