This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, September 14th, 2020. I'm Caleb Brown.

The FBI has a checkered history so it would make sense if the agency taught its cadets about how to avoid the kinds of violations of Americans' rights that the agency is undertaken in its many decades of existence.

Cato's Patrick Edington says,

the agency just doesn't do that. We spoke last week.

I get that mistakes being made by an agency ought to be internalized by that agency and to the extent that those were

costly mistakes they should be everybody should say well this is the thing you

can't do these are the things you can't do. These are the things you can't do. But I also get that you

want people to be proud of what they do and happy with the organization that they work for and so maybe you don't stress the even egregious errors of the past.

What does the FBI teach its future agents about the FBI's past, in some cases,

criminal past?

You know, we found out through this particular Freedom of Information Act inquiry that the FBI most definitely

does everything it can to put a happy spin on on the Bureau

and its history and what it does on behalf of the American people and so on and

so forth and they go very light to say the least on past

FBI abuses and it wasn't until 2014, 2014 that then FBI director Jim Comi actually started this extremely limited program at the FBI Academy,

which really amounts to not much more than a field trip, essentially, to the Holocaust Museum and to the Martin Luther King Memorial down on the mall here in DC.

And when you look at this particular 14 page document we got

entitled Basic Field Training Course Training Guide,

the questions that you see on there in essence, are really the kind of thing that you

would use for a high school field trip to these.

They're not a serious effort, it is not a serious effort to instruct folks about just

exactly how much of this stuff the Bureau has been involved in over the course of the last, you know,

...