Dead Drop: October 30

BUT HIS EMAIL: After the brouhaha four years ago – you would think that government officials would have learned the lesson about not using personal email accounts for official business. Apparently not.  Watchdog group American Oversight filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking emails sent to and from Mike Pompeo when he was CIA director. They recently received nearly 400 pages of (heavily redacted) emails. The same outfit has filed a request for similar Pompeo emails after he shifted to Foggy Bottom – but so far State has been stiffing them. Using personal email for official business can be troublesome for a couple of reasons.  One is that they might not be captured for history’s sake, as required by federal record keeping requirements.  A second problem is that the exchanges might be captured by foreign intelligence agencies who could milk them for information about upcoming travel or improprieties.  By the way, American Oversight put out a press release about the issue – but we missed it. We first learned of the issue from a story in Sputnik News.

COURTNEY’S DAY IN COURT: The Dead Drop has reported a couple of times about the exploits of Garrison Courtney, a former DEA spokesman, who was busted for pretending to be a covert CIA operative – and bilking various private contractors out of more than $4.4 million. He even went so far as to give these companies fake “get out of jail free” cards – from the Justice Department promising they would not be prosecuted for working with him on his invented classified program. He should have saved one for himself.  This week, Courtney was sentenced to seven years in federal prison.

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