The FBI and DEA have been slammed in a new audit that said insiders stole gun parts slated for “destruction” that later ended up in a “ghost gun” seized during a criminal case.
Both agencies were accused of poorly securing critical pistol parts that could easily be taken by anyone inside the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Drug Enforcement Agency training academy at Quantico, Va. in recent years.
“We concluded that inadequate policies regarding the destruction of employee issued firearms create significant risks that firearms or their parts could be lost or stolen and used in subsequent crimes without accountability,” said the advisory memo from Justice Department Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz to FBI Director Christopher Wray and DEA Administrator Anne Milgram.
The issue was discovered last year when an unidentified suspect was arrested with a “ghost gun,” which is typically made from kits that in the past didn’t require a background check or registration.
While it investigated the case, the DEA realized that the barrel and slide came from a DEA gun that was to be destroyed in 2019. "According to DEA records, the slide and barrel were part of a DEA employee issued firearm that had been destroyed over three years earlier," said the memorandum.
In conducting its inquiry, Horowitz discovered that the parts likely came out of unsecured barrels that both law enforcement agencies used to store the parts of employee guns to be destroyed.
The report said that virtually everyone who worked at Quantico had access to the “gun cleaning room,” where the pistol parts were stored in open barrels.
“The gun cleaning room was accessible to thousands of employees and contractors at Quantico, including FBI and DEA armory employees, FBI and DEA academy trainers and students, cleaning staff, maintenance contractors, and others. Because the gun cleaning room was in a shared building that also held the Quantico cafeteria , security control measures were limited to a Quantico access card provided to every individual that had access to the grounds at Quantico. There were no safeguards to ensure that the location where the slides and barrels were stored was secured, document who had access to the location or DEA property, or document when the slides and barrels were destroyed,” the memo said.
Worse, neither agency had set policies for handling the parts.
“Indeed, in the investigation that led to this memorandum, the OIG was unable to identify the individual or individuals who stole the DEA slide and barrel that were later recovered during an arrest,” Horowitz wrote in the memo.
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Since finishing its report, both agencies claim that they have tightened security and set up formal procedures for storing and destroying employee firearms. The FBI said it moved the unit that handles the guns to Alabama in 2021.
But the IG is keeping the heat on the agencies and wants follow-up reports to show it is caring better for the gun parts.
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