One big reason we should all oppose the idea of a National ID Card is that Big Brother -- I mean, Uncle Sam -- has a tendency to lose laptop computers.  Maybe they get lost every day, but the ones we hear about are the laptops with thousands of people's personal information aboard.

Uncle Sam also loses a lot of guns, large sums of money, and massive computer backup files (at the most convenient moments).  Occasionally, good old Uncle Sam loses track of suspicious people and important evidence.

Oops. Pentagon Undercounted Troops in Syria By More Than 100%.  The Pentagon is famous for being unable to keep track of things.  Money?  Not sure where it went.  Inventory?  "We have stuff, but are not sure how much, where it is, or how much has disappeared."  But soldiers in war zones?  You would think they would have at least good, rough numbers of how many were stationed where.  Ah, you sweet summer child.  Counting is hard and all those REMFs have other things to do like push DEI and get soldiers the gender-affirming care they need.  [Tweet]  Most Americans are likely unaware that American troops are stationed in Syria — you know, that country that just went through a civil war that lasted more than a decade.  But those who have been following the issue "knew" that around 900 troops were there on counter-terror missions because, well, the Pentagon kept saying so.  Well, you knew wrong because the Pentagon isn't very good at counting.

The Pentagon Loses $824 Billion.  Last week, the nation's largest government agency, the Pentagon, failed its seventh consecutive audit due to its inability to fully account for its trillion-dollar-plus budget. [...] The DoD, under defense secretary Lloyd J. Austin, has been under the scanner for quite some time due to its inability to provide accurate and transparent financial reports.  Early this year, Austin himself was under fire for concealing his cancer diagnosis and subsequent treatment from the White House and the general public.  Obviously, accountability and transparency are not part of the Pentagon culture.  Congress approves the funding annually via spending bill, in FY 2024, the DOD received $1.99 Trillion.  One trillion is equal to 1000 billion, hence out of the $1990 Billion $824 billion has melted into thin air.

Pentagon Fails Seventh Straight Financial Audit:  Billions of Taxpayer Money Unaccounted For.  The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) has failed its seventh consecutive financial audit.  Despite commanding an $824 billion 2024 budget — funded entirely by hardworking American taxpayers — the Pentagon remains unable to account for vast sums of money.  The Pentagon began its first-ever agency-wide financial audit in 2017.  This marked the beginning of a process that had been sought, promised, and delayed for years.  Since undertaking this initial audit, the Pentagon has consistently failed to pass its subsequent audits, the first of which failed in 2018.

A Whistleblower's Warning:  RFK Jr.  Must Address the Missing Migrant Children Crisis at HHS.  As the federal agent who exposed the systematic failure in protecting migrant children in 2015, I've witnessed firsthand how our government's broken processes have enabled thousands of vulnerable children to vanish into the hands of unvetted sponsors, some with criminal backgrounds.  The potential appointment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services presents a crucial opportunity to finally address this ongoing humanitarian crisis that has plagued our nation for over a decade.  While public attention frequently focuses on HHS's healthcare responsibilities, few Americans realize that this department, through its Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), bears ultimate responsibility for the safety of unaccompanied migrant children.  This dual mandate creates a unique challenge that requires immediate attention and reform, particularly given the current administration's dangerous dismantling of critical child protection measures.

Somewhat related:
World Bank Missing $41 Billion in Climate Funds.  A new report by Oxfam, "Climate Finance Unchecked," has determined that the World Bank has $41 billion in unaccounted funds that were destined to fight climate change.  This figure represents 40% of all disbursed climate funds by the World Bank.  Oxfam's audit revealed that between 2017 and 2023, between $24 billion and $41 billion simply went unaccounted for and there is absolutely no record of where the money went.  No one knows how the money was used as there is no paper trail revealing where the money went.  "The Bank is quick to brag about its climate finance billions — but these numbers are based on what it plans to spend, not on what it actually spends once a project gets rolling," said Kate Donald, Head of Oxfam International's Washington D.C. Office.  "This is like asking your doctor to assess your diet only by looking at your grocery list, without ever checking what actually ends up in your fridge."

Protect the Children:  America's Lost Migrant Children Crisis.  On Day One, President Trump must take immediate action to protect migrant children by completely overhauling the Office of Refugee Resettlement within the Department of Health and Human Services.  The current catastrophe has resulted in thousands upon thousands of children vanishing into the unknown, many into the hands of traffickers.  The true number remains unknown as the government has lost track of so many of these vulnerable souls.  Those in the current administration who have deliberately weakened or eliminated crucial sponsor vetting procedures must be removed.  The safety of vulnerable children cannot be sacrificed for administrative expediency.

Mailbox master key theft enables massive ballot theft.  The United States Postal Service and mail thieves are both getting better at their trade.  The USPS now saves time by delivering mail to one master mailbox serving an entire neighborhood, apartment building, or other centralized location.  The problem is that this supposed increase in mail efficiency also makes it easier to steal dozens, hundreds, and even thousands of mail-in ballots.  Thieves have broken into mailboxes for years.  Their favorite targets were checks or someone foolish enough to mail cash.  The advent of electronic banking with its associated credit and debit cards made marauding through mailboxes more profitable.  Thieves steal new bank cards and quickly run up charges, buying easily resalable items.  They then list the fraudulently bought item on sites such as eBay or Craig's List.  The stolen cards quickly become cash.

The Editor says...
[#1] In the 21st century, most intenet users are aware that it's a bad idea to use the same password for every transaction.  In a similar manner, the use of a master key to open dozens of locks all over town is a dangerous anachronism.  [#2] Any postal employee who is trusted with a master key should be immediately fired if the master key is lost, stolen, or loaned to a Democrat mule.

Donald Trump on Kamala Harris's Migrant Youth Oversight: 'No Bigger Scandal'.  President Donald Trump is spotlighting the federal government's failure to safeguard more than 300,000 young migrants it has admitted via the "Unaccompanied Alien Child" (UAC) program.  "Under this administration, 325,000 migrant children are missing," Trump said at a September 13 press conference on the California coast.  "Take the biggest stadium in California and you can fill it up five or six times.  Those are all missing children.  Many of them are dead.  Many of them are sex slaves and slaves of [a] different nature."  "There could be no bigger scandal than this," he said.  The federally backed labor trafficking program is a political risk for Kamala Harris, who used her role as a senator in 2018 and 2019 to minimize protections for migrant youths in the United States.

IG: ICE Incapable of Monitoring Unaccompanied Minors Released into US.  The Inspector General for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security issued a management alert to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to make it aware of an urgent issue:  ICE is incapable of monitoring hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied children (UACs) released into the country by the Biden-Harris administration.  "We found ICE cannot always monitor the location and status of unaccompanied migrant children who are released from DHS and HHS custody," HHS Inspector General Joseph Cuffari said in a memo to the deputy director of ICE.  "Without an ability to monitor the location and status of UCs, ICE has no assurance UCs are safe from trafficking, exploitation, or forced labor," the alert states.

The Facts Behind Biden-Harris Admin's Loss of 300K Migrant Kids.  In 2014, Vice President Joe Biden was dispatched to Guatemala by President Barack Obama to implore Latin American countries and their citizens to stop smuggling unaccompanied children into the United States.  "These smugglers routinely engage in physical and sexual abuse and extortion of these innocent, young women and men, by and large," Biden said in a speech in Guatemala City.  Three months into his own presidency, in March 2021, Biden sent his vice president, Kamala Harris, to Guatemala to convey a similar message: "Do not come."  Ten years on from Biden's address in Guatemala City, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Office of Inspector General is out with a report that the Biden-Harris administration has lost track of approximately 300,000 migrant children.

DHS Watchdog Says ICE Has Lost Track of as Many as 291,000 Unaccompanied Migrant Children.  U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has lost track of up to 291,000 unaccompanied minors over the last five years, according to a blistering new report released by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Inspector General.  The IG report, titled "Management Alert — ICE Cannot Monitor All Unaccompanied Migrant Children Released from DHS and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Custody," confirmed that more than 32,000 unaccompanied migrant children [UCs] are no longer accounted for by ICE.  "During our ongoing audit to assess ICE's ability to monitor the location and status of UCs who were released or transferred from the custody of the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), we learned ICE transferred more than 448,000 UCs to HHS from fiscal years 2019 to 2023," the internal watchdog reported.  "However, ICE was not able to account for the location of all UCs who were released by HHS and did not appear as scheduled in immigration court.

Congress gave Kamala Harris $42.5 billion to fix the internet, then the money disappeared.  Vice President Kamala Harris hasn't been the most powerful VP, to put it mildly.  But when she's been tasked with responsibility, the results have been utterly catastrophic.  Many are aware of her "border czar" portfolio, but not so much about her continued campaign as the Biden Administration's "broadband czar."  As the nation's first DEI vice president, Kamala Harris demonstrated her unique incompetence from the very beginning of the Biden Administration.  It began on President Biden's 100th day in office, when, during his first public address before a joint session of Congress, he announced the first major agenda items for the portfolio of his vice president.

The Biden Administration Has Been Involved in Massive Child Trafficking.  The Biden administration is facing serious allegations of mishandling human trafficking issues after multiple whistleblowers claim that around 85,000 illegal immigrant children whom the Department of Homeland Security handed over to often inadequately vetted "sponsors" have since gone missing.  To make matters worse, during Senate testimony on Wednesday, one whistleblower accused the Biden administration of retaliating against her for raising concerns about placing children with individuals who were clearly not their relatives, as well as witnessing signs of abuse.  "The Department of Human Services has lost at least 85,000 children who crossed the border illegally as 'unaccompanied minors' after placing them with 'sponsors' who may be trafficking the children into prostitution or forced labor, according to multiple government whistleblowers who laid out the process to a Senate panel Tuesday," reports the Daily Wire.  "Whistleblowers assigned to process minors near the border said that children were being placed with people who clearly were not their relatives and when there was evidence of abuse and trafficking."

To Avoid 'Kids in Cages' Headlines, the Biden Administration Has Done Something Far Worse.  To avoid a bad news cycle, the Biden administration has allegedly created a human trafficking disaster.  According to multiple whistleblowers, some 85,000 illegal immigrant children have been lost by the Department of Homeland Security after handing them over to largely unvetted "sponsors."  Testifying before the Senate on Wednesday, one whistleblower even alleged retaliation from the Biden administration after she alerted superiors about children being placed with people who "clearly were not their relatives."  She also observed signs of abuse.

Pentagon Lost Track of Money Sent to China for 'Enhancement of Pathogens of Pandemic Potential'.  The Pentagon admitted it could not find how much money it had sent to Chinese research labs "for research related to enhancement of pathogens of pandemic potential."  [Tweet] [...] Their research found 13 projects worth $46.7 million given to EcoAlliance from 2014-2023.  They claimed no funding went to China or "research involving enhancement of pathogens."  It's so weird.  The maps showing the army's CDMRP Pathogen Enhancement Projects from 2014-2023 are all blacked out. [...] The GAO tried to confirm awards through the USASpending.gov website.  However, no one could "find the data sufficiently reliable to report on for the purposes of reporting objectives."  "Specifically, the GAO report stated that information on Federal research funds provided through sub-awards to Chinese entities is not fully known because of limitations in the data provided in response to Federal reporting requirements for sub-awards," according to the report.  The investigation also revealed that none of the Pentagon departments used "a budget line or any other consistent indicator" that could help people easily search or review "databases of grants, contracts, and other transaction agreements."

The Editor says...
It's a good thing the guys running the Pentagon aren't in charge of something really important, like Merrill-Lynch, Morgan Stanley, or Edward Jones.

85,000 'Lost' Unaccompanied Migrant Children.  Biden's open border has allowed 345,000+ unaccompanied minors to cross into the United States.  [Tweet with video clip]  [Advertisement]  And by "unaccompanied," they really mean, "NO ONE is with these kids."  They make it by the grace of God, the kindness of strangers...  [Tweet with video clip] ...and through the evil intentions of child traffickers.  To their eternal shame, Joe Biden and his vile minion Mayorkas have exempted these poor kids from the faux border EO recently released.  [Tweet with video clip] [...] So far, it's costing over $5 [billion] a year just to take care of the kids coming across the border alone and I would think taking care of children would be a priority for an administration and a party that demonized the Trump administration for "CHILDREN IN CAGES."  Wouldn't you?

Department of Energy Is Irresponsible with Grant Money.  The Department of Energy spent $1.4 billion to fund 654 carbon capture research projects from 2018 to 2023, but some were risky and might have been scientifically impossible, according to the Government Accountability Office.  President Joe Biden's Bipartisan Infrastructure Law has already set aside $12 billion for carbon capture research — the process of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to help stop global warming — but auditors say there's no guarantee that "taxpayer dollars are going towards selected projects that are more likely to succeed."  The DOE performs "risk screenings" before awarding grants to determine if scientific experiments are logical and have enough money to succeed.  Auditors found several instances where DOE officials identified issues during a project's risk screening but awarded them grants anyway.

A quarter-trillion dollars, vaporized.  In a revelation that may unsettle many taxpayers, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) has brought to light a staggering figure of $236 billion in improper or incorrect payments made under the Biden administration last year alone.  This sum, which does not even fully account for all susceptible programs, indicates a level of fiscal mismanagement that demands immediate attention and action.  The breakdown provided by the GAO is particularly alarming, with Medicare and Medicaid together accounting for nearly $100 billion of this colossal waste.  Such figures not only represent a "material deficiency or weakness in internal controls" within these agencies, but also signal a broader issue of accountability and efficiency within the administration's handling of taxpayer dollars.  Improper payments, as defined by the GAO, include those that should not have been made or were made in incorrect amounts.

State Attorneys General Say More than 85,000 Children [have been] Lost at the Border.  Twenty-two state attorneys general said Monday more than 85,000 migrant children could be lost based on a report from the Department of Health and Human Services.  The report issued this month shows many of the children could be in the labor market or sex trafficked, they said in a letter.  "By law, the Department of Health and Human Services is responsible for keeping these children safe when they arrive," the attorneys general said in their letter.  "That responsibility includes reuniting children with family or placing them with a sponsor who will protect them from trafficking and exploitation.  But that Department is not living up to its responsibilities, and the cost of that failure is tens of thousands of missing children."

