FBI's Ron Brown Dossier A Bust

After a nearly six-year wait, the FBI has finally given TSG its files on Ron Brown, the former Department of Commerce secretary and Bill Clinton crony who died in an April 1996 airplane crash. And, boy, what a freakin' disappointment. The bureau released 1018 pages of material dealing, in part, with various allegations of influence peddling, but the heavily redacted documents have been virtually stripped of any meaning by FBI censors. So we're left to highlight just a few of the comprehensible pages, all of which come from an October 1993 FBI report of an interview with Brown, who was accompanied by counsel Reid Weingarten. At the interview's outset, an FBI agent "requested that the interview be recorded in its entirety and offered to provide Brown" a copy of the tape (a similar offer, of course, was famously not made to so-called "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh). The bureau's request was rejected by Team Brown. At the interview's close, an apparently miffed Brown said that he was starting to believe there was some truth to the claim that successful black politicians and businessmen were "unfairly targeted for investigation." Finally, when asked if he would submit to a lie detector test, Brown said he "could not believe that government officials would ask the Secretary of Commerce to submit to a polygraph based solely on the allegations" of one FBI source. (3 pages)