Criminal Conspiracy between FBI, CIA, DEA, NSA, IRS and the Department of Homeland Security to launder illegally obtained evidence

Agents of a secretive DEA unit routinely receive tips from US intelligence agencies, including NSA intercepts, a report states. The sources are then concealed with "parallel construction" of evidence – a troubling practice that many call unconstitutional. 

SOD is comprised of two dozen partner agencies, which include the FBI, CIA, NSA, Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Homeland Security, and much of the unit’s work is classified.

This obviously illegal practice appears to bother no one and seems like there is no end in sight.

“Parallel construction is a law enforcement technique we use every day,” one official said, adding that it was “decades old, a bedrock concept” that was used to protect sources and investigative methods. 

While most of “a dozen” of other agents interviewed by Reuters were said to have defended the tactics as “legal,” former DEA agent Finn Selander has compared it to a criminal activity. 

“It’s just like laundering money – you work it backwards to make it clean,” Selander, who is now a member of the Law Enforcement Against Prohibition group, explained. 

‘Blatantly unconstitutional’ 

Meanwhile, lawyers, prosecutors and legal experts have been outraged by the report, saying that if the so-called “parallel construction” was indeed used for disguising how an investigation began it explicitly violates pretrial discovery rules. 

Such practice “would not only be alarming but pretty blatantly unconstitutional,” Lawrence Lustberg, a New Jersey defense lawyer has said. 

In particular, it would violate the defendants’ Constitutional right to a fair trial, since if they don’t know how an investigation really began, they cannot ask to review potential sources of exculpatory evidence – information that could reveal entrapment, mistakes or biased witnesses. 

By use of the SOD program the US government could also “skirt” the established court procedures, by which judges privately examine sensitive information (informant’s identity, classified evidence etc.) to determine whether the information is relevant to the defense – something which some lawyers find unacceptable. 

“You can’t game the system. You can’t create this subterfuge. These are drug crimes, not national security cases. If you don't draw the line here, where do you draw it?” said former federal prosecutor Henry E. Hockeimer Jr.