Federal Prosecutors Missing 'High-Risk Evidence,' Inspector General Finds.  The Justice Department's Inspector General released a damning report last week, showing that at least one U.S. Attorney's Office is misplacing "high-risk evidence."  The DOJ Inspector General said he launched an investigation after learning that physical evidence in a criminal case was missing, some of which was "high-risk physical evidence" — a category that includes weapons, drugs, cash, negotiable instruments, or any other dangerous or valuable items, as per DOJ guidelines.  "The OIG's investigation revealed that the USAO had stored physical evidence in this case and in prior cases, but that there were inadequate safeguards to ensure the proper storage of physical evidence by the USAO," the IG report said.  "For example, there were no safeguards: to ensure that the location where the evidence was stored was locked; to document who had access to the location; or to document what evidence entered or exited the location," the report said.

Consider the possibility that the weapons were never purchased, and the money was laundered and sent back to Washington, DC.
Inspector General watchdog report reveals the US has lost about $1.7 billion in arms sent to Ukraine.  You know the corruption and lack of accountability in Ukraine is bad when ABC News is reporting on it.  And on their national nightly news at that! [...] More than half of our Javelins, Stingers, and night vision equipment given to Ukraine just disappeared without a trace once it got over there?  The IG assures us he doesn't think any of the equipment fell into the wrong hands, but there's no guarantee.

This is a polite way of saying they were STOLEN:
Chicago Public Schools Have Lost $23 Million Worth of 'Free' Laptops and Other Electronic Devices Provided to Students.  Public schools in Chicago have lost $23 million worth of laptops, iPads, and other electronic devices provided for 'free' to students.  As many as 77,000 of these devices have just vanished into thin air.  Where did they go and who stole them?  Taxpayers are constantly lectured about public schools needing more funding and better equipment.  Perhaps this is why so many people roll their eyes when they hear that argument.

Chicago Public Schools lost $23M worth of laptops, iPads and other devices in 1 year: report.  An annual report from the Inspector General of Chicago Public Schools (CPS) revealed that millions of dollars worth of tech devices were reported lost or stolen "without appropriate search and recovery efforts."  The fiscal year 2023 annual report released Tuesday states CPS schools reported 77,505 tech devices as lost or stolen during the 2021-22 school year, totaling well over $23 million in original purchase price.  The discovery, as a result of the district's first post-COVID-19 inventory, calls the numbers "unacceptably high" and says the oversight process is in need of a "serious overhaul."  The report said the missing items included laptops, iPads, Wi-Fi hotspots, printers, document cameras and interactive whiteboards.

The Editor says...
Obviously, kids who get free laptops, without putting down any deposit or making any investment, will not value that property.  Politician who spend other people's money do not care when the money is squandered.

New J6 Evidence Emerges, Pelosi Colluded With Secret Service?  The more we find out about the events of J6, the more Nancy Pelosi becomes suspect.  According to sources, the former Speaker of the House was in contact with the Secret Service on that day and was caught on video stating that she was 'waiting' for the 'trespass' on Capitol grounds.  She was waiting for it, in her own words.  Pelosi reportedly spoke with the Secret Service before they spoke to President Trump on that day and told him that they didn't have the resources to protect him in the Capitol.  There was also a communication trail between Pelosi's office and the Secret Service from that day, but, of course, much of it has been 'lost.'

The Fabricated Memory of January 6th.  [Scroll down]  The people felt there were shenanigans in the 2020 elections, such as late-night voter drops caught on film, mail-in ballots counted at the last minute that all seemed to go for Biden, even from districts that previously had voted overwhelmingly for Trump in 2016. And what about the supposed water pipe explosion in Atlanta that forced the evacuation of a tallying center — and then it turned out there was no pipe burst or flooding after all — it was just a false alarm.  We now know, according to FBI Director Christopher Wray, they had dozens — if not hundreds — of embedded FBI agents in the crowd.  It was like a Cecil B. DeMille movie production, and it was done for the specific purpose of being able to create and fabricate a memory of an insurrection that never occurred. [...] At present, most of the video depositions have been erased or have disappeared according to FBI administrators; they've lost hours of video depositions of witness testimony; Liz Cheney says she doesn't know what happened to the original tapes.  Do you think Biden's FBI will perform a serious search?

Oregon Lost Track Of $426 Million In Federal Pandemic Funds For Emergency Rental Assistance.  The state of Oregon's housing agency lost track of $426 million in federal pandemic-era funds for emergency rental assistance (ERA), according to a new state audit.  In the 43-page audit released Thursday, the Oregon Audits Division revealed that Oregon Housing and Community Services (OHCS) couldn't definitively say where the millions designated to the Oregon Emergency Rental Assistance (ERA) Program ended up.  "The agency has no way of knowing how much of the $426 million went to eligible Oregon recipients and how much was sent to landlords, renters and non-eligible recipients in error," read the audit.  OHCS also told auditors that it couldn't quantify the amount of ERA funds distributed or the number of applicants who received funding.  The number of total applicants paid shifted from just over 56,000 to over 67,000 in the auditors' investigation.

Maryland Health Department Doesn't Know What It Did With $1.4 Billion.  Imagine being in charge of spending for a state's health department initiatives, including the billions in federal funding received during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.  Now imagine losing track of $1.4 billion.  That's what the Maryland Department of Health did when it failed to adequately track federal reimbursements it received during the pandemic, leading to more than $1 billion in unaccounted-for funds, according to a recent audit from the state Office of Legislative Audits, the Washington Post reported.  But that's not the worst of it.  At the end of Fiscal Year 2022, the department couldn't account for $3.5 billion in reimbursed funds it should have received from the federal government.  By April, the office recovered $2.1 billion of those funds, leaving $1.4 billion that should have been reimbursed undocumented.

The Pentagon has failed its SIXTH audit in a row! "Half of DOD's assets can't be accounted for".  I would say, "This is your taxpayer money at work" but in order to say that we'd have to know where the money went.  For a sixth time in a row, you read that right, six times, the Pentagon has failed its audit.  No one seems to know what we are spending our billions and billions on.  [Tweet]  Besides so much of our money just being wasted on stupid things like woke initiatives and things Rand Paul will point out at Festivus, the DoD has lost half of the money they were given.  And you know what makes it worse?  We only started auditing the Pentagon on a yearly basis in 2018.  This means the Pentagon has NEVER passed an audit.  And, according to the Comptroller and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, this year, with half the budget missing, is an improvement!

Billions Unaccounted for at 25 US Government Agencies.  The Government Accountability Office (GAO) revealed that numerous government agencies had "discrepancies" in their 2022 budgets.  Twenty-five agencies in total failed to properly report their expenditures to USAspending, which is intended to act as American's guide to where their tax dollars are going.  The GAO is now urging Congress to hold these agencies accountable.  To the surprise of no one, COVID related spending reports contained the largest errors.  In fact, the Treasury stated $231.5 billion was budgeted for the pandemic in their annual report, but only $36 billion was reported to USAspending.  Health and Human Services (HHS) stated they were spending $85.7 billion on the pandemic response, but reported spending $91.7 billion to USAspending.  Homeland Security (DHS) had a $10 million discrepancy in reporting as well.  Numerous entries totaling $1.2 trillion did not contain sources and did not state where the money was spent.

The Pentagon Fails Another Audit — Trillions Missing.  They say the Pentagon is the government's favorite money laundering tool for a reason.  It is comical that they even attempt to audit the Pentagon when they know the agency will fail miserably.  The government spent $187 million to conduct the meaningless audit at 700 locations.  This year, as with the year prior, only 7 of the 29 sub-audits passed.  HALF of the claimed assets were nowhere to be found by the 1,600 hired auditors.  How does trillions of dollars disappear?  Trillions have gone missing since pre-9/11.  There is no ongoing investigation into finding the whereabouts of these funds that belong to taxpaying citizens.  The September 11, 2001, attack occurred one day after former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld sounded the alarm bells and notified the public that $2.3 trillion in transactions could not be traced.  The WTC7 demolition on 9/11 destroyed the room where the Pentagon audit was taking place and also happened to be the location of my computer system.  I received from the SEC explaining that everything had simply been destroyed and no further questions were permitted.

How Many Illegals Has Biden Admin Released Into US?  Mayorkas Can't (or Won't) Say.  During a Senate committee hearing Tuesday, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas couldn't answer a question about how many illegal immigrants federal authorities have released into the U.S. interior under the Biden administration.  Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., pressed Mayorkas on the issue, but the DHS secretary couldn't provide a number at Tuesday's Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing.  Illegal immigration at the southern border of the U.S. has surged past 2 million in both fiscal year 2022, the highest year on record, and 2023, according to federal data. [...] Border Patrol doesn't have the ability to always collect migrants' addresses, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement doesn't always validate the addresses before they're released into the country, the inspector general previously found.  Between March 2021 and August 2022, Border Patrol collected 981,671 migrant records, but more than 177,000 migrant records "were either missing, invalid for delivery, or not legitimate residential locations."

How Did Biden Manage To Lose $300 Billion?  Friday afternoon, the Treasury Department reported that, despite a growing economy and low unemployment, the federal deficit shot up by $320 billion in fiscal year 2023.  That's unusual.  But what's really bizarre is why the deficit exploded.  According to the report, overall spending actually dropped by 2% compared with 2022 as the COVID-19 spending splurge abated.  What drove up the deficit this year was a sudden and completely unexpected 9% drop in tax revenues.  Not only did revenues come up hundreds of billions lower than last year, but they were well below what everybody expected them to be.  At the start of the year, the Treasury Department and the Office of Management and Budget projected revenues for fiscal 2023 at around $4.7 trillion.  The Congressional Budget Office figured it would be $4.8 trillion.  The actual amount:  $4.4 trillion.  In other words, there's between $300 billion and $400 billion worth of missing tax revenues.

Army: Now that you ask, we really don't know where all of our weapons are.  It's well known that the United States Army and Marines maintain a significant stockpile of used, damaged, or older models of weapons.  Some are damaged and waiting to be safely salvaged, but many of them are still functional, requiring a bit of cleaning or maintenance.  Some may be perfectly fine, but they've been replaced by newer models. [...] We're not talking about the big-ticket military equipment here.  When it comes to our most advanced fighter jets, submarines, long-range precision missiles and ICBMS, we're pretty good about keeping track of those.  But the stockpiles in question involve more conventional rifles, sidearms, ammunition, and maybe some shoulder-fired rockets.  They get shuffled around a lot in various warehouses across the country and around the world.  And we obviously don't know precisely where some of them are in case they need to be shipped out or, in some cases, if we even still have them.  And that's a problem.  This is an issue that won't be resolved overnight because it's been building for so many decades.  And the main reason for that is the fact that our military is so massive and has a gigantic budget.

How Did Philadelphia Sheriff Rochelle Bilal 'Lose' at Least 76 Service Weapons?  It's entertaining when the Mexican government chirps up, complaining about weapons that flow across their northern border (frequently facilitated by US government agencies). Sure, the drug cartels that actually run our neighbor to the south find ways to move acquire firearms up here and move them south, but when your own military "loses" about one-third of their guns they've been entrusted with, the Mexican regime doesn't have a lot of room to talk.  Which brings us to... Philadelphia.  The City of Brotherly Love is doing its level best to become the next Chicago.  They may not have elected (yet) a doctrinaire socialist who wants to further defund the police and open city-owned food stores, but give them time.  They'll probably get there.  The city's feckless mayor and Soros-backed prosecutor who's never seen a criminal he's wanted to prosecute love to inveigh against the Founders' original sin of protecting individual gun rights.  The problem is never the rampant recidivism, the decarceration, the zero bail, or the flash mobs looting stores.  As always... it's the guns.

Military mocked after asking if anyone has seen its missing F-35 stealth jet valued over $78 million.  A U.S. military base is asking nearby residents to give them a ring if they happen to find the Marine Corps' missing F-35B Lightning II.  Officials' apparent inability to track down the stealth aircraft has resulted in some lampoonery online, ranging from posting photoshopped camping selfies with the F-35B to invoking the ages-old rule of "finders keepers."  The missing jet, one of 353 belonging to the USMC and priced at over $78 million, was "involved in a mishap" on Sunday afternoon, according to Joint Base Charleston.  While the pilot thankfully managed to eject and is now in stable condition, it's unclear where his jet from the Marine Fighter Attack Training Squadron 501 with the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing ended up.

Marine Corps Still Hunting For Missing $80 Million F-35 Fighter Jet After Sunday 'Mishap'.  The U.S. military is on the hunt for an F-35 fighter jet that went missing near North Charleston after its pilot ejected, but there is no sign that the jet crashed, officials said, according to local outlet News19.  A "mishap" occurred around 2 p.m. on Sunday that involved two Marine Corps F-35B Lightning II jets, forcing one pilot to eject after the pilot switched on an unspecified autopilot system, officials said, News19 reported.  Officials at Joint Base Charleston, however, could not locate the roughly $80 million advanced fighter and have asked the public to provide any information that might help recovery teams find the errant jet, according to a statement.

Update:
Missing F-35 is found after pilot ejected on Sunday and plane continued in 'zombie mode'.  Debris from the F-35 fighter jet missing since its pilot ejected over South Carolina has been found, hours after the military asked the public for help to find it.  Joint Base Charleston had asked the public to call if they have 'any information that may help our recovery teams locate the F-35,' which is worth $80 million.  The pilot ejected and parachuted safely into a residential area in North Charleston around 2 pm Sunday.

The Editor says...
I remind you that we are living in the 21st century.  Shouldn't the plane try to return to its base, if the pilot bails out?

Marines Issue Two-Day Stand-Down of All Aircraft after F-35 Disappearance.  Marine Corps officials ordered a two-day stand-down of all aircraft inside and outside the U.S. on Monday after an F-35 jet disappeared in South Carolina.  The remains of the jet were discovered roughly two hours northeast of Joint Base Charleston on Monday evening, according to reports.  Hours before the debris was found, the Pentagon said in a statement that the stand-down would allow units "to discuss aviation safety matters and best practices."  The pause will give leaders time "to ensure the service is maintaining operational standardization of combat-ready aircraft with well-prepared pilots and crews."

What Happened to the 177,000 Illegal Aliens DHS Lost?  We are not in very good hands when it comes to our homeland security.  DHS Inspector General reports that 177,000 illegal aliens who were released in the U.S. disappeared.  But that's not all.  Out of the 177,000 illegal immigrants released, 54,000 were found to have blank addresses.  The rest either had invalid or nonexistent addresses.  Address forms included 50 different locations, including a Maryland restaurant, a Georgia bus station, a New Jersey car dealership, and an Illinois church.  DHS cannot send an immigration hearing notice to illegal aliens if they do not have a valid address.  In the process of screening illegals to determine if they pose a threat to national security or criminal activity, a valid address is required.  Without it, the illegals cannot be arrested and deported.

