The FBI Gets Tough

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Meanwhile, dozens of border guards, National Guard soldiers and other law-enforcement officials in Arizona have been charged with accepting bribes from FBI agents posing as Mexican drug smugglers. Towns in Florida and Connecticut--where Republican John Rowland quit the Governor's mansion in 2004 and went to jail last year for his part in a gifts-for-contracts scheme--are also charging their local officials. The FBI even had a local West Virginia politician facing corruption charges pose as a candidate in a state-legislature election in order to help uncover vote buying and other instances of election fraud. The phony candidate pulled out before the actual election, but when he ended up with more than 2,000 votes in a close race, some critics wondered whether the feds had gone too far and skewed the results.

Corruption in politics is, of course, as old as politics itself. So the current spike in prosecutions does raise a rather obvious question that FBI criminal chief Swecker is happy to answer. "I don't think there is more corruption," he says. But with more agents on the job, "we're just trained better and look more to find it."