According to the Justice Department Inspector General, the FBI has been mishandling classified information for years now.

From Headline USA. Talk about irony: The FBI, which was willing to use deadly force over Donald Trump allegedly mishandling classified documents, has been systematically mishandling similar information for years, according to bombshell findings released Thursday by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz.

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The DOJ-IG said it discovered the FBI’s mishandling of classified information while auditing a contract related to how the bureau destroys electronics containing “sensitive-but-unclassified” information, as well as classified national security information.

According to Horowitz’s audit, the FBI labels computers that handle such information when it sends them to a facility to be destroyed. However, it does not label internal hard drives extracted from those computers. The FBI also doesn’t properly track thumb drives and disk drives containing information of varying classification levels, according to Horowitz.

Compounding the security risk is the fact that those unmarked internal hard drives, thumb drives and disk drives often end up in a physically unsecured warehouse.

Horowitz said that when his staff visited an FBI “Media Destruction Team” facility last October, they found “non-accountable” hard drives and other electronic storage devices sitting in an open pallet-sized box. Horowitz said he’s not disclosing details about the facility since it’s not secured. …

During the same visit last October, Horowitz said his staff also found a container from January 2022 that identified its contents as “non-accountable.”

“Notably, the container’s shrink wrapping was torn, and boxes inside were visibly open and contained hard drives marked Secret,” he said.

Horowitz added that after his team spotted the box, the FBI’s Asset Management Unit “promptly secured” it with additional shrink wrap. However, the FBI’s PTI supervisor and contractor told Horowitz that they would not be aware if someone was to take hard drives from the pallets because these assets are not counted or otherwise tracked. …

“There is no physical barrier preventing FBI and non-FBI personnel and contractors from other Facility operations from accessing PTI’s work area and the pallets of unsanitized assets in the Facility shelving space,” he said.

And even though there is apparently a door to the Media Destruction Team’s work area, the FBI doesn’t close it to prevent non-Asset Management Unit personnel from accessing the area, the IG found. …

It appears as if the problems identified by Horowitz have been around for almost a decade, if not longer. …

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(Excerpt from Headline USA. Photo Credit: Noah Wulf – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=100040778)