Suspect in $1.6M fentanyl case fails to show for court hearing.  A man who was released on nonmonetary bond after police said they caught him with $1.6 million in fentanyl in Pittsburgh failed to show for a court hearing Monday morning in Allegheny County Common Pleas Court.  Yan Carlos Pichardo Cepeda, 27, of New York did not answer repeated phone calls by pretrial services over the past several days.  Messages left with his father and grandmother also were not returned, said Lindsay Black of pretrial services.  Common Pleas Judge Edward J. Borkowski issued a nationwide arrest warrant for Cepeda following the hearing.

Tim Ballard:  Thousands of Unaccompanied Children 'Disappearing' into U.S. Interior.  Establishment media outlets and other players do not want to have a conversation about what is happening to children, as thousands of unaccompanied children are disappearing into the U.S. interior, Tim Ballard, the individual at the center of the box office surprise Sound of Freedom, told Breitbart News during an exclusive interview at the Turning Point Action Conference in West Palm Beach, Florida.  Ballard noted that establishment media outlets — Rolling Stone, MSNBC, CBS, CNN, and more — posted "glowing" stories about the operation that occurred on October 11, 2014.

In San Francisco, they don't know where they put all that COVID relief money they solicited from the public.  In San Francisco, the lockdown enthusiasts at the height of COVID pandemic had a great solution for all the businesses and people put out of work by their lockdowns:  A government-run charity — which solicited and took donations from the public. [...] According to the San Francisco Standard, there were a lot of little guys who donated to the fund, too — the website for the program accepted donations as low as $1, and the website itself said "you can donate any amount."  Breed didn't mention them in her laudatory press release, but little guys pitched in to do their part for COVID, too.  And after all that hoopla, and all those $30 millions rolling in ... the City doesn't know what it did with the money.

41 Percent Of Illegal Immigrant Group Biden Admin Released Into US Never Showed Up For Court Dates.  The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) has yet to issue court summons for about 82 percent of the illegal immigrants it allowed into the United States after a federal court ordered a halt on a Biden administration immigration parole program.  In May, Judge T. Kent Wetherell II of Florida's Northern federal court district issued a temporary restraining order (TRO), blocking the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) from releasing noncitizens into the United States through the Biden administration's "Parole with Conditions" (PWC) policy.  The PWC policy allowed for illegal immigrants to be paroled into the United States under the expectation that they'd check in with ICE within 60 days and receive a Notice to Appear (NTA), which would initiate court proceedings for them to be removed from the United States.

Pentagon cannot account for over $85 million in taxpayer-funded spare parts for F-35 jet.  The Pentagon cannot account for over 1 million F-35 Joint Strike Fighter spare parts since 2018, totaling over $85 million, according to a new May report from the Government Accountability Office.  The F-35 jet is the Department of Defense's costliest weapon system, and the program's life cycle is projected to cost over $1.7 Despite the project's massive cost, the DOD's F-35 Joint Program Office does not manage or keep track of the parts in its global spare parts pool located in 50 domestic and international non-prime contractor facilities.  "The F-35 Joint Program Office does not track or enter these spare parts into an accountable property system of record that could enable it to capture and store real-time changes to property records," GAO reported.  "Currently, the prime contractors maintain this information."  Spare parts for the jet include everything from engines, tires, and landing gear to bolts, screws, and fasteners.

American Despotism.  [Scroll down]  Meanwhile, the CIA, in another intelligence failure, could not locate its puppet president of Afghanistan, Johns Hopkins professor Ashraf Ghani, as he fled with a reported $169 million in cash while his country imploded.

Republicans demand answers after Biden administration loses track of 85,000 migrant children.  A first-term House Republican is leading 75 other lawmakers in demanding transparency from the Biden administration following a report that the federal government was unable to track 85,000 migrant children whom it released into the United States since 2021, the Washington Examiner has learned.  In a letter sent Wednesday [5/3/2023], southeastern Arizona Rep. Juan Ciscomani accused Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas of knowingly and recklessly discharging unaccompanied children to adults across the country and doing nothing to find the tens of thousands they had lost touch with.

Biden Is Guilty Of Child Abuse On A Massive Scale, And Nobody Cares.  That was a Washington Post headline from May 2018, one of many such pronouncements in nearly every mainstream news outlet — all decrying these missing children as evidence of the "cruelty" and "inhumanity" of President Donald Trump's border security policies.  "It's just wrong.  It's wrong," Joe Biden said at one point.  "Cruelty is the point.  It's their only point."  But under President Biden's allegedly more humane border security policies, the federal government has lost track of 85,000 children who crossed the border unaccompanied by their parents.  Worse, many of them ended up in the hands of traffickers, not family or friends.

'Modern-Day Slave Traders': Hawley Demands Probe Into 85,000 'Lost' Migrant Children.  Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) is demanding that the FBI investigate the exploitation of thousands of unaccompanied alien children (IUAC) who may have been brought into the United States via child smuggling operations.  According to data from US Customs and Border Protection, approximately 345,000 minors have crossed into the United States unaccompanied since President Joe Biden took office, while a report from the NY Times suggests that the Department of Health and Human Services has lost contact with 85,000 of these minors.

Josh Hawley Calls on FBI to Launch 'Full-Scale' Probe into 85K Migrant Children Missing on Joe Biden's Watch.  Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) is calling on the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to launch a "full-scale" investigation into the whereabouts of 85,000 migrant children who have been released into the United States under President Joe Biden but whom the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has lost all contact with.  Since Biden took office, HHS officials have lost contact with some 85,000 Unaccompanied Alien Children (UACs) released to adult sponsors after arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border.  At the same time, Biden officials have reportedly ignored warnings that many UACs are ending up in a widespread labor trafficking pipeline as well as sex trafficking.

Biden Administration Official Unable to Give Clear Answer on Whereabouts of 85,000 Migrant Children.  "Please do better," Rep. Katie Porter, D-Calif., told a Biden administration official responsible for caring for children who cross unaccompanied and unlawfully into the United States.  "I have always promised to hold the powerful to account, regardless of political party," Porter said during a Tuesday hearing, speaking to Robin Dunn Marcos, director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement under the Department of Health and Human Services.  The hearing by the House Oversight and Accountability Committee's subcommittee on national security, the border, and foreign affairs focused on reports of high number of illegal immigrants who are abandoned, unaccompanied children.

FBI make arrest in Massachusetts after suspected leaker of top secret Pentagon files identified online.  FBI investigators have arrested Jack Teixeira, the 21-year-old suspected of being behind the biggest US intelligence leak in nearly a decade.  Attorney General Merrick Garland confirmed that the National Guardsman had been arrested in North Dighton, Massachusetts 'without incident'.  He said Teixeira will appear in a local court as part of the investigation into 'alleged unauthorized removal, retention and transmissions of classified national defense information.'

The Full Surveillance Power of the U.S. Govt Could Not Find the Classified Intel Leaker, But the Media Did.  Sometimes the obvious answers are in the reality of the obvious part that few pay attention to.  According to the original outline, as presented by the Washington Post last night, the full surveillance and intelligence power of the United States government was unable to locate the source of the largest leak of U.S. classified intelligence in a decade, but some journalists found a teenager in his mom's basement with all the answers.  This is the story, and they are sticking to it.  I've been in enough rabbit holes created by the silos of the intelligence community to know when not to enter one.  First things first, what silo uses the Washington Post?  We all should know by now the same three-letter operators in charge of the Amazon Cloud Service, are the same three-letter operators who use the PR firm known as the Washington Post.

Man Allegedly Finds 'Sensitive' Biden Docs Lying In Street In Northern Ireland.  A man reportedly found security documents on the street related to President Joe Biden's trip to Belfast, Northern Ireland.  Northern Ireland police are currently investigating the suspected security breach, the Belfast Telegraph reported.  The man who reportedly discovered the documents claimed the five pages comprised a "sensitive document" on how police officers were deployed in Belfast for Biden's visit, according to the outlet.  "We are aware of a security breach," the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) told the BBC, the outlet reported.

Explosive Device Goes Missing from Marine Helicopter.  A device containing explosives disappeared from a U.S. Marine helicopter in Japan on Thursday.  The 1st Marine Aircraft Wing stationed in Okinawa, Japan has reported a device that contains explosives was noticeably missing from their Bell AH-1Z Viper helicopter after it underwent a post-flight inspection on Thursday.  A spokesperson for the 1st Marine Aircraft Wing unit told the Stars and Stripes the missing device is no more than two inches wide and contains approximately .16 ounces of TNT.

The Biden Admin Lost 20,000 Migrant Children, and That's Not the Worst Part.  The Biden administration admitted in a letter to Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) that it has lost track of nearly 20,000 unaccompanied migrant children since January 2021.  "Of the 108,981 Safety and Well-Being Calls conducted since January 2021 for children discharged from ORR care, there are 19,726 sponsors who could not be reached," reads the letter from Acting Assistant Secretary Jennifer Cannistra of Administration for Children and Families at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.  And they have no plans to look for them.  "While ORR's custodial responsibilities end when a child is released from ORR care, ORR provides post-release services for children and sponsors who would benefit from ongoing connections to community services," the letter sent to Biggs on February 24 reads.  "Although ORR has no legal custody after a child is discharged, ORR does follow-up by phone."

'The Biggest Fraud in a Generation': Hundreds of Billions in 'Covid Relief Funds' Have Gone Missing.  The United States government presided over what is being called the "biggest fraud in a generation" during the Covid pandemic.  According to the latest reports on the Covid relief program, between $163 billion and $400 billion out of a total of $900 billion in funding has gone missing.  The Department of Labor has admitted that at least $163 billion of the Covid relief funds did not make it into the right hands, Pete Hegseth reported.  The $163 billion in "lost" funds includes fraud — and the estimate is on the "low end," Hegseth added.

Pentagon can't account for $220 billion in gov't property, fails fifth audit.  A Tuesday report by the Government Accountability Office revealed that the Department of Defense failed its fifth audit in a row after it could not account for at least $220 billion in government-furnished property, the Daily Caller News Foundation reported.  The DOD has been mandated by federal law to complete audits since 1994; however, the mandate was ignored for decades due to the agency's massive size, according to Military.com.  Since launching its first independent audit in 2017, the Pentagon has never passed.  The Pentagon failed its fifth audit in November after the agency could not prove expenditures for 61% of its $3.5 trillion in assets.  To perform this year's overall audit of the DOD, which was expected to cost $218 million, the agency aggregated 27 separate audits conducted by approximately 1,600 auditors.  According to Military.com, the auditors performed 220 in-person site visits and 750 virtual site visits.

ICE apparently "loses" records of 378,000 detainees in illegal immigration program.  The Epoch Times is reporting that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials are apparently having some difficulty locating any records of illegal aliens placed in a key federal program numbering 378,000.  The program is designed to "ensure non-detained non-citizen compliance with release conditions, court hearings and final orders of removal, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a nonprofit government transparence advocacy group.

ICE Can't 'Locate' Records of 378,000 Detainees.  Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials are unable to locate any records of illegal immigrants taken into custody and placed in a federal program to "ensure non-detained non-citizen compliance with release conditions, court hearings, and final orders of removal," according to a nonprofit government transparency advocacy group.  "ICE has conducted a search of the ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) for records responsive to your request and no records responsive to your request were found," the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) told the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University in a Dec. 22 letter.  The ICE letter cautioned that the failure to locate records sought by TRAC isn't evidence that the documents do or don't exist.  The inability of ICE to locate the requested records was described by TRAC in a Dec. 23 statement as a "very troubling development."

Biometric devices sold on eBay reportedly contained sensitive US military data.  German researchers who purchased biometric capture devices on eBay found sensitive US military data stored on their memory cards, The New York Times has reported.  That included fingerprints, iris scans, photographs, names and descriptions of the individuals, mostly from Iraq and Afghanistan.  Many worked with the US army and could be targeted if the devices fell into the wrong hands, according to the report.  A group of researchers called the Chaos Computer Club, led by Matthias Marx, bought six of the devices on eBay, most for under $200. They were spurred by a 2021 report from The Intercept that the Taliban had seized similar US military biometric devices.  As such, they wanted to see if they contained identifying data on people who assisted the US Military that could put them at risk.  They were "shocked" by the results, according to the report.

U.S. Military Equipment From Afghanistan [is] for Sale on eBay.  Our national security is in the best of hands.  Not Biden.  Maybe whoever in Afghanistan has an eBay account.  ["]German researchers who purchased biometric capture devices on eBay found sensitive US military data stored on their memory cards, The New York Times has reported.  That included fingerprints, iris scans, photographs, names and descriptions of the individuals, mostly from Iraq and Afghanistan.  Many worked with the US army and could be targeted if the devices fell into the wrong hands, according to the report.["]  They cost under $200.  Where did it come from before eBay?  That's a good question.  And officially there's no answer.  But one seems to have come most recently from Afghanistan.

ICE Lost Track of 150,000 Illegal Immigrants: Florida AG.  Florida's Attorney General Ashley Moody has revealed new video evidence that shows officials from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) lost track of 150,000 illegal immigrants who had entered the United States.  In March 2021, border officials began releasing immigrant illegals, asking them to report to the ICE office closest to their intended residence.  However, the officials did not issue formal charging documents for these migrants.  Charging documents require illegal aliens to appear before a federal immigration judge.  ICE officials use these documents to locate and remove them.

Where in the world is 'La Barbie'?  It's no secret that Joe Biden's open borders has fattened Mexico's notorious cartels with profits from the human trafficking and "crossing fees" from illegal migrants.  According to an ICE official, cited here, they "earn" between $2 billion and $6 billion a year from border crossing "fees" alone.  More illegal migrants, more fees for the cartels.  And that rolling cash does and will have knock-on effects, starting from the increased violence in Mexico to its spillover effect from Mexico to the states.  But now we're seeing a funny turn in events that raises natural questions about a connection as well as just how well U.S. prisons are run:  ["]A cartel leader and hitman fond of videotaping torture sessions and decapitating likely dozens of enemies has gone missing from a federal prison in Florida, where he was serving a 49-year sentence.  As of November, Edgar Valdez-Villareal, a Mexican American cartel leader, had been mysteriously removed from the federal Bureau of Prisons website.  He is now listed as "not in BOP custody" even though his release date is not until July 27, 2056.["]

Migrants Let Into U.S. With GPS Trackers Underreported 600%.  During a recent trip to Arizona, President Biden was asked by Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy why he wasn't planning on visiting the border — Arizona and Texas are ground zero for a migrant crisis that has spilled into the entire country[.]  "Why go to a border state and not visit the border?" Doocy asked.  "Because there are more important things going on," Biden responded. "They're going to invest billions of dollars in a new enterprise."  Last month, White House press secretary dismissed all GOP border visits as "political stunts."  But the Biden Administration knows the numbers don't look good down south — a record number 73,000 "gotaways" were logged in November; Since the fiscal year started on Oct. 1, there have already been 137,000 "gotaways" counted, sources told Fox News.  Now we know, according to an exclusive Daily Caller report, that the Biden Administration may be intentionally downplaying the number of migrants released into the U.S. with a GPS tracker.

