(Ken Silva, Headline USA) One of the nation’s top forensic science organizations was reportedly pressured by the FBI to censor speeches critical of the bureau crime lab, which were to take place at a conference later this month.
According to The Intercept, there were two speeches that were expected to be critical of the FBI at the Feb. 17 American Academy of Forensic Sciences annual conference: a 20-minute talk titled “How the FBI Has Failed to Enforce Its Own Explicit Standards Applicable to Handwriting Comparison and Improperly Restricts the Use of Blind Verification in Handwriting Cases”; and another 45-minute talk titled “Taking on the FBI.”
However, the FBI caught wind of the upcoming talks, and pressured the AAFS to cancel them. Citing unnamed sources, The Intercept reported last Thursday that the FBI threatened to boycott the conference if the AAFS didn’t “take action.”
According to The Intercept, the AAFS caved to the FBI’s pressure.
“On December 17, the AAFS board voted unanimously (with one member absent) to ask the organizers of the two workshops to censor their presentations or face cancellation. Two members of the board also suggested an apology to the FBI might be in order,” the outlet reported.
According to The Intercept, the organizers of the “Taking on the FBI” speech agreed to “several small changes to their workshop language.” However, the speaker set to talk about the FBI’s handwriting evaluation standards refused to buckle. The speaker reportedly pulled his presentation altogether.
The FBI, for its part, denied censoring the conference. The bureau told The Intercept that it merely “brought to the attention” of the AAFS material mentioning the FBI that “seemingly violated AAFS’s own bylaws”—a similar argument the bureau made when insisting it didn’t pressure tech companies to censor stories such as the Hunter Biden laptop scandal.
The FBI’s sordid history of tampering with and destroying evidence dates back decades, as chronicled by authors John Kelly and Phillip Wearne in their book, “Tainting Evidence : Behind the Scandals at the FBI Crime Lab.” This book features interviews and records from former FBI crime-lab scientist Fred Whitehurst, who came out as a whistleblower in the 1990s about the bureau’s mishandling of evidence.
Whitehurst revealed that the FBI mishandled evidence in prominent investigations into the Unabomber, O.J. Simpson, and the Oklahoma City bombing cases. The Department of Justice’s Office of Inspector General found some of Whitehurst’s key allegations to be substantiated in an April 1997 report.
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/jd_cashless.
