Leid Stories - 02/03/14

The IRP6 & the FBI, Chapter 2: A Raid That Really Wasn’t?

 

On Feb. 9, 2005, 21 armed FBI agents without warning swarmed the Colorado City offices of Investigative Resource Planning Solutions (IRP Solutions), a fledgling black-owned software-development company that had created an effective, integrated case-management system for law-enforcement and national-security agencies.

By then IRP’s Case Investigative Life Cycle (CILC) solution had been getting enthusiastic reviews and, from one agency alone, quote requests for more than $100 million in software support. By then, too, FBI Director Robert Mueller had suffered a humiliating dressing down by a Senate subcommittee for blowing $170 million and more than three years to develop a similar program but had nothing to show for it. Testimony by Glenn A. Fine, the Justice Department’s inspector general, sealed the FBI program’s fate; it was scuttled.

IRP associates Samuel Thurman and Cliff Stewart recall the day of the raid and peculiar things that happened that day that strengthen their belief that sinister motives were behind it. It was, after all, the reason six of the company’s core executives inexplicably were charged with fraud, and why IRP’s promisingly lucrative future came to an ignominious end.  

Thurman and Stewart are advocates with A Just Cause, which is seeking a Justice Department investigation into the targeting of the IRP6.