Army Base [is] Still Searching for [a] Machine Gun That Went Missing Days Ago.  An Army base in Washington state spent part of the long holiday weekend searching for a missing part to a .50-caliber machine gun, the latest incident after the service was criticized for lost weapons.  Soldiers with Joint Base Lewis-McChord's 1-2 Stryker Brigade Combat Team, or "Ghost" Brigade, had their four-day weekend cut short on Friday for what soldiers lamented as a classic Army debacle involving the missing piece of equipment, a firestorm of rumors and what one soldier described as an out-of-season "Easter egg hunt."  The receiver assembly of an M2 .50-caliber machine gun went missing from 2nd Battalion, 3rd Infantry Regiment's staff duty area and triggered an all-hands search that, for most of the rank and file, lasted a little over 12 hours.  But it resulted in an Army investigation that was still ongoing Monday.

Feds can't say what happened to Afghan evacuees in U.S. who were security risks, not fully vetted.  The Biden administration is still allowing Afghans to reach the U.S. without checking them through a key Defense Department database that could help weed out national security risks, according to senators.  Wednesday marks a year since the end of the final U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, yet lawmakers say they still haven't received a full accounting of what happened in the chaos — including who, exactly, made it out of the country.  Those who are tracking the matter say there are plenty of worrying signs.

CIA Admits to Losing Dozens of Intelligence Assets Around the World.  Top American counterintelligence officials sent a memo that warned every CIA station around the world about a troubling number of intelligence assets who had been killed, disappeared, or captured in recent years.  The memo actually gave a specific number of agents — a highly unusual inclusion but one that demonstrates the seriousness of the situation.  The CIA is an agency in transition with the focus of intelligence moving from rooting out terrorism in Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan to concentrating on our enemies in Russia and China.  But the loss of agents is particularly troubling because there doesn't seem to be a major intelligence leak.  The problem is with the agents themselves.

ICE comes up empty in effort to find missing border jumpers.  The Biden administration's attempt to track down catch-and-release illegal immigrants and serve them with court summonses turned into a "complete waste of time," according to officers who say they were pulled off higher priority cases to chase down "ghosts."  Out of a universe of more than 30,000 potential targets, officers were able to locate and serve only about 600, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement sources.  That means tens of thousands of illegal border crossers remain at large in the country without an official Notice to Appear for their immigration proceedings — and there are no good prospects for tracking them down.

DHS Lost Track Of Nearly One-Third Of The Illegal Immigrants It Released Into The US: Report.  U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) failed to record the domestic addresses of nearly one third of illegal migrants released into the country, according to a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Inspector General report obtained by The Washington Free Beacon.  Between March and June 2021, when the migrants crossed, CBP encountered over 720,000 migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border, according to the Beacon.  Between March and September 2021, nearly 30% of those released "did not comply with release terms," the outlet reported.

Secret Service deleted texts from Jan 5 and Jan 6, Homeland Security's Inspector General reveals amid its internal probe.  The Secret Service has admitted to deleting texts from January 5 and 6 but claimed it was part of a 'pre-planned, three-month system migration'.  The Department of Homeland Security agency shot back at the Inspector General saying it had 'maliciously' erased messages from 2021.  A spokesman argued staff had been 'fully cooperating' with Joseph Cuffari with 'interviews, documents, emails, or texts'.

This is only believable if you've never heard of a server.  Text messages don't reside in your phone after they're sent.
Secret Service Denies Deleting Text Messages, Blames Phone Reset.  The U.S. Secret Service has denied allegations that the agency deleted text messages from January 5 and 6, 2021 after they had been requested by the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general.  Secret Service Chief of Communications Anthony Guglielmi issued a strongly worded statement on Thursday that refuted the claims by the Office of Inspector General (OIG) and blamed a "reset" of the agency's mobile phones for the loss of some data other than the messages in question.  In a letter to Congress on Wednesday, DHS Inspector General Joseph Cuffari wrote that many text messages from January 5 and 6, 2021 were deleted even after OIG had requested them.  The Secret Service initially said the messages were lost as part of a "device- replacement" program, according to OIG, but the agency issued a statement late on Thursday denying that the texts OIG sought had been lost.

Also posted under Liberals think you're stupid.

What a convenient coincidence.
Secret Service deleted texts messages from Jan. 6: Government watchdog.  Secret Service agents deleted text messages exchanged around the time of the 2021 Capitol riot, according to a government watchdog that sought the communications as part of its investigation into the Jan. 6 insurrection.  The Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General said messages sent between Jan. 5 and 6 were deleted "as part of a device-replacement program," according to a letter to lawmakers, dated Wednesday [7/13/2022], obtained by the Associated Press.  The messages were erased after the OIG requested electronic communications between the agents during its probe into the Capitol siege.  Homeland Security personnel were also told they couldn't provide records to the inspector general and any records would first have to be reviewed by DHS attorneys.

The Editor says...
If you lose any data when "migrating" from an old computer system to a new one, then you're incompetent.

Suspected Terrorists Who Crossed Border Into United States May Have Been Released:  Mayorkas.  Some of the 42 illegal immigrants who were arrested by U.S. border agents and identified as suspected terrorists may have been released into the United States, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandryo Mayorkas said on May 4.  "Some may be placed in removal proceedings.  Some may be placed in criminal custody.  Some may be cooperating with law enforcement.  Some may be downgraded from the terrorist rating,"  Mayorkas told the Senate Homeland & Governmental Affairs Committee in Washington.  Mayorkas said officials in his agency know the "precise disposition" of each of the 42 suspected terrorists but declined to share that information in a public setting.

Gaetz Lights up FBI Official on Hunter Laptop, Makes Move Leaving Nadler Speechless.  Looks like the story of the Hunter Biden laptop is heating up again as Republicans in Congress are pushing to finally get answers.  On Monday, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) dropped receipts with bank records showing that a Hunter Biden firm received $100,000 from a company that Grassley said was effectively an arm of the Chinese Communist government.  Grassley and Johnson said they had more records that they would be dropping.  On Tuesday, Rep. Matt Gaetz was questioning the assistant director of the FBI Cyber Division, Bryan Vorndran, about the laptop.  The FBI had taken the laptop after the repair shop owner called them and turned the laptop over to them in Dec. 2019.  But when Gaetz was questioning him, Vorndran claimed that he didn't know where the laptop was or what had happened to it.

How does the FBI 'lose' a laptop like Hunter Biden's?  Some things don't make sense.  That brings us to some testimony from the FBI's assistant director for cyber-security, who told Congress's Rep. Matt Gaetz that he had no idea where Hunter Biden's laptop, entrusted to FBI custody, actually is. [...] "I don't know who has it," said [FBI Assistant Director for the Cyber Division Bryan] Vorndran. [...] Vorndran should be embarrassed.  The whereabouts of this laptop are something he should know.  Even if he doesn't have it, he should know who does have it because it's a computer matter that likely affects his job of protecting the country from cyber-attacks.

The FBI 'Doesn't Know' Where Hunter's Laptop Is.  "So where is it?  The Laptop?" Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) clown-slapped the assistant director of the FBI's Cyber Division, Bryan A. Vorndran, on Tuesday [3/29/2022] when Vorndran admitted he didn't have "any information" on the whereabouts of Hunter Biden's "laptop from hell."  [Tweet with video clip]  Vorndran told Congress he didn't know where the laptop is, nor does he even know who SHOULD know the whereabouts of the laptop.  Weird, considering he IS the assistant director of the FBI's Cyber Division.  Gaetz mentioned the laptop's "international business deals, kickbacks, and shakedowns" that might potentially hurt the Biden family.

Director of FBI Cyber Has No Idea Where Hunter Biden Laptop Is Located.  I would say this is sketchy but given everything that has been revealed about the FBI in recent years the point would be moot.  We still have no idea where the Huma Abedin/Anthony Weiner laptop is located after the FBI took custody of it.  During a congressional hearing today, GOP Congressman Matt Gaetz asked FBI cyber chief Bryan Vorndran if he knows where Hunter Biden's laptop is stored.  The head of the FBI cyber operations said he has no idea.  [Video clip]

FBI cyber chief admits to not knowing what the agency has done with Hunter Biden's seized laptop.  Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) got into a heated spat over the whereabouts of Hunter Biden's laptop during a House Judiciary hearing on oversight of the FBI's Cyber Division on Tuesday [3/29/2022].  The Republican firebrand used his allotted time to grill the division's assistant director Bryan Vorndran, who repeatedly told Gaetz he didn't have any information on where the hard drive belonging to President Joe Biden's son is currently located.  At one point Gaetz tried to enter the hard drive into the Congressional record but was blocked by House Judiciary Chair Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), who changed his mind a short while later.

Somewhat related:
400 bulletproof vests set to be donated to Ukraine [were] stolen in NYC: cops.  About 400 used bulletproof vests that were supposed to be donated to Ukraine were stolen sometime overnight from a nonprofit organization in Manhattan, police said Wednesday [3/16/2022].  The vests were being stored at 203 Second Ave. near 12th Street in the East Village and were slated to be sent to the country that has been under siege by Russian forces since Feb. 24.  Somebody called 911 after discovering the heist at 9:19 a.m., police said.

Oops!
Secret Service says it can't find Hunter Biden travel records for 2010, 2011, or 2013.  The Secret Service is telling Republican investigators that it cannot find communications related to Hunter Biden's travels for 2010, 2011, or 2013 — when President Joe Biden was the vice president.  Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin sent the Secret Service a letter last month seeking unredacted records tied to Hunter Biden's travels between January 2009 and January 2017.  They asked for full travel records and criticized the agency for years of "inappropriate redactions" — especially related to a controversial Kazakhstan trip in 2014.  The senators also lamented that three years of documents seemed to be missing entirely.

Defense Dept:  Biden Brought Unvetted Afghans to U.S., Many Flagged with 'Security Concerns' Cannot Be Located.  An explosive report conducted by the Department of Defense's (DOD) Inspector General reveals that President Joe Biden's administration brought dozens of Afghans to the United States without properly vetting them and many of whom deemed "significant security concerns" have since gone missing.  The report, released late last week, exposes massive holes in Biden's unlimited resettlement of Afghans to American communities — the largest in U.S. history — such as a lack of vetting through the National Counter-Terrorism Center (NCTC) database.

DHS Cannot Account for 50K Migrants Released in 2021.  Data released by the Department of Homeland Security show more than 50,000 migrants released by the agency with instructions to report to ICE once at their desired U.S. location have failed to do so.  The Notice to Report (NTR) process was instituted to help the Border Patrol ease detention facility overcrowding in 2021.  The federal disclosure covers the period between March and August 2021.  Of more than 270,000 migrants released by DHS, roughly 104,000 were placed in the NTR system which trusts the migrant to voluntarily report to ICE at their intended U.S. destination to begin the deportation process.

Oops!
Controversial bail hearing not recorded; human error blamed.  The only people who know what happened in a Milwaukee County courtroom last month when Darrell E. Brooks Jr. — now charged with six homicides in the Waukesha Christmas Parade attack — was released on $1,000 bail are those there that day.  They're not talking.  And there is no audio recording of what happened.  Court officials say they only discovered the missing recording after the Waukesha parade attack, when they fielded media requests for copies of the recording of the hearing.

What an amazing coincidence.
Record of Waukesha massacre suspect's $1,000 bail hearing missing due to 'technical issues'.  The early November bail hearing of Darrell Brooks, the man who prosecutors say plowed his car into the Waukesha Christmas parade on November 21, is reportedly gone from records due to "technical issues."  On November 5, just 16 days before prosectors say Brooks killed 6 and injured more than 60, Court Commissioner Cedric Cornwall set his bail at an "inappropriately low" amount of $1,000 in a court hearing that has been lost to time, Fox 6 has learned.

Biden Government Has 'Lost' 45,000 Kids That Were Trafficked Over The Border.  The incompetence of the Biden administration is never-ending.  It has turned the longest-running American crisis, illegal immigration on our southern border, from a failure of liberal policy to a failure of liberal processes. [...] Justthenews said that, in part, the loss of these children is because the administration has weakened the vetting process for adult sponsors.  And Biden weakened the process because they just want the kids to disappear rather than ending up in US facilities as part of a photo-op.

Crime Data Feared Lost From Dallas Police Computer Network.  A massive amount of information on criminal cases dating to July 2020 has been lost from the Dallas Police Department computer database, authorities revealed on Wednesday [9/8/2021].  In a statement, the Dallas County District Attorney's Office said the loss occurred in early April as the Dallas Police Department performed a data migration from a computer network drive.  About 14 terabytes of the 22 terabytes lost were recovered, but the remaining eight terabytes are believed lost forever, according to the statement, and would have to be restored by new investigative work.  Most up-to-date personal computers have hard-drive memory capacities ranging from a half-terabyte to two terabytes.

Biden Loses 4,890 Migrant Children, And The Left Yawns.  Last week, Axios reported that the Department of Health and Human Services has lost contact with more than 4,500 children who'd crossed the border illegally after it had released them into the country.  That's a third of the migrant children it was supposed to be tracking.  "In 2018, the Trump administration was criticized for being unable to account for the whereabouts of around 1,500 children released from HHS shelters during a three-month period," Axios reports.  "There were around 4,500 such minors as of the end of May who had been released under the Biden administration."  Axios, a small news organization started just four years ago, uncovered this new wrinkle in the Biden-created border crisis by submitting a Freedom of Information Act request.

Biden administration has lost track of one in three migrant children who have crossed the border and [were] put in care.  The Biden administration is increasingly losing touch with migrant children released from government custody after illegally crossing the southern border, with one in three going unaccounted for in May.  As the number of illegal migrant crossings and apprehensions rises, so does the number of minor migrants who are released from government custody into sponsor or guardianship custody.  Of the 14,600 required check-in calls made in the first five months of 2021, Axios reported Wednesday that it found in a Freedom of Information Act request only 4,890 were successful in reaching either the minor migrant or their sponsor.  From January to May, care providers tasked with checking in on minor migrants' status made 14,600 calls to those released from Health and Human Services shelters, but in 4,890 of those instances, they were unsuccessful in reaching the migrant or their U.S. sponsor.

