New Yorker: How a C.I.A. Coverup Targeted a Whistle-blower [on “intelligence laundering”]

New Yorker: How a C.I.A. Coverup Targeted a Whistle-blower by Ronan Farrow (“When a Justice Department lawyer exposed the agency’s secret role in drug cases, leadership in the intelligence community retaliated.”):

McConnell had uncovered what he described as a “criminal conspiracy” perpetrated by the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. Every year, entries in the Helios database lead to hundreds of drug busts, which lead to prosecutions in American courts. The entries are typically submitted to Helios by the Drug Enforcement Administration, the F.B.I., and a division of the Department of Homeland Security. But McConnell had learned that more than a hundred entries in the database that were labelled as originating from F.B.I. investigations were actually from a secret C.I.A. surveillance program. He realized that C.I.A. officers and F.B.I. agents, in violation of federal law and Department of Justice guidelines, had concealed the information’s origins from federal prosecutors, leaving judges and defense lawyers in the dark. Critics call such concealment “intelligence laundering.”