Denver, CO -- (ReleaseWire) -- 05/16/2018 --Many people may not want to believe the FBI is capable of violating the law, but there is plenty of evidence showing Denver FBI agents and the Colorado U.S. Attorney's Office conspired together (likely on behalf of a competitor) to take down a small Colorado technology company and its executives to steal its valuable criminal investigations software, which threatened to disrupt the status quo of billion dollar defense contractors and system integrators winning post-9/11 federal law enforcement technology modernization contracts. The Denver FBI and Colorado U.S. Attorney's Office would be called upon to manufacture a criminal case to ruin the company and/or steal its software for a competitor who would then sell it to the FBI. The software was called CILC (pronounced "silk"), an acronym for Case Investigative Life Cycle, which was developed by the Colorado Springs-based IRP Solutions Corporation.

After 9/11, FBI Director Robert Mueller was under pressure to replace the FBI's outdated case management system, which the congressional 9/11 commission found contributed to information sharing failures that allowed Al Qaeda to carry out the 9/11 attacks that killed 3000 Americans. Congress gave the FBI $400 million dollars for the Virtual Case Files (VCF) case management modernization project which failed and was declared "unfit for use" in the summer of 2004. By the fall of 2004, Mueller was made aware of CILC by the Department of Homeland Security who had been vetting CILC for nearly a year and half and found it was the only case management software that could support the modernization needs of the FBI and DHS.

On October 28, 2004, at the request of DHS, four senior FBI technology officials attended a demonstration of CILC as part of the joint DHS/DOJ Federal Investigative Case Management System (FICMS) initiative whose goal was to find a single commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) case management solution that could be used by all federal agencies to modernize their case management systems, thereby making it easier to share information and collaborate on a common technology platform.

After the demonstration FBI officials expressed satisfaction and interest in CILC. DHS was so impressed, that on December 1, 2004, they requested and received a $100 million quote from IRP for two CILC modules. On February 3, 2005, one of those FBI attendees, supervisory special agent Melissa McRae, is documented saying CILC was "suitable" to support investigative operations in an FBI field office. Coincidentally (or maybe not), on the same day, Mueller told Congress the FBI was going to purchase a COTS case management software product and would have that product working within a year. Just six days later, on February 9, 2005, twenty-two FBI agents armed with guns and a search warrant conducted a SWAT-style raid on IRP Solutions offices and spent 13 hours imaging every single desktop, laptop and server computer in the building.

Why were they there and how was the FBI able to obtain a search warrant at a company where there was no criminal activity and where former FBI agents from the Denver field office were on staff for a year? Certainly, IRP executives wouldn't be involved in criminal activity with federal agents working for them. The government decided they would take down the small, minority-owned IRP using their unpaid debts to staffing companies. Since having corporate debt is not a crime, Denver officials lied about IRP being a bogus business whose African-American executives were not only incapable of developing world-class case management software but were pretending to have software to defraud staffing companies out of money. The government scheme started with an FBI agent lying on an affidavit to fraudulently obtained a search warrant to gain access to IRP computers.

The FBI search warrant affidavit shows that Colorado Springs FBI agent John W. Smith falsely claimed that IRP was a "purported" software development company and suggested CILC was sham law enforcement software being used by IRP executives to misrepresent their contractual relationships with large law enforcement agencies (DHS, NYPD) for the purpose of wooing staffing companies into entering into agreements to providing temporary labor to work on the fake CILC software.

Smith's suggestion is absurd not only given McRae's statement received six days before the raid, but also because Smith had received a January 18, 2005 letter (http://bit.ly/2hS2JNX) from retired ICE agent Gary Hillberry, who, speaking on behalf of himself and two other retired FBI agents who were working as independent contractors at IRP, said "We decided IRP Solutions had a viable product and appeared to be moving forward to acquire state and federal law enforcement contracts." Furthermore, Smith had knowledge that CILC had been nationally featured in 2003 and 2004 in Law Enforcement Technology magazine (http://bit.ly/2xspI9D) and Police magazine (http://bit.ly/2JwdCPm) and received high praise from many other law enforcement agencies around the country.

"The warrant cited the seizure of financial records, but the real intention seemed to be the imaging of the IRP computers that contained anything related to IRP's CILC software," said Dr. Alan Bean, Executive Director of Friends of Justice, who conducted a six-month investigation into the case. Two weeks after the raid, a business consulting firm contacted IRP executives seeking to purchase the company on behalf of an undisclosed third-party. When the execs persisted in knowing who the third party was, the consulting firm wouldn't divulge and finally backed off.

Former federal appeals judge H. Lee Sarokin, who reviewed the facts and evidence of the case, including trial records, told the Washington Post that the FBI's claims about IRP and CILC being a scam "defies reality" and that "all the proof in the case goes the other way." Furthermore, "attempting to scam law enforcement agencies as their sole customer, seems an unlikely target," noted Sarokin, especially when the men "left their jobs to create the software, hired former FBI and immigration agents as consultants and made no profit from the [alleged] scheme," added Sarokin. The IRP executives were "indicted and imprisoned for failing to pay corporate bills," said Sarokin.

Washington Post article - http://www.wapo.st/29jXqSC

By 2009, there was no indictment and IRP's COO David Banks was successful in winning two contracts from Philadelphia's Police Department (PPD) and Inspector General's office. "Establishing the viability of their product would immediately catch the attention of other jurisdictions and lead to additional orders, cash flow and the ability to discharge the company's debt," said Dr. Bean. Furthermore it "would have derailed the government's case," added Bean. Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Kirsch wasn't going to let that happen and scuttled the deal by making a phone call to Philly officials to tell them an indictment was coming. Director of Information Technology for PPD told the FBI "PPD was very close to having the (CILC) product installed prior to discovery of the IRP investigation." (See email communications between IRP and Philly officials at (http://bit.ly/2fOxbEJ)

What did Mueller know about CILC and was he aware of the Denver FBI office's rogue actions? Could he have been involved? It's certainly reasonable to conclude that Mueller was briefed on CILC by his chief information officer after four officials from his office expressed satisfaction with CILC's capabilities. The timing of McRae's statement, Mueller's promise to have COTS software within a year and the offer to buy IRP certainly indicates the conspiracy to takedown IRP may have been planned at a higher level even if Mueller was unaware. It appears the head of the Denver field office was in the dark about the IRP case when he sent a letter to a staffing company six months after the raid, stating the matter would "best be handled civilly." (See letter at http://bit.ly/2ibF7Qp)

Judge Sarokin sent a letter to President Obama asking him to grant clemency for the IRP executives, but Obama refused to give justice to these men. Obama can't claim he didn't know because Sarokin's letter was emailed to his senior aide Roy Austin. In the past weeks, A Just Cause sent a request for a pardon to President Trump at the White House for five IRP executives who remain imprisoned at a Florence, Colorado federal prison camp for six years and counting. (See http://bit.ly/2JImAZp). Four congressmen also sent a letter to the DOJ asking for an investigation into the government misconduct on November 1, 2017 but have not received a response. (See letter at http://bit.ly/2HuvgTc)