Somewhat related:
Classified UK defence documents found at bus stop in England, says BBC.  Classified documents from Britain's defence ministry containing details about a British warship and Russia's potential reaction to its passage through the Black Sea have been found at a bus stop in southern England, the BBC reported on Sunday (June 27).  The BBC said the documents, almost 50 pages in all, were found "in a soggy heap behind a bus stop in Kent early on Tuesday morning" by a member of the public, who wanted to remain anonymous.

US military guns keep vanishing — and showing up in street crimes.  In the first public accounting of its kind in decades, an Associated Press investigation has found that at least 1,900 U.S. military firearms were lost or stolen during the 2010s, with some resurfacing in violent crimes.  And that's certainly an undercount.  Government records covering the Army, Marine Corps, Navy and Air Force show pistols, machine guns, shotguns and automatic assault rifles have vanished from armories, supply warehouses, Navy warships and elsewhere.  These weapons of war disappeared because of security failures that, until now, have not been publicly reported, including sleeping troops and a surveillance system that didn't record.  In one case, authorities linked an Army pistol stolen from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to four shootings in New York before it was recovered.  Another stolen Army pistol was used in a Boston street robbery.

Guns don't kill people; negligent bureaucrats kill people.  Agents at every ATF office in the country are now scrambling to recover thousands of guns that an agency contractor stole over a three-year period from their National Firearms and Ammunition Destruction Branch in Martinsburg, W. Va.  The guns in question were waiting to be destroyed when the contractor, Christopher Yates, stole them, according to his plea agreement.  Yates sold them on, in some cases through a gun dealer in Pennsylvania.  Among the takings were a number of fully automatic machine guns, which require federal permits to own.  Among the disturbing questions in this case is how this pilfering went unnoticed for so long.

Guns And Parts of Firearms Reportedly Stolen From ATF Facility.  When the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives makes a bust, they generally seize a whole lot of guns.  Well, they take what guns are there.  Sometimes it's a warehouse, sometimes it's three guns hiding under a mattress.  Sometimes, they even manage to do it without shooting innocent women and children apparently.  True story.  Anyway, when they do, they lock those guns up in storage facilities.  That's supposed to keep guns out of the hands of bad people until they can be properly destroyed.  In theory.

Feds lost track of criminal alien informants: inspector general.  Federal law enforcement agencies knowingly invite foreigners, often with lengthy criminal records, into the U.S., sponsoring them for visas on the hope they'll help out with an investigation.  But in dozens of those cases the government has lost track of the people and agents were slow in reporting them to Homeland Security, allowing the trail to go cold in efforts to track down, according to a Justice Department inspector general's report released Wednesday [6/12/2019].  From 2015 to 2017 the Justice Department sponsored roughly 5,500 immigrants for deferred deportation, an S visa or parole into the U.S.

Uncle Sam isn't the only one.
Report: Official forgot secret arms deal file at airport.  A delegation of Israeli security officials on their way to arms talks in India left classified documents on a table in Ben Gurion Airport, but an investigation concluded that there was no damage to national security, Haaretz reported Wednesday [4/3/2019].  The team, headed by National Security Council Chief Meir Ben Shabbat, was en route to New Delhi in January when a member of the delegation forgot a folder with top-secret material in an airport restaurant, the report said.

The Editor says...
If there was no damage to national security, why were the files top secret?

How $21 Trillion in U.S. Tax Money Disappeared:  The following are highlights from the DOD IG "Summary of DOD Office of the Inspector General Audits of Financial Management":
  •   The financial management systems DOD has put in place to control and monitor the money flow don't facilitate but actually "prevent DOD from collecting and reporting financial information... that is accurate, reliable, and timely."  (p. 4)
  •   DOD frequently enters "unsupported" (i.e. imaginary) amounts in its books (p. 13) and uses those figures to make the books balance.  (p. 14)
  •   Inventory records are not reviewed and adjusted; unreliable and inaccurate data are used to report inventories, and purchases are made based on those distorted inventory reports.  (p. 7)
  •   DOD managers do not know how much money is in their accounts at the Treasury, or when they spend more than Congress appropriates to them.  (p. 5)
  •   Nor does DOD "record, report, collect, and reconcile" funds received from other agencies or the public (p. 6),
  •   DOD tracks neither buyer nor seller amounts when conducting transactions with other agencies.  (p. 12)
  •   "The cost and depreciation of the DOD general property, plant, and equipment are not reliably reported...." (p. 8);
  •   "...the value of DOD property and material in the possession of contractors is not reliably reported." (p. 9)
  •   DOD does not know who owes it money, nor how much. (p. 10.)

Obama Admin Losing Track of Illegal Immigrant Children in U.S..  The Obama administration has lost track of scores of immigrant children who have been caught crossing into the United States illegally, according to a new government oversight report that found children are sometimes being placed into homes with other illegal immigrants and non-citizens.  Following a massive uptick in the number of immigrant children crossing into the United States, the Government Accountability Office discovered that children are being handed off to individuals who have not gone through vigorous background checks and may have criminal histories.  Regulations do not require that individuals taking custody of these kids "be a citizen or lawful permanent resident of the United States," according to the report, which has sparked investigations on Capitol Hill into the Obama administration's handling of these immigrant children.

Minot Air Force Base:  We're also missing a machine gun.  Dangerous equipment has once again gone missing at the U.S. Air Force base in North Dakota that operates aircraft and intercontinental ballistic missiles that can deliver nuclear warheads.  Days after Minot Air Force Base reported that one of its squadrons protecting intercontinental ballistic missile silos had lost a 42-pound box of explosive grenade rounds while traveling on a gravel road, the same base said a machine gun turned up missing in a routine inventory of the facility's weapons.

Here are 1,366 well sourced examples of Barack Obama's lies, lawbreaking, corruption, cronyism, hypocrisy, waste, etc..  [#291] In September 2013, it was reported that IRS employees had "lost" $67 million from a "slush fund."  Obama refused to fire those employees.  Obama had created the "slush fund" as part of Obamacare. [#292] In September 2013, it was reported that ATF employees had "lost" 420 million cigarettes.  Obama refused to fire them. [...] [#809] In August 2014, it was reported that Obama's "transparency" website was missing information about how $619 billion had been spent. [...] [#1103] In September 2012, it was reported that the Department of Defense had "lost" $475 million worth of oil. [...] [#1183] In November 2015, the Obama administration said it had no idea where the money went when it spent $43 million of taxpayers' money to build a gas station in Sheberghan, Afghanistan, that was supposed to cost $500,000.  However, in the real world, there would be canceled paper checks, or records of electronic payments, or some other type of documented information that showed where the money went.

Reward Offered for Lost Treasure of the Compton PD (Glocks and Berettas).  Long ago, in a far away country (2017 in California) a dying city locked treasure in a secret vault, to be handed over to the new, larger regime.  The treasure was inventoried then ignored for several months.  During that time, from March 6, 2017 to August 31, 2017, the treasure, 23 Beretta .40 caliber handguns and 8 Glock .40 caliber handguns, disappeared.  No one admits knowing who purloined the treasure or where it has gone.  At the end of March, 2018, the city gave up on finding the treasure on its own, without controversy.

America's Missing Money.  On September 10, 2001, then U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld disclosed that his department was unable to account for roughly $2.3 trillion worth of transactions.  The next day, the U.S. sustained the terrorist attacks that changed the world, and this startling revelation was forgotten.  When an account discrepancy occurs that cannot be traced, it's customary to make what is called an "un-documentable adjustment."  This is similar to when your checkbook balance is off by, say, ten dollars; you add or subtract that amount to make everything balance with the bank.  In 1999, the amount that the Pentagon adjusted was eight times the Defense Department budget for that year; it was one-third greater than the entire federal budget.  By 2015, the amount reported missing by the Office of the Inspector General had increased to $6.5 trillion — and that was just for the army.  Using public data from federal databases, Mark Skidmore, a professor of economics at Michigan State University, found that $21 trillion in unsupported adjustments had been reported by the Defense and Housing and Urban Development departments between 1998 and 2015.

This happened under Obama, not Trump:
Pentagon Auditor Can't Account For $800 Million In Spending.  The Pentagon's Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) has reportedly "lost track" of hundreds of millions of dollars it spent, said Ernst & Young, the accounting firm conducting the first-ever Pentagon audit, according to Politico.  E&Y discovered that DLA "failed to properly document more than $800 million in construction projects," said Politico, which also reported this is just one of the many instances where millions of dollars went missing as the accountability system inside the Pentagon is broken.  Worse, according to Politico, the first-ever audit, covering the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, 2016, signals complete incompetence about how the Pentagon handles its $700 billion annual budget.

Massive Pentagon agency lost track of hundreds of millions of dollars.  One of the Pentagon's largest agencies can't account for hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of spending, a leading accounting firm says in an internal audit obtained by POLITICO that arrives just as President Donald Trump is proposing a boost in the military budget.  Ernst & Young found that the Defense Logistics Agency failed to properly document more than $800 million in construction projects, just one of a series of examples where it lacks a paper trail for millions of dollars in property and equipment.

Why Trust the FBI?  Another big tranche of missing communications?  Really?  When the IRS was in trouble for targeting tea-party organizations and other conservative groups in the run-up to the 2012 election, thousands of emails — evidence under subpoena — went missing.  John Koskinen, then acting commissioner of the IRS, lied to Congress about how and why that happened, a fact he was later forced to acknowledge.  As a legal question, the result of all that malfeasance — destroying evidence — was precisely squat.  Lois Lerner walks the streets a free woman with a fat federal pension, and John Koskinen is perfectly comfortable showing his face in the daylight.  And now it is the FBI's turn.

FBI text messages lost because of 'misconfiguration issues' that perplex security analysts.  The FBI may have ignored its own data storage procedures as it lost five months of text messages between two anti-Trump FBI employees, security analysts said.  Texts that have been made public, which show the two employees and reported lovers talking about their antipathy toward the president and efforts to impeach him, have become a major embarrassment for an FBI already reeling from accusations of bias and bungling.

Oops! Those FBI Texts and 4 Other Times the Deep State 'Lost' Crucial Communications.  [Scroll down]  Many believe, and not without cause, that this "insurance policy" is the phony Russian dossier funded in part by the FBI (along with the Clinton campaign). The phony dossier was almost certainly used by the Obama White House to wiretap the Trump campaign under the FISA program.  These lost five months of texts also happen to coincide with the crucial months when the Russian hoax blew up in the media and resulted in the appointment of special prosecutor Robert Mueller.  Although, on its own, the very idea that these crucially important text messages were "accidentally lost" defies belief, what makes this news even more troubling is how frequently the Deep State loses communications that might prove to be inconvenient to the Deep State.

Confirmed: FBI can effectively monitor anybody EXCEPT perhaps some of their own.  It's entirely possible that the FBI could produce documentation on what you or I bought the last time we went to the grocery store or quickly produce an email we sent 13 years ago, but when it comes to monitoring their own personnel who happened to be anti-Trump during the 2016 campaign, hey, accidents happen!

In Search of Lost Texts.  Under federal law, the head of each federal agency is required to preserve all records documenting the decision-making process and essential transactions of the agency.

Another missing-email defense from the bowels of the Deep State.  The FBI has told a Senate committee that it "lost" the text messages of top counterintelligence officials attempting to undercut President Trump, conveniently during the five months when their political activity was most fervent.  This calls for its own investigation.

FBI counterterror chief, reportedly drunk, loses weapon.  Robert Manson, a supervisor in the FBI's counterterrorism division, got drunk — allegedly — during a party with exotic dancers, better known as strippers, at a hotel in Charlotte, North Carolina, went to bed, woke up and found his service weapon missing.  This isn't just embarrassing.  It's downright dangerous to innocent American citizens.

Air marshal misplaces weapon at Indianapolis airport, causes delays.  Operations at the Indianapolis International Airport were delayed on Thursday afternoon [10/5/2017] after an air marshal somehow "misplaced" his/her weapon at the airport, TSA officials confirmed.  In a statement obtained by Fox News, the Transportation Security Administration said they were aware of the situation, but did not confirm whether or not the weapon had been recovered.

Passenger finds air marshal's loaded gun on Delta flight.  A federal air marshal left her loaded gun in an airplane restroom during a transatlantic flight to Kennedy Airport — yet she's still on the job, it was reported Saturday [4/22/2017].  A passenger found the weapon on Delta Flight 221 from Manchester, England, on April 6, and gave it to a flight attendant who returned it to the marshal, CNN said.  Federal Air Marshal Service sources told CNN that the agent should have been placed on leave, but remains on active flight duty.

Air marshal left loaded gun in bathroom abroad transatlantic Delta flight:  Reports.  A federal air marshal misplaced her loaded service weapon in the bathroom of a transatlantic flight earlier this month before it was ultimately found by another passenger, according to multiple reports.  The incident happened aboard Delta Flight #221 on April 6 as the aircraft traveled to New York City from Manchester, England, CNN and the New York Times each reported this week citing several unnamed sources.  The passenger who found the weapon in the aircraft's bathroom alerted the flight crew who subsequently returned it to the air marshal, the outlets reported.

Laptop holding Trump Tower floor plans, Hillary Clinton email investigation info stolen from Secret Service agent.  A laptop computer containing floor plans for Trump Tower, information about the Hillary Clinton email investigation and other national security information was stolen from a Secret Service agent's vehicle in Brooklyn, police sources told the [New York] Daily News.  Authorities have been frantically searching for the laptop since it was stolen Thursday morning — and are trying to determine if the thief knew what he was taking or randomly targeted the agent's vehicle.

Targeted Theft — Secret Service Laptop Containing Clinton Investigation Files Stolen From Vehicle Agent's Home.  Everyone should try to skip the shiny things embedded within the story of a laptop theft from a Secret Service Agent Marie Argentieri.  The theft appears to have nothing to do with Trump Tower or Trump Tower floor plans.  The theft appears to have everything to do with Argentieri as a supportive investigator for Hillary Clinton's private email server.  Evidence of the specific targeting is transparent within the eye witness stories that a car pulled up, a passenger exited the vehicle — went directly to Agent Argentieri's vehicle, broke in, took the back pack and walked away quickly.

Secret Service laptop, pins, radio stolen.  A Secret Service computer containing sensitive security information about Trump Tower was stolen from an agent's vehicle in New York on Thursday, along with a set of security perimeter pins, a personal laptop, and other items, federal and New York City law enforcement sources told POLITICO.  The Secret Service laptop, which contained information about the layout and evacuation routes in Trump Tower, was still missing as of Friday afternoon [3/17/2017], according to multiple sources familiar with the investigation.

