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The Internal Revenue Service, already facing accusations that its workers improperly snooped through tax files, has hired a former police officer convicted just a few years ago of illegally accessing FBI records and providing information to a subject of a counterterrorism investigation involving an infamous al Qaeda figure.Mohammad Weiss Rasool, or Weiss Russell as he is known at the IRS, was sentenced to two years of probation in 2008 after pleading guilty in federal court to illegally accessing the FBI's National Crime Information Center database to run license tag numbers for a friend he thought was being followed. That friend, it turned out, was the subject of an undercover FBI operation and a close associate of the al Qaeda-linked cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, the American Islamist militant who preached to three of the 9/11 hijackers and inspired the Fort Hood shootings, according to court records and interviews.Government watchdogs told The Washington Times that Mr. Rasool’s hiring by the IRS raises red flags about the quality of the federal government’s background checks and is alarming given his previous admission that he misused a police database.
Government watchdogs told The Washington Times that Mr. Rasool’s hiring by the IRS raises red flags about the quality of the federal government’s background checks and is alarming given his previous admission that he misused a police database.
