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Tuesday, May 06, 2008
FBI Raids Office of Special Counsel Office, Home
 Wow.
FBI agents on Tuesday raided the offices of Special Counsel Scott J. Bloch, who oversees protection for federal whistleblowers. The agents seized computers and shut down email service as part of an obstruction of justice probe, NPR has exclusively learned.
FBI agents also searched Bloch's home and a Special Counsel field office in Dallas. A grand jury in Washington issued subpoenas for several OSC employees, including Bloch, according to NPR sources who spoke on condition their names not be used.
Those developments came about on a Tuesday morning that had seemed no different than any other weekday in the Washington headquarters of the Office of Special Counsel. But at 10 a.m., the OSC's national email system went down, and the FBI arrived.
And from TPM Muckraker, a reminder of what Bloch's deal is:
To refresh your memory, Bloch's agency is a little known one that is charged with investigating whistleblower complaints, Hatch Act violations, and the like -- but who is himself being investigated for retaliating against whistleblowers and politicizing his office. The Office of Personnel Management's inspector general has been conducting that investigation since 2005. The feds are apparently investigating whether Bloch tried to obstruct that investigation by deleting his hard drive, among other things.
To give you an idea how fraught this investigation is with unique issues, Bloch is not only busily investigating the White House for political briefings Karl Rove and his aides made to various agencies, but he's also conducting an investigation of the politicization at the Department of Justice and issues related to the U.S. Attorney firings -- a probe that he complained was being blocked by the DoJ. Of course, he can't do much to block the DoJ investigation of him.
We last wrote about Bloch in November, when the WSJ reported that he was being investigated for shredding documents (i.e. "a 'seven-level' wipe [of several office hard drives]: a thorough scrubbing that conforms to Defense Department data-security standards).
Posted by Craig Jennings
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