Secret Service computer containing Trump Tower floor plans stolen from car.  A laptop containing floor plans for Trump Tower, information about the Hillary Clinton email investigation and other national security information has been stolen from a US Secret Service agent's car in New York.  US media said the authorities had been frantically searching for the computer since it was stolen Thursday morning.  Some items stolen along with the laptop — including coins and a black bag with the Secret Service insignia on it — were later recovered.  But the laptop, along with other documents described as "sensitive," have not been found.

Secret Service Laptop Stolen, But Data Not at Risk:  Sources.  A New York-based Secret Service agent's laptop was stolen from her car in Brooklyn, but the device is encrypted and sensitive data is not at risk, law enforcement sources told NBC News and NBC New York on Friday.  The sources said the laptop requires a keycode to access, and two unsuccessful attempts to log in will destroy the device's memory.

FBI sub-machine gun stolen from California agent's car.  The FBI announced Friday [1/20/2017] that a sub-machine gun was stolen out of an agent's car earlier this month outside San Francisco.  The San Francisco Chronicle described the gun as a Heckler & Koch MP5 10 mm.  The report said an ammunition magazine and bulletproof vest were also taken from the special agent's vehicle.  It is believed that the items were taken on the evening of Jan. 8 or the morning of Jan. 9, according to the report.  It was unclear how the weapon was stored in the car, which was parked in Contra Costa County.

DHS 'snafu' gives Illegal aliens green cards.  [T]hanks to the Obama administration's incompetence that's been observed repeatedly, upon taking office on Jan. 20, 2017, President Trump will face an immigration and homeland security behemoth gone berserk.  For example, a report released by the Department of Homeland Security's Office of the Inspector General admits that the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services problems experienced in the agency's so-called Green Cards issuance program are far worse than originally believed.  The audit was conducted as a follow-up to a March 2016 report in which the DHS OIG revealed that the USCIS had sent hundreds of Green Cards to the wrong addresses.

DHS loses thousands of 'Keys to the Kingdom'.  President-Elect Donald Trump's campaign promise to build a wall to separate the United States from Mexico resonated with many Americans and galvanized their support, which ultimately enabled him to win the election.  These voters want to prevent narcotics and illegal aliens and the criminals and terrorists among them from flowing freely into the United States. [...] While illegal immigration represents a huge multi-faceted challenge and, indeed threat, to America and Americans, the multiple failures of the legal immigration system is no less problematic.

Thousands Of Immigration Green Cards Have Disappeared.  Thousands of green cards are missing because U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) officials apparently sent them to the wrong addresses, jeopardizing national security, according to a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Office of Inspector General (IG) report made public Monday [11/21/2016].  "It appears that thousands of green cards have simply gone missing," DHS Inspector General John Roth said in a news release.  "In the wrong hands, green cards may enable terrorists, criminals, and undocumented aliens to remain in the United States.  It is vital that USCIS ensure better tools and procedures are in place to mitigate such risks."

JW Probe:  Secret Service Loses Guns, Badges, Laptops, "Other Equipment".  Since 2001 dozens of weapons and pistols have gone missing, hundreds of agent badges and cell phones as well as scores of laptop and desktop computers and six agency motor vehicles.  Labeled "lost and stolen assets" by the Secret Service, the records are broken down by year and type of equipment missing.  Two categories are somewhat vague and neither includes records before 2009.  One, titled "other equipment," reveals the loss of 793 items since 2009.  The other, listed as "office equipment," shows the loss of 201 items during the same period.  The agency had an especially humiliating year in 2004 when 1,362 items were recorded as lost or stolen, the records show.  Radio equipment led with 191 lost items in addition to 53 laptops, 53 desktop computers, 26 badges and 25 cell phones, among others.  In 2002 the Secret Service lost 1,179 items, including a disturbing number of weapons (69) and badges (40).

Secret Service Can't Find Tons Of Its Guns, Phones, Badges And Cars.  Thousands of sensitive assets belonging to U.S. Secret Service agents, including firearms, computer laptops, work badges, telephones and even motor vehicles, have been lost during the past 15 years, according to documents obtained by nonprofit government watchdog Judicial Watch.  "This is supposedly an elite law enforcement agency — how did all this equipment get stolen?" or lost.  "This is alarming.  Every American should be alarmed about this," Judicial Watch's Irene Garcia told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

Feds: DHS agent leaves car unlocked; M4 assault rifle, tactical vest stolen.  A Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agent who lives in Brighton had his agency-issued .223 assault rifle stolen out of his unlocked car back in September, according to federal court paperwork.  Federal prosecutors said Russell Lawrence, a heroin addict who was taking items from unlocked cars, took the rifle from the vehicle, along with two 30-round rifle magazines and a tactical police vest.

U.S. Can't Find ISIS Prisoners.  Captured ISIS fighters should be an invaluable source of intelligence in the fight for the terror group's Iraqi capital.  But U.S. forces have only questioned 'a handful' of them.

The $6 Billion Clinton's State Dept LOST Was Not 'Debunked'.  Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton's claim that the $6 billion the Department of State lost was "debunked" contradicts multiple investigations and audits by the agency's watchdog.  "When you ran the State Department, $6 billion was missing," Republican nominee Trump said during Wednesday's [10/19/2016] final presidential debate.  "How do you miss $6 billion?  Six billion dollars was either stolen, they don't know.  It's gone."  Clinton replied:  "Well, first of all, what he just said about the State Department is not only untrue, it's been debunked numerous times."  But it was the State Department's Inspector General (IG) who found in three investigations and two audits that an estimated $6 billion was lost to contract mismanagement, fraud and incompetence during Clinton's tenure as secretary of state.

Missing Afghans Raise Terrorism Fears.  Several Afghan nationals undergoing military training in the United States disappeared from U.S. military bases this month, according to Pentagon and Homeland Security officials.  "During the month of September, seven Afghan students were considered absent without leave (AWOL) during international military student programs," Pentagon spokesman Cmdr. Patrick L. Evans said.  Three of the Afghan military trainees fled from a Pentagon training program two weekends ago during the bombing spree in New York and New Jersey by Afghan-born bombing suspect Ahmad Rahami, raising concerns among security officials that the missing Afghan students may be linked to terrorism or plans for attacks in the United States.

FBI Docs:  Hillary Clinton Left A Classified Document Behind In A Russian Hotel Room.  Hillary Clinton left a classified document behind in a Russian hotel room in which she had been staying.  No problem there, I'm sure.

Justice Department can't find anti-medicinal marijuana talking points to Congress it had just found.  What happened to those two pages of responsive records?  No clue, but the DOJ's Office of Information Policy assures us that an "adequate, reasonable search" that somehow didn't turn up what it had found just a few months prior.

Fed Housing Dept Has $43 Billion Worth Of Indecipherable Records.  Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) officials have ignored 63 financial management recommendations from Congress' investigative arm since 2012 and only half-heartedly followed many more, resulting in the $43 billion agency's books to be all but useless.  Things have gotten so bad at HUD so rapidly, that auditors who found only one "material weakness" in the department's accounting in 2012 found nine in 2015, according to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report published Monday [8/22/2016].

Brazil:  Still looking for the Gitmo guy.  Abu Wa'el Dhiab, a.k.a.  Jihad Ahmad Diyab, a.k.a.  Abu Wael Dihab, a.k.a.  Jihad Ahmed Mujstafa Diyab, is still missing.  The forner Gitmo detainee was released to Uruguay last year, and visited Argentina last February, where he declared he was "ready to fight."  He had tried to enter Brazil three times but was turned away at the border.

Former Gitmo detainee's location unknown in South America, airline issues alert.  The growing mystery about the whereabouts of a former Guantanamo detainee who resettled in Uruguay has led a South American airline to issue an alert to its employees.  The Colombia-based Avianca Airlines issued an internal alert asking its employees to be on the lookout for Syrian native Abu Wa'el Dhiab, whom according to Uruguayan is visiting neighboring Brazil.  The Brazilian government, however, has said there is no record for Dhiab entering the country.

Orlando Jihadi's Wife's Location Still Unknown After Conflicting Statements to Police.  The Obama administration seems to have lost track of Noor Zahi Salman, wife of Orlando jihadi Omar Mateen and a possible co-conspirator in the worst terrorist attack on American soil since 9/11.  Loretta Lynch said at her press conference on Tuesday [6/21/2016], in response to a question about Salman's whereabouts, "Right now I do not know exactly the answer to that.  I believe she was going to travel, but I do not know exactly her location now."

Unbelievable! AG Lynch admits she has lost track of Orlando shooter's wife.  The mind boggles, as during her press conference in Orlando, Attorney General Loretta Lynch casually admitted that she has no idea of the location of the wife of the Orlando shooter — who may well have been aware of his attack and provided material support for it.

Loretta Lynch:  So We Sort of Lost Track of the Orlando Terrorist's Likely-Accomplice Wife.  It looks a lot like incompetence, but it might just be tha they're performing well for their actual employeers.

Lessons from Fort Hood and Asking the Right Questions in Orlando.  In 2009, debilitating coordination problems within the [FBI] kept it from capitalizing on early intel about Nidal Hasan, a radicalizing Muslim Army officer who was emailing AQAP's Anwar al-Aulaqi nearly a year before the officer went on a shooting rampage at Fort Hood, firing more than 200 rounds and killing 13 people.  In the email, Hasan asked whether a Muslim US solider who committed fratricide would be considered a martyr in the eyes of Islam.  To the FBI's credit, the email "tripped the wire."  An agent and analyst singled it out despite a crushing workload.  The signal was found amidst the noise — but the FBI's coordination weaknesses then let it get lost again.

The IRS Deleted 422 Backup Tapes With Lerner Emails.  The IRS "accidentally" erased 422 backup tapes that investigators believe contained emails to and from IRS official Lois Lerner, according to the Associated Press.  The tapes contained as many as 24,000 Lois Lerner emails.  The tapes were erased eight months after Congressional investigators requested all emails to and from Lois Lerner and a month after the IRS informed Congress they were missing some of Lois Lerner's emails.

U.S. Air Force computer crash wipes out a decade of data.  The Air Force has lost thousands of inspector general's records after a database crash.  The database, run by Lockheed Martin, was corrupted about a month ago.  The company spent two weeks trying to recover information before informing the service of the loss on June 6.

Update:
Air Force recovers crashed database.  The Air Force has recovered a database that holds thousands of inspector general records after it crashed, the service said Wednesday afternoon [6/15/2016].  "After aggressively leveraging all vendor and department capabilities, the Air Force made a full recovery of the Automated Case Tracking System database, the Air Force inspector general system of record for all records related to IG complaints, investigations and appeals," the Air Force said in a statement.  Last week, the Air Force announced that a database known as the Automated Case Tracking System (ACTS) had crashed and that records for more than 100,000 Air Force inspector general cases dating back to 2004 were lost.

Bungling border agency can't find drone records.  Homeland Security can't find a single record of a request to fly drones to help the Coast Guard, the agency said this week in a letter to a top member of Congress — an admission that's likely to add fuel to the guard's request for its own fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles.  R. Gil Kerlikowske, commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, said his agency's Air and Marine office records all requests, but for some reason it "could not locate any prior requests from the USCG" for unmanned aerial surveillance flights.  For Rep.  Duncan Hunter, California Republican and chairman of a subcommittee that oversees the Coast Guard, the admission was the latest signal that the border agency isn't treating its colleagues in the guard fairly.

$6 Billion Dollars Missing From The State Department on Hillary Clinton's Watch.  The mainstream media would have reported it but they're busy campaigning for her.

Feds left 'explosives' material aboard school bus after training exercises, parents told.  Kids in a northern Virginia public school district unknowingly rode a school bus this week that was also carrying "explosives training materials" left behind by the CIA after it conducted exercises with local law enforcement agencies, officials acknowledged Thursday [3/31/2016].  The materials were packed in a container and placed in the engine compartment of a bus at Briar Woods High School in Loudoun County on March 24, officials said.  It was discovered nearly a week later during a maintenance check of the bus — which by then had carried dozens of kids, including elementary school students, for at least two days.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and Operation Fast & Furious.  Operation Fast and Furious was a BATF led operation that sold guns to the drug lords in Mexico through intermediaries in a supposed attempt to track the guns and the channels feeding the drug lords.  Trouble is, the program actually put over 2000 high powered rifles, including 50 caliber sniper rifles, into the hands of the Drug Lords never intended to track them.  The GPS tracking devices were intentionally left off.  Over 1500 of these weapons are still "missing."

Handguns and FBI agent's badge stolen from car in Bay Area.  Three handguns and an FBI agent's badge were stolen early Friday [1/29/2016] from a locked and alarmed vehicle in the latest such incident in the San Francisco Bay Area, the FBI said.

Hundreds of DHS badges, guns, cell phones lost or stolen since 2012.  Hundreds of badges, credentials, cell phones and guns belonging to Department of Homeland Security employees have been lost or stolen in recent years — raising serious security concerns about the potential damage these missing items could do in the wrong hands.  Inventory reports, obtained by the news site Complete Colorado and shared with FoxNews.com, show that over 1,300 badges, 165 firearms and 589 cell phones were lost or stolen over the span of 31 months between 2012 and 2015.

Clinton Chief Of Staff Lost Her Personal Blackberry, Which Contained Classified Emails.  While working as Hillary Clinton's chief of staff at the State Department, Cheryl Mills lost her personal Blackberry, on which she sent emails that the State Department has determined contain classified information.  Records obtained by The Daily Caller through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit show Mills revealed that she lost her Blackberry in a March 20, 2010 email she sent to Bryan Pagliano, the State Department IT staffer who managed Clinton's private email server.

The smoking gun?  In 2006, a Special Forces Operational Detachment Alpha (ODA) from my company was deployed to Afghanistan.  Theirs was a particular mission that differed from the combat missions the typical ODAs were conducting at that time.  Everyone on that team maintained a Top Secret Sensitive and Compartmented Information (TS/SCI) clearance and was "read-on" to their special program.  A few months into their deployment, their Intelligence Sergeant lost a thumb-drive that possessed classified information.  A week later the thumb drive was found for sale at a local bazaar.

The 'New Cuban Missile Crisis' Mystery Deepens.  A U.S. Hellfire anti-tank missile — a weapon launched from Predator drones in anti-terrorism operations, among other uses — found its way into the hands of Cuba's government in 2014.  But the route it took, twice crossing the Atlantic, was less mysterious than the U.S. government's public response to the discovery that front-line American military equipment made it to Havana — or beyond.

