PENTAGON CAUGHT GIVING WEAPONS TO PHONY FEDERAL AGENCY

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, and research purposes:

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) created a fake federal
agency and obtained $1.2 million worth of former Defense Department
hardware, including military-grade weapons, at no cost, a new GAO report reveals.

“They never did any verification, like visit our ‘location,’ and most
of [the communication] was by email,” Zina Merritt, director of the
GAO’s defense capabilities and management team, which ran the operation,
told the Marshall Project. “It was like getting stuff off of eBay.”

Under the 2016 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), GAO was
tasked with investigating the Defense Department’s Law Enforcement
Support Office (LESO) program, which transfers surplus military property
to federal, state, and local law-enforcement agencies that claim to
need it. According to the GAO report, since 1991 the Pentagon has
transferred over $6 billion worth of its excess property to more than
8,600 agencies. Four to seven percent of these items consisted of
“controlled” property: items that “are typically sensitive in nature,
cannot be released to the general public, and require specific actions
to ensure proper disposal,” says the report.

Merritt told the Marshall Project that a GAO survey of local
law-enforcement agencies “did not turn up any instances of outright
abuse at the state level but did find one illegitimate agency that had
applied as a federal entity and was approved for equipment” — the
impetus for the sting operation described in the report.

Merritt’s team created a fictitious federal law-enforcement agency
that they claimed performed “high-level security and counterterrorism
work,” according to the Marshall Project. The team e-mailed an
application to the LESO program in late 2016. The application “contained
fictitious information including agency name, number of employees,
point of contact, and physical location,” the report reads. The team
also created a website plus mail and e-mail addresses for their fake
agency.

LESO officials asked the bogus agency to make some revisions to its
application, which the team did, resubmitting the amended application in
early 2017. Soon thereafter, the application was approved.

All this took place strictly through e-mail. “At no point during the
application process did LESO officials verbally contact officials at the
agency we created — either the main point of contact listed on the
application or the designated point of contact at a headquarters’ level —
to verify the legitimacy of our application or to discuss [the program]
with our agency,” wrote the GAO.

Once the phony agency had been approved for the LESO program,
Merritt’s team set about requesting controlled property items. According
to the report:

The investigator managed to enter the three warehouses and procure
the requested items using fake credentials; two of the sites did not
even request or validate identification. In addition, two of the three
sites failed to use checklists to verify that the number of items
transferred matched the number approved, leading the phony agency to get
more of one item than it had requested.

GAO recommended a number of improvements to the LESO procedures to
prevent these types of oversights, and the Defense Department — as
agencies always do when caught acting like government agencies —
promised to implement them. Whether or not that happens remains to be
seen. GAO, after all, has been reporting deficiencies in the program for
15 years, and the Pentagon has purportedly implemented nearly all of
the GAO’s recommendations during that time, yet the possibility of
almost effortless fraud remains.

Even if LESO could be made completely fraud-proof, it would still be a
dangerous program because it contributes to the militarization of law
enforcement. As Madhuri Grewal of the anti-militarization Constitution
Project told the Marshall Project, “There just aren’t many everyday
policing uses for military equipment like this. The question is why can real law enforcement agencies get some of this stuff, let alone fake ones?”