One of the stranger side stories to come out of the FBI’s secret investigation of then-presidential candidate Donald Trump’s election campaign back in 2016 came out in the news last week, where the FBI apparently chose to redact (or black out) a portion of a text message sent between FBI agents Lisa Page and Peter Strzok. Apparently, the text message indicated the price that the Bureau’s then-acting director, Andrew McCabe, really paid for a conference table in materials that had been sent by the Department of Justice to the Senate Judiciary Committee, which has oversight authority over both the DOJ and the FBI. Senator Charles Grassley got a hold of an unredacted version of the message and referenced it in a communication he sent to the U.S. Department of Justice to demand that the DOJ stop inappropriately censoring public information. Since the U.S. Congress approves the FBI’s funding, the members of that body have every right to access the FBI’s information on how it spends U.S. taxpayer dollars, which is what made redacting the cost of the conference table such a boneheaded move on the part of the FBI and the DOJ. There is only one reason why it would ever have been done, and it is because $70,000 is an exorbitant amount of money for any government agency to spend on a conference table. Paul Downs, who has crafted custom conference tables for a number of corporations and also NASA, but not the FBI, indicates on his web site that the price of a standard conference table that he might build for a customer would cost about $400 per linear foot. At that price, $70,000 could buy a 175-foot long table...MORE
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