Hellfire missile accidentally sent to Cuba on Air France.  The Wall Street Journal broke the news that a US Hellfire missile sent to Europe for training purposes was accidentally shipped to Cuba in 2014, "a loss of sensitive military technology that ranks among the worst-known incidents of its kind."  This is the missile we use every day to take out terrorist targets.  The journal reports that "US officials worry that Cuba could share the sensors and targeting technology inside it with nations like China, North Korea or Russia."  Add to that list Iran, Hezbollah and a long litany of other US enemies.

The Editor asks...
Was this really an accident, or an act of treason?

Rubio: Obama administration hiding details on stray missile.  Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) is demanding that the Obama administration turn over details of how the Cuban government wound up having a U.S. missile.  The Florida Republican, who is running for president, sent a letter Friday to Roberta Jacobson, the assistant secretary of State for western hemisphere affairs, accusing the department of withholding information after reports that a Hellfire missile was sent to Cuba after being used during a European training exercise.

Missing since 2014, U.S. Hellfire missile found in Cuba.  An inert U.S. Hellfire missile that had been missing since 2014 was found in Cuba after it was possibly misrouted on its way to Europe.  Federal authorities have tried for more than a year to convince the Cuban government to return the Hellfire missile, which are designed to be dropped from helicopters as anti tank weapons and have since been used to carry out drone attacks.

Missing U.S. Hellfire missile located in Cuba.  One of the most advanced U.S. missiles was unintentionally shipped to Cuba in 2014, according to a report Thursday evening [1/7/2016] in the Wall Street Journal.  The Hellfire missile was supposed to be sent to Europe for a training mission, the Journal reported, cited "people familiar with the matter."

Secret Service agent's gun, badge stolen near White House.  A Secret Service agent's gun, badge, radio, handcuffs and flash drive were stolen in broad daylight Monday [12/21/2015] near the agency's headquarters in Washington, according to a police report and sources briefed on the incident.  The agent's belongings were taken from his personal vehicle while it was parked on G Place in downtown Washington around 4 p.m. ET.

U.S. lets in four times as many suspected terrorists as it keeps out.  The State Department admitted to Congress last week that it had revoked the visas of 9,500 individuals since 2001 who were believed to have either engaged in terrorist activities or were associated with a terrorist organization.  Think about what that means:  Nearly 10,000 people considered too dangerous to enter the United States because of suspected terrorist activity or association were mistakenly granted visas to lawfully enter the country.  They successfully penetrated our defenses, beat our screening system and got their hands on U.S. visas.  Worse still, after officials caught their mistake and revoked the visas after the fact, they lost track of the visa holders.  Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, pressed Michele Thoren Bond, assistant secretary for the Bureau of Consular Affairs, to explain what had happened to the 9,500.  She replied:  "I don't know."

IRS loses $27 million to computer glitch.  A pattern of "ineffective monitoring," identified by the IRS' watchdog, caused the IRS to hand out an additional $19 million before the agency verified that the recipients had provided accurate income information.  "We forecast that over five years the IRS could issue $135 million in potentially erroneous refunds due to this programming error," wrote the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, which oversees the IRS, in a report made public Monday [12/21/2015].

IRS Issued $46 Million in Erroneous Tax Refunds.  The Internal Revenue Service issued more than $46 million in erroneous tax refunds due to a computer glitch and ineffective monitoring, issues that left uncorrected could cost taxpayers up to $230 million over the next five years.  The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) released an audit Monday [12/21/2015] faulting the IRS for approving thousands of potentially fraudulent tax refunds in 2013.  "TIGTA identified that because of a programming error, over $27 million of refunds were erroneously issued for 13,043 Tax Year 2013 tax returns," the audit said.  "The programming error is overriding the IRS's two-week processing delay on some refund tax returns that are identified by the IRS as potentially fraudulent."

Another Negligent Fed, Another Murder Victim.  Not long ago we had the death of an innocent woman in San Francisco because an irresponsible criminal investigator with the Bureau of Land Management couldn't be bothered to secure his handgun.  Add to that a government that at its most senior levels will not deport or imprison violent criminal aliens.  And there you have the death of Kate Steinle, at the nominal hands of criminalien Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez.  Lopez-Sanchez had a strong assist from the US government at several levels:  the agent, the BLM (which has never held the agent accountable), and every open-borders enthusiast who draws a government paycheck.  Did Feds learn from that?  No, since there were no consequences for the careless bum who left his firearm unsecure, they did not.  Now we have a new murder victim, who was reportedly shot with a gun negligently left unsecured in a car by a special agent with ICE ERO.

How did the FBI manage to "lose" Sharyl Attkisson's file?  Sharyl Attkisson, the former CBS reporter and independent journalist, has a long history of getting under the government's skin. [...] This week, Attkisson tells the story of how she finally sought to obtain her own FBI file and the mysterious answers she received. [...] [E]ven if you don't want the details revealed, can the FBI simply claim they don't have a file when one exists?  It seems as if they would instead come back with an answer of saying that the information is sensitive and can't be released.  Or perhaps just turn over a page with everything redacted except the date and the title?  Something doesn't sound right about that.

US taxman slammed: Half of the IRS's servers still run doomed Windows Server 2003.  [Scroll down]  The result of not having an executive steering committee — the usual process — was that "basic planning documents such as budget estimates and deployment schedules are still unsigned and incomplete."  It also notes that "no official meeting minutes with the CTO or decision documents were created or signed."  In addition, the IRS reported in December 2014 that it has managed to upgrade all its workstations from Windows XP to Windows 7.  But it later turned out that there were 1,300 computers still running XP.  Where they were, though, nobody knew because of "inaccuracies in the inventory records."

Where did billions in Obamacare grants go?  The Government Accountability Office charged the Obama administration and many state-run healthcare exchanges with not adequately tracking federal funding, according to a report in the libertarian Reason magazine on Monday [7/20/2015].  The GAO report, which is still in draft form, comes as the administration is taking heat for not properly screening fake Obamacare applications.

Capitol Police Left Guns in Bathrooms.  When a member of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's security detail left his Glock and magazine stuffed in the toilet seat cover holder of a Capitol Visitor Center bathroom stall, a CVC worker found the gun, according to a source familiar with the Jan. 29 incident and two other disturbing instances when Capitol Police left loaded firearms in problematic places.

FBI agent's sniper rifle stolen out of car at Salt Lake City hotel.  An FBI agent's sniper rifle was ripped out of his car's window and stolen from a Salt Lake City hotel parking lot just days before President Obama visited Utah earlier this month.  The gun was inside a hard rifle case and was 'secured properly' to a truck safe with padlocks and chains while the car was parked at the Marriott Springhill Suites, according to police.

Obama Pentagon can't account for $500 million in weapons left in Yemen.  It seems the Obama administration has misplaced some military equipment, a large amount of military equipment.  A very large amount, actually.  It doesn't know where about $500 million in weapons and equipment is, in fact.  That's $500,000,000 — a half-a-billion dollars.  Almost as much taxpayer money as it blew on that solar energy company Solyndra, owned by an Obama bundler.  Except the Solyndra money went down a political rat-hole.

Pentagon loses track of $500 million in weapons, equipment given to Yemen.  The Pentagon is unable to account for more than $500 million in U.S. military aid given to Yemen, amid fears that the weaponry, aircraft and equipment is at risk of being seized by Iranian-backed rebels or al-Qaeda, according to U.S. officials.  With Yemen in turmoil and its government splintering, the Defense Department has lost its ability to monitor the whereabouts of small arms, ammunition, night-vision goggles, patrol boats, vehicles and other supplies donated by the United States.

If the government doesn't know how much it spends or how much it owes, how can it know anything?  When an accountant prepares a balance sheet for a company, the purpose is to measure the firm's actual financial health, as opposed to the fantasies pushed by the public relations department gnomes.  Sales may be up 10 percent, but that doesn't mean much if the company is swimming in debt, operational expenses are out of control and the bank says forget about getting more credit.  That's pretty much the current state of affairs for the federal government.  Tax revenues are climbing, but the debt is out of control and nobody knows for sure how much the bureaucrats are actually spending.

Only CBS Acknowledges Gov't Missing $619 Billion from Agency Budgets.  On Wednesday, August 6, USA Today reported that the federal website USASpending.gov which is tasked with tracking government money, can't find $619 billion from different agency budgets. Despite the government losing track of hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars, CBS This Morning was the only network morning show to cover the report on Wednesday morning. ABC's Good Morning America and NBC's Today ignored the story altogether.

Detroit Lost a $1 Million Check in a Desk Drawer.  The City of Detroit misplaced a million-dollar check sent to it by a school district.  Which prompts two questions.  How do you lose a million-dollar check?  And:  Why is a city in the year 2013 still using paper checks?

DHS Can't Locate 266 Illegal Overstays that 'Pose National Security' Risks.  The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) cannot find 266 potentially dangerous foreign nationals who have overstayed their visas, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO).  According to testimony from Rebecca Gambler, director of the Homeland Security and Justice for GAO, on May 21, 2013 before the House Subcommittee on Border and Maritime Security, DHS identified 1,901 illegal overstays of concern in 2011.  As of March 2013, 14 percent remain missing.

Homeland Security Documents Found in Target Parking Lot.  [Scroll down]  But that's not all NBC 12 uncovered.  The station's anonymous source known as "Eric" explained how he discovered documents pertaining to the plan.  ["]He says he found Homeland Security's Operation Plan in the parking lot of the Target on West Broad Street.["]

More about the raid on Lumber Liquidators.

F.B.I. Evidence Is Often Mishandled, an Internal Inquiry Finds.  F.B.I. agents in every region of the country have mishandled, mislabeled and lost evidence, according to a highly critical internal investigation that discovered errors with nearly half the pieces of evidence it reviewed.

51 Examples of Government Waste.  [#5] The Department of Defense is set to destroy $1.2 billion worth of ammunition because it does not have an effective inventory system to track supplies across the military services.  The services each use different inventory systems, preventing proper data sharing and leading to excess materials.

Ten Years Later, the Question Remains: How on Earth Do You 'Lose' $5.5 Billion?  Despite a full decade of audits and investigations, Pentagon officials still cannot say what happened to $6.6 billion in cash that was intended for the Development Fund for Iraq.  Apparently, it just "disappeared."  Was it just misplaced in an accounting error, or was it "stolen"?  Who knows?  Apparently, the Pentagon has no idea.

Who's tending State Department's cash cow?  The U.S. State Department has been handing over billions of dollars in grants for foreign projects — ranging from cultural exchanges to "climate change" activities — without adequate oversight or adequate assessment of the risks involved, and sometimes without knowing whether the money was actually spent, according to the department's Inspector General.  Moreover, these money-management problems have been going on for years, despite specific warnings, according to the watchdog IG's office.

What if the conspiracy theories are true?  I found an article published by the Washington Post on July 16 of this year reporting that [Thomas] Frieden had been called to testify on Capitol Hill about researchers at his agency that had mishandled live anthrax and other deadly pathogens in a number of mishaps over the past year or so.  This came on the heels of federal officials finding forgotten smallpox samples in a storage room at the National Institute for Health campus in Bethesda, Maryland.  They also discovered 12 boxes and 327 vials with pathogens that included the virus behind dengue and spotted fever.  When Frieden testified about the anthrax, his response was:  "We missed a critical pattern, and the pattern is an insufficient culture of safety."  Really?  And this is the guy in charge of making decisions on Ebola?

Exclusive: Top Secret Service agent had gun stolen from car.  A top Secret Service agent who has regularly served on President Obama's protective detail had his gun stolen out of his car at his house after leaving it there overnight and was never disciplined for it, according to two sources with detailed knowledge of the incident.  Internal Secret Service records show that the agency reported that the agent in question lost a semi-automatic handgun in 2009, but he was never punished for it, the two sources said.

State Department won't say how missing records for $6 billion were stored.  A spokesperson for the State Department refuses to say if any missing contract files from March 2008 [to] March 2014 were stored electronically.  The American Thinker began covering the case of the missing records for $6 billion on April 5, 2014, soon after the State Department's Office of Inspector General released two unclassified memos dated March 20, 2014.  Several news media outlets also covered the missing State Department records in early April, but, to date, there's been little, if any, follow-up to the story.  In short, it's off the mainstream media radar.

State Department can't account for $6 billion in last 6 years.  After six months, the search for missing State Department accounting records continues.  Multiple websites, including the American Thinker, reported in early April 2014 that, "There has been, in the most charitable interpretation, grave sloppiness in spending and accounting for money at the cabinet agency run by Hillary Clinton."  The sloppiness involves $6,000,000,000.

Reports: Feds Lose Track of 6,000 Foreigners on Student Visas.  The federal government has reportedly lost track of more than 6,000 foreigners on student visas, some of whom may be in the country "to do us harm."  According to an ABC News investigation, "58,000 students overstayed their visas in the past year.

U.S. Government Lost Track of 6,000 Foreign Nationals of 'Heightened Concern'.  More than 6,000 foreign nationals in the United States on student visas have vanished after overstaying their time here, raising alarm at the Department of Homeland Security.  The federal agency is now working to find them after losing track of their whereabouts.  Officials at the federal agency told ABC News there are more than 58,000 students who overstayed their visas over the past year.  Approximately 6,000 of those foreign nationals were referred to Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents for "follow-up," as they're of "heightened concern."

Military families complain as personal cars go missing.  A surprise change in Pentagon contractors is causing headaches for rank-and-file military personnel and their families on the move this summer.  International Auto Logistics of Brunswick, Ga., last year won a $305 million bid to handle the transport of about 66,000 personal vehicles owned by service members, family members and civilian employees who move each year within and beyond the United States.  Immediately after the new contract began this spring, complaints began rolling in:  Cars and trucks shipped to wrong locations, delays of several weeks, vehicles damaged upon arrival and an online vehicle tracking system that typically fails.

Where Are The Guns The U.S. Gave To Afghanistan?  Special Inspector General's report says the Pentagon gave hundreds of thousands of rifles, machine guns, and other small arms to the Afghan police and army. But now the military can't track who has them.

Audit Finds Poor Tracking of Weapons.  A Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) audit found that "poor record keeping" has resulted in a sea of unaccounted weapons given to Afghan forces by the U.S. government.  Thanks to Pentagon efforts to train and supply the Afghan National Security Forces, the country's military is now swimming in some $624 million in military equipment provided since 2004, including more than 747,000 weapons and pieces of auxiliary equipment.  The total includes 465,000 small arms, such as AKs and M16s.  However, inventory inspections at depots found missing weapons and more weapons than the military needed, increasing the likelihood that U.S.-provided arms would fall into the hands of the Taliban and other jihadists.

