A review of the longstanding FBI policy against agents’ electronically recording interviews appears to be going nowhere fast, says MainJustice.com. An FBI spokesman reiterated opposition to a policy change expressed by FBI director Robert Mueller in 2007. Former U.S. Attorney Thomas Sullivan said the bureau’s resistance to change is a “foolish adherence to the past,” the equivalent of saying, “My horse and buggy are just fine.” The Attorney General’s advisory committee of U.S. Attorneys has been reviewing the issue but there is no public indication of any action.
Several other federal agencies allow investigators to record interviews, and 11 states and the District of Columbia have made recording police interviews the rule rather than the exception. In Illinois, Barack Obama as a state senator helped engineer a requirement that police interviews be recorded in most homicide cases.