The Editor says...
This sounds a lot like Fast and Furious, but with larger weapons.

FDA found more than smallpox vials in storage room.  Federal officials found more than just long-forgotten smallpox samples recently in a storage room on the National Institutes for Health campus in Bethesda, Md. The discovery included 12 boxes and 327 vials holding an array of pathogens, including the virus behind the tropical disease dengue and the bacteria that can cause spotted fever, according to the Food and Drug Administration, which oversees the lab in question.

Pentagon Loses Many Cars Belonging to American Soldiers.  Here's how it happens: The Pentagon often reassigns their soldiers to different stations throughout the world, and helps their families defray the financial costs of moving — including the cost of shipping their cars.  For decades, the Pentagon contracted this service out to American Auto Logistics (AAL), but replaced them this summer with a company called International Auto Logistics (IAL).  According to the Beast, this is when things went haywire, with "lost cars, delays, IT glitches, problems with live tracking, and poor customer service."  Though they weren't able to pin down exactly how many cars were lost, military families are complaining about it loudly on Facebook and the internet.

Smallpox discovered sitting in Maryland storage room.  The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Tuesday [7/8/2014] that employees at the National Institutes of Health found some vials containing smallpox sitting in a laboratory storage room in Bethesda.  These vials were labeled "variola," which the CDC calls "the severe and most common form of smallpox."  The vials were discovered last week in an unused part of a storage room inside a laboratory operated by the Food and Drug Administration, the CDC said in a news release.  They were found by employees preparing to move the lab, which has been operated by the FDA since 1972, over to the main FDA campus.

62 Percent of Labor Department's International Grants Missing Documentation.  More than half of international grants distributed by the Labor Department are missing documentation, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO).  The Department of Labor's Bureau of International Labor Affairs (ILAB) distributed roughly $70 million in awards to improve working conditions overseas and fight child labor last year.  However, 62 percent of these grants lacked proper documentation.

Ailing vet turns to 911 in absence of timely VA care.  William "Bill" Webb says he tried to get timely doctor appointments in the Phoenix VA Health Care System, repeatedly failed and would be dead today if he hadn't dialed 911 and been taken to another hospital by ambulance.  The 87-year-old Army veteran of World War II says his struggles began about two years ago, long after he'd become a patient in the Phoenix VA network.  Somehow, his records vanished.  "They lost me," Webb says.  "They said I'm no longer a patient.  I'd been going there for years, and suddenly, I no longer exist."

Related topic:  VA hospitals paint a clear picture of Obamacare's future.

GAO: Pentagon's Finances Are a Mess.  The Pentagon has roughly $7.2 billion in excess equipment, gave out more than $1 billion in improper payments, and wasted billions on a system for the Air Force to account for its inventory, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO).  According to a GAO report released Tuesday [5/13/2014], the Department of Defense (DOD) faces "serious and continuing deficiencies," including the inability to account for their total assets.

Half of EPA office's passports are missing, IG finds.  Almost half of the passports issued to the Environmental Protection Agency's employees are missing, according to the EPA's inspector general.  Official and diplomatic passports issued to EPA employees, as well as other sensitive personal identifiable information, could be compromised as a result, the inspector general said in a report.  Of 417 passports issued to Office of International and Tribal Affairs employees, 199 could not be located, the report said.

Hackers Steal $1.5 Million in Printer Ink from FBI, EPA, GSA.  Hackers were able to steal $1.5 million worth of printer cartridges from the FBI, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the General Services Administration (GSA) by placing fraudulent contract orders.

$6 Billion Goes Missing at State Department.  The State Department has no idea what happened to $6 billion used to pay its contractors.  In a special "management alert" made public Thursday [4/3/2014], the State Department's Inspector General Steve Linick warned "significant financial risk and a lack of internal control at the department has led to billions of unaccounted dollars over the last six years.  The alert was just the latest example of the federal government's continued struggle with oversight over its outside contractors.

After Year of Stonewalling, Issa Subpoena's ATF Over Sketchy and Reckless Storefront Tactics.  Over the past two years, investigations conducted by the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel have uncovered a whole slew of shady tactics being used in operations conducted by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.  During their research, The Journal reporters found ATF agents prey on mentally ill teenagers (including ATF agents pressuring at least one young man to get a squid tattooed on his neck) to "help" with gun stings and found agents lost a fully automatic rifle on the streets of Milwaukee after it was stolen out of an unsupervised government vehicle.  Careless actions from agents also resulted in thousands of dollars in damages to a rented storefront and the exposure of the names belonging to undercover agents.  These actions aren't isolated incidents, but instead are happening all over the country.

Fast and Forgetful: Dozens of ATF guns reportedly lost, stolen.  ATF agents are losing track of their government-issued firearms, according to a new report, with records showing multiple instances where officers forgot their guns after leaving them on top of cars, in bathrooms and in automobile glove compartments.  The incidents were catalogued in a report Wednesday [2/26/2014] by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.  Internal records obtained by the newspaper reportedly show ATF agents had their guns lost or stolen at least 45 times between 2009 and 2013.  But the ATF sharply disputed the report, with a spokeswoman telling FoxNews.com that many of the lost weapons were later recovered.

"The Continued Lack of Accountability at ATF is Disturbing".  In January 2013, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel dropped a bombshell report showing ATF Agents who attempted to set up a storefront in the city, ended up damaging the building, owing the landlord money and lost a machine gun on the streets after it was stolen out of a government vehicle.

Homeland Security Documents Found in Target Parking Lot.  [Scroll down]  But that's not all NBC 12 uncovered.  The station's anonymous source known as "Eric" explained how he discovered documents pertaining to the plan.  ["]He says he found Homeland Security's Operation Plan in the parking lot of the Target on West Broad Street.["]

More about the raid on Lumber Liquidators.

ATF lost track of 2.1 million cartons of cigarettes in sting operations, report finds.  In another black eye for the beleaguered agency that regulates guns and investigates tobacco trafficking, a new report found that federal agents lost track of 2.1 million cartons of cigarettes and paid an informant more than $4.9 million without requiring him to account for his expenses.  "We found a significant lack of oversight and controls to ensure that cash, cigarettes, equipment and other assets used ... were accurately tracked, properly safeguarded and protected from misuse," Michael E. Horowitz, the Justice Department inspector general, said in a 68-page report released Wednesday [9/25/2013].

US: ATF misplaced 420 million cigarettes in stings.  Government agents acting without authorization conducted dozens of undercover investigations of illegal tobacco sales, misused some of $162 million in profits from the stings and lost track of at least 420 million cigarettes, the Justice Department's inspector general said Wednesday [9/25/2013].

Homeland Security loses track of 1 million foreigners; report could hurt immigration deal.  The Homeland Security Department has lost track of more than 1 million people who it knows arrived in the U.S. but who it cannot prove left the country, according to an audit Tuesday [7/30/2013] that also found the department probably won't meet its own goals for deploying an entry-exit system.

Report: US Marshals lose track of thousands of two-way radios.  The U.S. Marshals Service has lost track of approximately 2,000 encrypted two-way radios worth millions of dollars, The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday.  The paper cited internal records obtained through a public records request in their report, adding that the problems date back to at least 2011, when marshals were using new versions of the radios in the field.

Police chief killed with rifle lost in ATF gun-tracking program.  A high-powered rifle lost in the ATF's Fast and Furious controversy was used to kill a Mexican police chief in the state of Jalisco earlier this year, according to internal Department of Justice records, suggesting that weapons from the failed gun-tracking operation have now made it into the hands of violent drug cartels deep inside Mexico.

More about the Fast and Furious scandal.

Washington Deserves a Declaration of Incompetence.  The U.S. Park Police were supposed to destroy some 1,400 guns.  Instead, they are intact.  Another 198 guns that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives donated to the USPP are stored in Washington but appear on no official documents.  Similar problems identified in 2008 and '09 have gone unfixed.  The Interior Department's inspector general denounced the USPP's "decade-long theme of inaction and indifference."  Such casual disregard for weapons safety defined the Fast and Furious scandal.

U.S. Park Police show "inaction and indifference" towards missing guns.  Not to denigrate the important work done by the Park Police, or unfairly question the need for them to be reasonably equipped for their duties, but this report makes agency management sound like the Left's political caricature of an irresponsible gun nut: cutting regulatory corners, buying a ton of weapons they didn't need, and treating their weapons carelessly.

U.S. Park Police Lost Thousands of Guns; Will the Media Report?  Ever since the Newtown mass shooting, the liberal media have pushed for a fresh round of federal gun control, insisting that such measures are needed to keep guns from falling into the wrong hands, even though the efficacy of such measures is doubtful.  But what about guns potentially falling into the wrong hands thanks to the malfeasance or incompetence of government officials?  Shouldn't the media highlight those instances and call the government to account for them?

Park Police lost track of thousands of weapons, inspector general's report says.  The U.S. Park Police has lost track of thousands of handguns, rifles and machine guns in what a government watchdog agency concluded is the latest example of mismanagement on a police force trusted to protect millions of visitors to the city's iconic monuments.  There is no indication that police guns got into the hands of criminals, but the Office of the Inspector General for the U.S. Department of the Interior warned that the Park Police might not know if they had.  In a scathing report, the authors said there is "credible evidence of conditions that would allow for theft and misuse of firearms, and the ability to conceal the fact if weapons were missing."

Secret Service under investigation over loss of sensitive files on Metro.  The Secret Service is the target of an investigation into an "immense breach" involving the loss of two backup computer tapes left on a Washington, D.C., Metro train that contained sensitive personal information about all agency employees, contacts and overseas informants, according to multiple law enforcement and congressional sources.

IRS Laptop Lost With Data on 291 People.  An Internal Revenue Service employee lost an agency laptop early last month that contained sensitive personal information on 291 workers and job applicants, a spokesman said yesterday [6/10/2006].  The IRS's Terry L. Lemons said the employee checked the laptop as luggage aboard a commercial flight while traveling to a job fair and never saw it again.  The computer contained unencrypted names, birth dates, Social Security numbers and fingerprints of the employees and applicants, Lemons said.

Lost items puzzle nuclear research lab.  The U.S. federal Idaho National Laboratory nuclear-reactor research lab cannot account for more than 200 missing computers and disk drives that may have contained sensitive information.  The computers were among 998 items costing $2.2 million dollars that came up missing over the past three years.

67 computers missing from nuclear weapons lab.  The Los Alamos nuclear weapons laboratory in New Mexico is missing 67 computers, including 13 that were lost or stolen in the past year.  Officials say no classified information has been lost.  The watchdog group Project on Government Oversight on Wednesday released a memo dated Feb. 3 from the Energy Department's National Nuclear Security Administration outlining the loss of the computers.

Audit:  Labs Can't Account for Explosives.  Hundreds of non-nuclear explosive devices are untested or unaccounted for due to poor record keeping at two of the nation's top national laboratories, a federal audit found Wednesday [6/28/2006]. [...] For example, Sandia officials couldn't account for at least 410 items, including detonators, rocket motors, shaped explosives and bulk explosive powders.

Customs Service Withholds Data on Missing Guns, Computers:  The U.S. Customs Service is refusing to publicly release data on thousands of computers and weapons for which it cannot account, getting angry attention from a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee.  The move comes just three days after an inspector general's audit at the Justice Department found more than 200 weapons and 400 laptop computers missing from the FBI.

Missing FBI Laptops Still a Problem.  Three or four FBI laptop computers are lost or stolen each month and the agency is unable to say in many instances whether information on the machines is sensitive or classified, the Justice Department's inspector general said Monday [2/12/2007].

Laptops, weapons missing at DEA.  More than 90 weapons and 230 laptop computers belonging to the Drug Enforcement Administration have turned up missing over the past five years and, despite efforts by the agency to address weaknesses in tracking the items, "significant deficiencies" remain, a report said yesterday [3/28/2008].  The lost and stolen weapons include pistols, rifles, shotguns and a submachine gun, said a 105-page report by the Justice Department's Office of Inspector General….

Audit:  ATF Lost 76 Weapons, 418 Laptops.  The ATF lost 76 weapons and hundreds of laptops over five years, the Justice Department reported Wednesday [9/17/2008], blaming carelessness and sloppy record-keeping.  Thirty-five of the missing handguns, rifles, Tasers and other weapons were stolen, as were 50 laptops, the internal audit found.  Two of the stolen weapons were used in crimes.

Lost DOT Laptops:  Compromised Personal Data?  A series of data breaches at agencies under the United States Department of Transportation has put the Personal Identification Information of at least 133,000 people at risk.  According to information WTOP obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, since 2001, the DOT has lost nearly 400 laptop computers and had nine instances when Personal Identification Information was lost or stolen.

Personal data at risk in lost IRS laptops.  At least 490 IRS computers have been stolen or lost since 2003 in security breaches that potentially jeopardized the personal information of more than 2,000 taxpayers, a government audit reported Wednesday [4/6/2007].  The computers were lost in 387 incidents, most of which were not reported to the IRS computer security office as required, according to the report by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration.

Stolen NASA laptop contained the command codes to control the International Space Station.  A laptop stolen from NASA contains the control codes used to command the International Space Station.  The unencrypted laptop stolen last year is among dozens of mobile devices containing sensitive information that have been reported missing from the space agency, an internal investigation has found.  Giving testimony on the space agency's security issues, NASA Inspector General Paul K. Martin told Congress that 48 agency devices were lost or stolen over a two year period.
[Emphasis added.]

Stolen NASA laptop had Space Station control codes.  A NASA laptop stolen last year had not been encrypted, despite containing codes used to control and command the International Space Station, the agency's inspector general told a US House committee.  NASA IG Paul Martin said in written testimony (PDF) to the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology that a laptop was stolen in March 2011, which "resulted in the loss of the algorithms used to command and control the ISS".

Hundreds of Texas driver's licenses mailed to the wrong people.  An agency that warns Texans not to share personal information with strangers because of the risks of identity theft mistakenly mailed hundreds of driver's licenses to the wrong people.

Nuclear data found missing at DOE office in New Mexico.  An inventory has found another case of missing data involving nuclear weapons, this time at the Energy Department's regional office in Albuquerque.  The Energy Department said that an "accounting discrepancy" involving three copies of a "controlled removable electronic media"  — or CREM  — [more commonly, a computer disk] was found at the regional office as part of the nationwide inventory of such devices.